As part of an ongoing study stretching from Davis to Germany and across the many islands of Indonesia, the UC Davis Department of Music is holding a second conference on Indonesian music. “Rethinking The History Of Indonesian Music” on Nov. 5 brings together scholars from around the globe and is organized by Professor Henry Spiller and Professor Emerita Anna Maria Busse Berger.
The UC Davis Department of Art and Art History in the College of Letters and Science will host an extraordinary lineup of visiting artists in the coming months. Making art that explores contemporary issues related to race, the environment, gender and national identity, this year’s visitors will work closely with students and deliver public talks. This fall’s visiting artists are Jessica Segall, Xu Bing, Christina Quarles and Tarrah Krajnak.
The culmination of two or more years and a lifetime of experience and exploration by UC Davis students, “The Arts & Humanities Graduate Exhibition” offers new ways to understand the world, ourselves and the issues we face. We spent time with three students from art studio, music and design to learn about their journeys of creating works that are in the exhibition.
When he was a college student, Pierpaolo Polzonetti was hired by an opera-loving cookbook author to research composer Giuseppe Verdi’s favorite recipes. There weren’t any, but it led Polzonetti to a fascination with what he dubs “gastronomic signs” in opera. Many years later, the result is the recently published book Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet by Polzonetti, the Jan and Beta Popper Professor of Music at UC Davis.
When Wayne Thiebaud arrived at UC Davis in 1961, the university had been an independent campus for only two years. The art department was in an embryonic stage. Then in 1962, Thiebaud had a groundbreaking exhibition in New York and, during the decades that followed, his reputation only grew. Along the way he was joined by other art faculty who soon developed national reputations as well, and UC Davis became nearly as well-known for art as for agriculture.
Wangechi Mutu will give the Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture on May 12 at UC Davis. The 4:30 p.m. free talk at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is presented by the Department of Art and Art History.
UC Davis researchers studying mycelium, the white filament-like root structure of mushrooms, are making strides towards creating a more sustainable planet. Researchers found that by growing mycelium with a biomass, such as coffee grounds or left-over agricultural waste, they can create sustainable structures that can be turned into everything from biodegradable plastics and circuit boards to filters that remove harmful antibiotic and pesticide residues from water.
The face already plays an important role in communication, but a group of UC Davis computer scientists led by doctoral student Shuyi Sun is taking this to the next level. The team is designing facial jewelry that can use signals from a person’s facial muscles to send wireless commands to at-home devices like Alexa and Google Home.
The UC Davis Department of Art and Art History will host Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil and Beatriz Cortez as the spring quarter artists in residence in The California Studio: Manetti Shrem Artist Residencies. Launched in fall 2021, The California Studio brings artists to campus in residencies focused on teaching and studio art education.
The UC Davis Creative Writing Series for the spring will be part of an art installation at a performing arts center, include a celebration and discussion in Woodland of a new book by a Mexican poet, and feature a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winner. The Creative Writing Program is part of the Department of English.
Art and Words from Ashwini Bhat and Forrest Gander
April 15 and 28, 7:30 p.m.
A moving musical work with contributions from UC Davis music and Native American studies studentswillexplore California’s complicated relationship with water, drawing on Native origin stories in which water is an important player. It will be performed in several locations in the UC Davis Arboretum along Putah Creek.
Jo Ann Stabb, a founding member of the UC Davis Department of Design and a widely recognized scholar of textiles, died Feb. 13 in Walnut Creek, California. She was 80.
“Jo Ann Stabb essentially started the textile and fashion curriculum in the department,” design professor Susan Taber Avila said in a 2017 interview. “She captured the zeitgeist of the wearable art movement and brought that creativity into her teaching. She understood and championed the value of studying actual textiles and artifacts.”
The annual Templeton Colloquium in Art History at UC Davis this year brings together scholars speaking about the women’s movement and how women were portrayed in the media during 20th-century modernization in Tehran, Cairo, Istanbul and Beirut.
The presenters, coming from around California, Michigan, Indiana and Lebanon, will show the shifting ways women activists and organizers were encouraged to be modern, then criticized and satirized for doing so.
Tom Lin, a UC Davis doctoral student in English, has won the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. At 25, Lin is the youngest writer to ever win the award.
Art professor emeritus Wayne Thiebaud's death at 101 on Dec. 25, 2021, brought an outpouring of memories and tributes, critical acclaim for the artist’s remarkable life and career, and news of a significant gift to UC Davis.