Monday, February 23, 2009

Week in Preview 2/23 - 2/28 (Part 1)

The Center for the Humanities Spring 09 Lectures series continues this evening (Monday, February 23) at 8 p.m. in The Russell House, 350 High Street. Scheduled to speak is Katherine Maus, James Branch Cabell Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Virginia. Professor Maus is the co-editor of "The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1" (8th edition, 2005), "The Norton Shakespeare" (1997) and the forthcoming " The Oxford English Literary History, 1603-1660." Her talk, titled "Being and Having in Shakespeare's 'Richard II'", is free and open to the public. For more information, call 685-3004.

The Samuel Silipo Lecture Series at Wesleyan welcomes performance artist/ conceptualist/sculptor Dennis Oppenheim on Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. in the CFA Cinema. Oppenheim, whose career spans 4 decades, has become one of the leading figures in "public art", with large-scale works that fuse sculpture and architecture. In the late 1960s, many of his works used his body as the subject (see "Reading Position for Second Degree Burn", 1970, above) or larger installations that utilized wheat fields and snowy tracts of land. Later installations saw the artist working with puppets, building large "outdoor"sculptures, and more. Oppenheim will talk about how his work has developed and how his focus gas changed over the course of his career. The talk is free and open to the public. For more information, call 685-3355. To learn more about Oppenheim, take the time to wander through his website at www.dennis-oppenheim.com.

Mardi Gras, also known as "Fat Tuesday", will be celebrated in Middletown at Public, 337 Main Street. Tuesday Jazz series curator Trevor Davis assures us that there will be masks, beads, costumes, and, best of all, the music will be provided by the Heartbeat Dixieland Jazz Band featuring Bill Logozzo (drums), Bill Sinclair (piano), Art Hovey (bass, tuba), Andy Sherwood (clarinet), Skip Hughes (trombone), and Thomas Brown (trumpet.) Heartbeat DJB is one the area's finer ensembles, with members that are also involved in music education and social action. The party/music goes from 5:30 - 9 p.m. The Tuesday series has become quite popular and this is a night that should not be missed.




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