Monmouth University brings Henrik Ibsen’s scandalous 19th century masterpiece into the modern era. A Doll’s House follows a vibrant but sheltered housewife as she navigates a world in which women have no autonomy. As events spiral beyond her control, Nora’s journey of self awareness builds toward one of the most controversial endings in theatrical history. Directed by Sheri Anderson.
by James Graham
directed by Jeremy Herrin
inspired by the documentary by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon
David Harewood (Homeland) and Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) play feuding political rivals in James Graham’s (Sherwood) multiple award-winning new drama.
In 1968 America, as two men fight to become the next president, all eyes are on the battle between two others: the cunningly conservative William F. Buckley Jr., and the unruly liberal Gore Vidal.
During a new nightly television format, they debate the moral landscape of a shattered nation. As beliefs are challenged and slurs slung, a new frontier in American politics is opening and television news is about to be transformed forever.
Jeremy Herrin (All My Sons) directs this blistering political thriller, filmed live in London’s West End.
Dinty W. Moore is a celebrated American essayist and a pioneering, early practitioner of creative nonfiction. He received the Grub Street National Book Prize for Non-Fiction for his memoir, Between Panic and Desire, in 2008 and, more recently, is also the author of the memoir To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, the writing guides The Story Cure, Crafting the Personal Essay, and The Mindful Writer, and many other books and edited anthologies.
Curator Victoria Reis, Founder & Artistic Director of Transformer Arts Organization, will highlight innovative contemporary platforms artists and arts organizations have initiated nationally to develop, create, and present art. Showcasing a range of visual art practices, including performative, experiential, social, and pedagogical, Do You Know Where Your Art Comes From? investigates current and future models of art organizing.
Transformer is a Washington DC based arts organization that develops multi-faceted exhibition and program platforms to advance emerging contemporary artists & arts practices.
Victoria Reis is a curator, writer, and arts organizer who has been actively supporting contemporary visual artists and arts organizations within local, national, and international contexts since 1991.
In 2002, Reis co-founded Transformer, an internationally recognized non-profit visual arts organization based in Washington, DC. Since 2006, Reis has been leading Transformer as its Executive & Artistic Director, curating and presenting substantial exhibitions and programs in support of emerging artists, innovative cultural production, and new & best practices within contemporary visual art. Reis has established comprehensive cultural partnerships & collaborations with an extensive range of arts, educational, and diplomatic organizations and institutions. She has launched and advanced the careers of several hundred artists.
In May 2017, Reis expanded Transformer’s programming to include Siren Arts, an Asbury Park, NJ based summer residency program for emerging visual artists working within the performance art discipline. Siren Arts will be presenting its 7th season of programming summer 2023. Reis is a Founding Member of Common Field, a national network of art spaces and artist-led initiatives. She has been a member of ArtTable since 2000. In 2018, she joined the Board of Directors of Monmouth Arts, a non-profit arts organization supporting artists and arts organizations throughout Monmouth County, NJ.
Feminist theatre/performance studies scholar and artist Dr. Tessa Carr will give an artist talk about her experiences directing plays and developing devised performances with college students and in communities using a feminist ethics of care.
Artist Talk: Monday, March 20, 2023, 4:30-5:30 SC 202B
Tessa Carr serves as Associate Professor of Theatre and Artistic Director of Mosaic Theatre Company at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Performance Studies and a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on devised performance in practice and theory, autobiographical performance, feminist performance strategies and performance as pedagogy. She is currently co-authoring a manuscript with Dr. Deanna Shoemaker about collaborative performance as a social justice communicative intervention. She writes, directs, and facilitates performance throughout the year in the mainstage season at Auburn University and with Mosaic Theatre Company.
Associate Professor Kimberly Callas will give an artist talk on the artwork she created during a two-year Monmouth Fellowship, where she served as the artist-in-residence for the Urban Coast Institute. During the fellowship, Callas created a series of large-scale (10′) drawings that connect images of the ocean, ocean archetypes, and the human body. Inspired by historical nautical charts hand-drawn and mounted on muslin, Callas’ drawings are made of graphite, dye, and India ink on paper and dyed muslin. They are then mounted on canvas. In the drawings, Callas uses latitude, longitude lines, and depth charts to ‘specifically place’ the work in places that follow the Right Whales’ annual migration through the Jersey Shore. The drawings include symbols like the Whale, Fish, Boat, Net, and Horizon Line, and archetypes like ‘the night sea journey,’ a journey navigated by stars to a new shore.
