Thursday, October 6, 2005

Milton Rogovin Art Exhibit: Photos of the Forgotten Ones
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

The exhibit features 70 black and white images taken by Rogovin throughout his prolific career, including those of people living on Buffalo's Lower West Side, a project that eventually documented the plight of more than 100 families.

Also included in the exhibit are photographs of the Native American and Yemeni communities in western New York, and the "The Family of Miners" series that chronicles the lives of miners and their families in Appalachia, Mexico, Cuba, Zimbabwe and China.

Rogovin, age 95, has spent a lifetime photographing the "forgotten ones" all over the world, saying, "The rich have their own photographers. I photograph the forgotten ones." His work has appeared in more than 160 journals, magazines and other publications.

Flood of Florence Photos
Syracuse University School of Art and Design
Featuring Works of Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna

Price: Free
Office of the Dean, 200 Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Kraczyna teaches printmaking and art-on-paper classes for the studio arts program at SU's Division of International Programs Abroad Florence Center. He is the founder and past director of Il Bisonte International School of Advanced Printmaking in Florence, where he taught techniques of color etching. Kraczyna co-authored I Segni Incisi, the first Italian textbook on the history and techniques of etching. He has directed "Studio for Color Etching" workshops in Barga, Lucca and at the International Symposium for Color Etching at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Columbia, Czech Republic and Japan, and is represented in the Uffizi Print Collection. Kraczyna holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Paid parking is available in the Irving Avenue garage.

The Great New York State Fair Series
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Local artist Mick Mather brings his series of digitally altered State Fair photographs to the Westcott Community Art Gallery. Mather's photo series captures the mad joy of the New York State Fair and takes the viewer through a funhouse of familiar images seen through different eyes. By digitally changing the images in his photographs, Mather shows the viewer a different way to look at the people, places and animals at the fair. The series of 18 photos captures the essence of the New York State Fair and those who love it.

View from Here: Works of Kanako Sasaki
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photography has the ability to wrap whole novels into a single image. One look and the viewer can absorb the mood, the narrative, and the key characters. Much like reading a book, the story unfolds and an event unravels. Some stories are short and to the point; others are lengthy and complicated. Kanako Sasaki's images are both. By casting herself as the single protagonist or including just a few characters in each frame, Sasaki is able to build many layers of suggested narrative into each image. These layers hold many surprises built with humor and a quirky, unexpected depth.

In her images Sasaki captures energy and joy, childlike wonder, and naivety. In the world of her pictures social etiquette does not matter, and occasional embarrassment is accepted as a fact of life. Only the expression of emotion as action is important in Sasakis sometimes upside-down world. She sets her figures apart within the grandness of nature, inspired by childhood memories, novels, and Ukiyo-e paintings. Ukiyo, literally translated as "floating world," is a Japanese genre in literature and painting that developed in the sixteenth century. It depicts a reality that embraces the coexistence of life and death. By wrapping whole novels into each of her images, Kanako Sasaki gives us a rich and poetic description of her imagination and memory.

Gallery reception Thurs., Sept. 29, 6-8pm

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members' wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan.

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The hallway space of Light Work's main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition consisting of about 100 images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over 30 years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects' visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Read a review!

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

Modern Prints from the International Graphic Arts Society
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Included are prints by Garo Antresian, Gabor Peterdi, and Donald Saff, three printmakers who taught a generation of artists and had a profound impact on the art of printmaking in the latter half of the 20th century.

W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition of photojournalist Eugene Smith includes his service as a World War II photographer in the Pacific theater, a group from a 1950s Life magazine photo essay on the rise of America's chemical industry, and a selection of images from his Pittsburgh project.

