artspeaks 2009–2010 Season

2009–2010 Season Announced

Now in its sixth season, The University of Chicago’s Artspeaks series welcomes composer Osvaldo Golijov on November 17, playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner on April 6, and conceptual artists Ilya & Emilia Kabakov on May 19.

The Artspeaks series engages internationally renowned artists from varying disciplines in creative conversations with the campus and community—giving voice to vision. Combining public presentations and workshops for students and faculty, Artspeaks residencies offer a rare encounter with eminent talent in an intimate setting. Previous seasons have included visits by photographers, painters, musicians, authors and filmmakers, including Uri Caine, Atom Egoyan, Leon Fleisher, Bill T. Jones, Peter Sellars, Anna Devere Smith, Kara Walker, and John Zorn.

Osvaldo Golijov | Nov. 17

Photo: John Sann

A performance of his song cycle, Ayre, featuring Dawn Upshaw, soprano, eighth blackbird, and distinguished guests, will be followed by a conversation with Shulamit Ran, Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Music

Osvaldo Golijov’s life and music reflect an enormously complex personal geography. Born into an Eastern European Jewish family that had been transplanted to Argentina, he was profoundly influenced by his years in Jerusalem, and its unique crossroads of overlapping, intertwined, and conflicting cultures. His work grows naturally out of these experiences, true to music’s ability to be deeply rooted in a specific place and, paradoxically, at the same time to transcend borders and cultural boundaries. He is currently co-composer-in-residence, together with Marc-Anthony Turnage, at the Chicago Symphony, and the Loyola Professor of Music at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

Soprano Dawn Upshaw has been an important muse and collaborator for Osvaldo Golijov. His first work for her, the beguiling song Lúa descolorida, was subsequently incorporated into La Pasión and, in another orchestration, forms the centerpiece of his Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra. She created the title role in Ainadamar, Golijov’s first opera, written with the playwright David Henry Hwang and based upon the life of Federico García Lorca.

Golijov’s Ayre—meaning “air” or “melody” in medieval Spanish—largely centers on southern Spain with its intermingling of three cultures (Christian, Arab and Jewish) in an era before the expulsion of the Jews in the late 15th-century. The varying degrees of coexistence and conflict among these cultures have continued to reverberate into our own time. “With a little bend, a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian,” Golijov says. “How connected these cultures are and how terrible it is when they don’t understand each other. The grief that we are living in the world today has already happened for centuries but somehow harmony was possible between these civilizations.” The texts are in Ladino (the lost language of the Spanish Jews, the Sephardim), Arabic, Hebrew, Sardinian and Spanish. These words encompass a wide range of human experience, from love and jealousy, to raucous rage and to religious yearning and prayer. For more information: www.osvaldogolijov.com.

Tony Kushner | April 6

Photo: Roy Zipstein

In conversation with Charles Newell, artistic director of Court Theatre

Born in New York City in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Hydriotaphia; Homebody/Kabul; and Caroline, or Change, the musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori. Kushner has translated and adapted Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion, which will be performed at the Court Theatre from March 11, 2010–April 11, 2010. Kushner’s awards include a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, and an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For more information: www.barclayagency.com/kushner.html.

Charles Newell has been Artistic Director of Court Theatre since 1994, where he has directed over 30 productions, including Caroline, or Change. He made his Chicago directorial debut in 1993 with The Triumph of Love, which won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production. He is the recipient of the 1992 TCG Alan Schneider Director Award. Most recently, his production of The Man of La Mancha at Court was the recipient of 6 Joseph Jefferson Awards, including Best Production-Musical and Best Director-Musical. For more information: www.courttheatre.org.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov | May 19

Photo: courtesy of the artists

A retrospective of their work together will be followed by a conversation with Matthew Jesse Jackson, Professor of Art History

The cultural historian Svetlana Boym once called the monumental art installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “memory museums,” remarking that each of these works “turns into a refuge from exile.”

Ilya Kabakov is a Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish origin, born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s and now lives and works on Long Island with his wife, Emilia. Throughout his forty-year plus career, Kabakov has produced a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations, and theoretical texts—not to mention extensive memoirs that track his life from his childhood to the early 1980s. In recent years, the Kabakovs have created installations that evoke the visual culture of the Soviet Union, though this theme has never been the exclusive focus of their work.

By using fictional artist biographies, many inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov has examined the birth and death of the Soviet Union as a metaphor for the ambitions and failures of modernity. In the Soviet experience, Kabakov discovers elements common to every modern society, and in so doing seeks to materialize the psychological landscapes of urban secular life. Rather than depicting the Soviet Union exclusively as a failed political and social project, the Kabakovs’ installations treat the USSR as one of the many utopian undertakings of the twentieth century. By reexamining historical narratives, while simultaneously interjecting personal perspectives, the Kabakovs demonstrate that every project, whether important or trivial, public or private, destructive or emancipatory, must wrestle with the temptations of an authoritarian will to power. For more information: www.ilya-emilia-kabakov.com.

Artspeaks Archives

Read a brief history of Artspeaks and its past seasons.

About Artspeaks

Read the Artspeaks mission statement and learn about the Artspeaks staff and committee.

The University of Chicago’s Artspeaks series is produced by The University of Chicago Presents in partnership with Court Theatre; the Smart Museum of Art; the Department of Music; the Department of Visual Arts; University Theatre; Theatre and Performance Studies; Cinema & Media Studies; Doc Films; the University of Chicago’s Provost Office; the Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

For information on all the arts at the University of Chicago, see arts.uchicago.edu