Week of Events
Transition: Vietnam – Photography by Mark Ludak and Andrew Cohen
Vietnam is a country in transition. Intrigued by the rapid transformation of Vietnam, one of the fastest growing economies of the world Monmouth University professors, Mark Ludak and Andrew Cohen have returned multiple times to photograph this region. A dynamic, youthful country, especially seen in mega-cities like Ho Chi Minh City (Sai Gon), it is a country where the traditional and contemporary are reconstituted into distinctively Vietnamese manifestations.
NATURE AND NURTURE – Mother/Daughter Artists: The Paintings of Cheryl Griesbach and Claudia Griesbach-Martucci
In 2000, Cheryl Griesbach began creating a body of paintings based on her interests in European 18th and 19th century still-life, botanical and landscape art. Her method includes the
manipulation of segments of Northern European paintings and incorporating that imagery in building a new landscape, like a stage. Following
in her parent’s footsteps Claudia Griesbach also attended the School of Visual Arts and with her background in illustration and oil painting, a
skill she learned from her mother, each of her paintings tells a story. In her most recent work she explores the notion “that behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic,” a quote from Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Sheba Sharrow
As one of its series of events around the theme of “Activism,” Monmouth University hosts an exhibition of paintings by the 20th-century artist who chronicled outrage and compassion for the struggles against injustice. Figurative painter Sheba Sharrow bore witness to human suffering, struggle and liberation. She was a child of the Great Depression and World War II, a participant in the social justice movements of the 1960s and ’70s, saw the bloody roads walked for civil rights and the damages wrought by wars.
Artist Talk with Weili Shi
Artist Talk with Weili Shi
Weili Shi is an artist who designs through the media of digital technologies. He creates unconventional experiences with the aim of provoking people’s consciousness. In his most recent work, Shan Shui in the World, he transformed the information of the buildings in Manhattan, NY, into traditional Chinese shan shui (landscape) paintings by a custom algorithm. This project revisits the ideas implicit in Chinese literati paintings of shan shui: the relationship between urban life and people’s yearning for nature, and between social responsibility and spiritual purity. With generative technology, Shan Shui in the World has the ability to represent any place in the world—including the city where the audience is—in the form of a shan shui painting. Weili Shi is currently a developer at Bluecadet and teaches at Parsons School of Design.
Reduced Shakespeare Company’s All the Great Books (abridged)
Reduced Shakespeare Company’s All the Great Books (abridged)
Little Dickens. Short Longfellow. Reduced Proust… All the Great Books. As anyone named Cliff will tell you, Less is More. The Literary Canon explodes as the bad boys of abridgement again unleash comic outrage on an unsuspecting public. America’s best loved comedy troupe takes you on a 98 minute roller- coaster ride through its compact compendium of 89 of the world’s great books in All The Great Books (abridged). It’s 1.1 books per minute (on average). Confused by Confucius? Thrown by Thoreau? Wish Swift was faster? Aiming for an ace of Tennyson? Then hop aboard and buckle up as the three cultural guerrillas of the Reduced Shakespeare Company zip through everything you should have read in school but probably didn’t. It’s a blast of bibliography. You’ve seen their PBS special. You’ve heard them on National Public Radio. They are officially London’s longest-running comedy troupe, and have broken box-office records at the Kennedy Center, Seattle Repertory Theatre, and the Pittsburgh Public Theatre. What are you waiting for? Tempus fugit! Reductio ad absurdum.
Die Zauberflöte
Die Zauberflöte
Met Music Director Emeritus James Levine conducts Tony Award winner Julie Taymor’s production of Mozart’s masterpiece, Die Zauberflöte. Golda Schultz makes her Met debut as Pamina with Kathryn Lewek as the Queen of the Night, Charles Castronovo as the fairy tale prince Tamino, Markus Werba as the bird-catching Papageno, Christian Van Horn as Sprecher, and René Pape as Sarastro. The holiday presentation of The Magic Flute, an abridged staging sung in English for families, was the first Live in HD performance to be transmitted. This is the first time the full-length German opera will be seen in the series.