Aftermarket: Art, Objects and Commerce
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Interdisciplinary artist John Freyer returns to his native Syracuse for his first museum exhibition. The exhibit includes components of three different, but inter-related projects: his nationally renowned web-based performance piece, AllMyLifeForSale.Com; a new interactive installation entitled Walm-Art.Com; and Surplus, a sculpture/installation comprised of one-ton bales of surplus clothing. In addition, a twelve-foot rotating Bob's Big Boy sculpture, purchased by Freyer on eBay for the University of Iowa Museum of Art, will be on view in the Sculpture Court. Freyer was recently appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and a pilot of his Second Hand Stories continues to be broadcast by PBS, which is developing a series of the same name.

Carrie Mae Weems: Forms of Memory
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Forms of Memory consists of four recent works -- The Hampton Project, a large scale gallery installation with audio, and three video projections: In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Time; A Woman on a Journey; and Speak to Me, Say Something. Each artwork is thematically engaged with various aspects of memory.

The Hampton Project is Weems' response to photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1899 for Johnston's project, The Hampton Album. Using these vintage images as a starting point, Weems questions Hampton University's role in mainstreaming Native Americans and freed African slaves as well as addressing the larger issue of the need to maintain one's own heritage while becoming a member of a diverse culture through force or free will. It consists of 26 digitally reproduced photographs printed with ink on semi-transparent muslin scrims and canvas. This creates an installation in which visitors move around and between the images; there is also a sound component to the work.

Two video pieces from the series Coming Up for Air (2003-04) will be shown. In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Times is a 15-minute piece referencing Bergman's film classic Cries and Whispers, in which Weems produces a video trilogy that explores the discomfort of love and longing among three embattled sisters. A Woman on a Journey is a 5-minute piece about a woman on a journey back to reclaim herself, who has failed to calculate the true price of the ticket.

The third artwork, Speak to Me, Say Something, (2005), is a 4-minute powerful narrative using singular images of local Syracuse activists that explores the difficult questions of a struggling community situated on the edge. In this work, Weems asks, "What did you know and when did you know it?" in order to further the notion of personal responsibility.

Borders and Memory: Works by Chien-Chi Chang, Chan Chao, Jeeyun Kim, Bari Kumar, and Daniel Lee
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Borders and Memory, a selection of works by artists born in Asia but who now live in the United States, includes artists working in different media, from different countries, at different points in the trajectory of their careers. Each artist deals with borders and memory, although in profoundly different ways as judged by content, imagery, materials, and techniques. Yet within this diversity, there is this common thread: each of these artists, either in obvious or subtle ways, using direct evidence or working through more metaphorical means, examines the continuum where border and memory merge.

We live in a country filled in large part with immigrants and their descendants. This population, whether through choice, necessity, or force, has come to settle and live in a land that for them or their ancestors was not originally theirs. To reach this place they have crossed physical, cultural, and political borders sometimes at enormous risk. We have come to think of this process as intrinsic to the American Dream.

What our country has experienced, however, is part of a larger narrative, as hundreds of millions of people across the globe move, relocate, or travel to destinations that were not the places where they were born. From the executive looking for business or the student seeking an education to the peasant driven from the land by political and religious oppression or lack of economic opportunity, people are on the move.

Whether tourist, traveler, or refugee, crossing borders - political, ethnic, religious, or geographic - has become a way of life.

The Artist Revealed: Artists Portraits and Self-Portraits
Syracuse University Art Museum

University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Artists in the exhibition (in a range of media) are Berenice Abbott, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Paul Cezanne, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Edward Manet, Reginald Marsh, and Edward Steichens.

Body Art: Duane Sauro
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Bodies have long been adorned with ink. Body decorations are sometimes purely artistic and often symbolic, but always a personal statement. An individual chooses to be tattooed and selects the subject matter as a manner of self-expression and individuality. In this collection of works, the photographer's intention is to acclaim the art of tattoo in conjunction with the character of the recipient. Soft, bold, gory, surreal, a tattoo is a visual window, a veneer, through which a person wishes to be perceived. Tattoos themselves are proudly displayed on a wall of skin. The images in this exhibition are graphic and emotional art statements that express something personal to those that choose to display them on a wall of their own.