Kimberly Callas is a multi-media artist, sculptor, and the lead artist of the Social Practice project Discovering the Ecological Self. She uses digital emerging technologies with traditional hand and clay modeling techniques to create life-size figures that combine the human body with symbols and patterns from nature. The figures are drawn or cast in plaster or bronze, 3D printed or routed out of wood with a CNC. Ground pigments, beeswax, and natural materials such as wasp paper or birch bark are often used to finish the work.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums and has received national and international grants and awards. Recent awards include a Pollination Project Grant, an Urban Coast Artist-in-Residence, and a Monmouth University Faculty Fellowship. In 2020, she received 1st Place Award in Sculpture at the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club’s Annual Exhibit in New York City. Other recent exhibits include the 2019 International New Media Exhibit at the CICA Museum in South Korea, Summer Exhibition at Flowers Gallery in New York City, 9×12 at Dual Galleria in Budapest, Hungary and Crossing Boundaries: Art and the Future of Energy at The Pensacola Museum of Art, Pensacola, FL. Her work has been published in Post Human, New Media Art 2020 by CICA Press and has appeared in the Huffington Post and Art New England. Callas received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA from Stamps School of Art at the University of Michigan. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Monmouth University, in West Long Branch, NJ and maintains a studio in both Maine and New Jersey.
***This lecture can also be viewed virtually through Zoom – please CLICK HERE to register to receive the zoom link***
The author will read from her book What Happened to Paula followed by a Q&A.
Katherine Dykstra holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. She served as senior nonfiction editor at Guernica for many years and taught narrative nonfiction in NYU’s continuing studies program. Her essays have been published in The Washington Post, Crab Orchard Review, The Common, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Brain, Child, Poets and Writers, Real Simple and the Random House anthology 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers, among other places. Her work has been included in the “Notables” section of both the 2015 and 2016 Best American Essays collections edited by Ariel Levy and Jonathan Franzen, respectively. She was one of three finalists for the 2014 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. She won first place in the 2012 Waterman Fund Essay Contest and placed third in the 2013 Real Simple Life Lessons Essay Contest.
She was recently named an “artist to watch” by Creative Capital for her work on the Paula Oberbroeckling story, which is the topic of her debut nonfiction book What Happened to Paula: On the Death of An American Girl, published by W.W. Norton. What Happened to Paula received a starred and boxed Publishers Weekly review and was designated a New York Times Summer Read, a People magazine Best New Book, one of Crimereads’ Top Ten Books of 2021, a Boston Globe Book of Summer, an Observer Best Book of Summer, and a Crimereads Best Book of Summer. You can find out more about Katie at her website: http://www.katherinedykstra.com/.
Formed in 2007 by Billy Bob Thornton and J.D. Andrew, The Boxmasters have recorded an impressive and diverse catalogue of music that touches on their love of a wide array of influences, but most importantly, the rock and roll of the 1960’s. Listening to The Boxmasters, one can hear obvious odes to the Beatles, Byrds and Beach Boys, but also important to The Boxmasters are The Mothers of Invention, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine and Big Star. Since forming The Boxmasters, several long-time friends have contributed to the sound of the band, but the core of The Boxmasters has always been Andrew and Thornton. As primary songwriters, the sound of the Boxmasters has been an evolution as the duo constantly strive to find new inspiration, new sounds and new ways of expressing what is in their hearts and on their minds. But at the core, there is a backbeat, a lyric with meaning and music played with emotion.
As a touring band, The Boxmasters have cultivated a rabid cult fanbase across the United States and Canada. Opening for the likes of ZZ Top, Steve Miller, George Thorogood and Kid Rock The Boxmasters have proven to win over large audiences. As a headliner, frequent stops in Kansas City at “Knuckleheads”, Springfield, Illinois at “Boondocks” and “Merrimack Hall” in Huntsville, Alabama have shown dedicated yet still growing audiences. Two appearances at Levon Helm’s “Midnight Ramble” in Woodstock, New York were highlight performances for the band, as well as the “Ramble at The Ryman” that Levon hosted in 2008. The Boxmasters performed on “The Grand Ole Opry” in 2015, another in a growing resume of must-play venues.
The Elephant in the Room calls attention to threatened and endangered animals, encapsulating their expressive nature through emotional representation. By addressing the “elephant in the room” these wood fired portrait-esque pieces bring awareness to species that have been brought to the brink of extinction due to human interference and have been forever impacted by these interactions.