See it With Different Eyes
Delavan Art Gallery

Delavan Art Gallery
501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Robert Carroll: photography
Liliya Lifanova: still lifes
Angelo Puccia: sculpture
Eric W. Shite: paintings
Sculpture exhibit by the clients of Enable, created under the guidance of Angelo Puccia

Contemporary Film Series: Supersize Me
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Members and students$3; non-members $4
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Morgan Spurlock's Academy Award-nominated documentary takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the legal, financial, and physical costs of America's hunger for fast food, which helped prompt McDonald's Corp. and other chains to offer healthier fare on their menus.

Directed by Morgan Spurlock; USA, 96 minutes, 2004

Mira Nair, film director, writer, and producer
Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences

Grant Auditorium, College of Law
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Nair is a critically acclaimed, award-winning film director, writer, and producer. Fearlessly crossing creative, intellectual, and economic borders as an independent filmmaker in an industry dominated by large studios, she emerges as a unique voice with her riveting examinations of the invisible borders associated with culture, race, and class.

Her appearance is part of Syracuse Symposium, a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining, and creating. The theme this fall is "borders."

Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Syracuse University Symphony Band and SU Wind Ensemble
Bradley Ethington; John Laverty, conductor

Price: Free
Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The Symphony Band will perform works by Bedrich Smetana, Gabriel Fauré, Leonard Bernstein and John Philip Sousa. The Wind Ensemble will perform works by Adam Gorb, Leos Janacek, William Schumann and Paul Hindemith.

Parking is available in Irving Garage.

Florence of Moravia
Acme Mystery Company

Price: $25.95 plus tax and gratuities
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Interactive mystery dinner theater.

Lost in Yonkers
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Teenage Jay and Arty are in for a rough 1942. Pop owes nine grand to a loan shark and has to hightail it out of town, so he drops the boys in Yonkers in the care of his mother. Grandma may own a sweet shop, but she's no box of chocolates. She's so tough her own grown-up children are afraid of her. And forget about sneaking a treat or two. She counts the salt on the pretzels. How's she going to take it when Uncle Louie shows up to hide out from gangsters and Aunt Bella (who's a little off) announces she wants to marry an usher from the local movie theatre? Neil Simon placed these wonderful characters into a very funny play and earned the 1991 Pulitzer and Tony Awards for his effort. Our reward is laughter and a truly great night in the theatre.

Read a Review!

Looking for Normal
Rarely Done Productions
Linda Lance, director

Price: $10
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Playwright June Anderson asks, "What is Normal?" Although undergoing a sex change is not as unusual a procedure as it once was in days gone by, it is still hardly an everyday occurrence.

Read a Review!

Friday, October 7, 2005

Flood of Florence Photos
Syracuse University School of Art and Design
Featuring Works of Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna

Price: Free
Office of the Dean, 200 Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Kraczyna teaches printmaking and art-on-paper classes for the studio arts program at SU's Division of International Programs Abroad Florence Center. He is the founder and past director of Il Bisonte International School of Advanced Printmaking in Florence, where he taught techniques of color etching. Kraczyna co-authored I Segni Incisi, the first Italian textbook on the history and techniques of etching. He has directed "Studio for Color Etching" workshops in Barga, Lucca and at the International Symposium for Color Etching at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Columbia, Czech Republic and Japan, and is represented in the Uffizi Print Collection. Kraczyna holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Paid parking is available in the Irving Avenue garage.

The Great New York State Fair Series
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Local artist Mick Mather brings his series of digitally altered State Fair photographs to the Westcott Community Art Gallery. Mather's photo series captures the mad joy of the New York State Fair and takes the viewer through a funhouse of familiar images seen through different eyes. By digitally changing the images in his photographs, Mather shows the viewer a different way to look at the people, places and animals at the fair. The series of 18 photos captures the essence of the New York State Fair and those who love it.

View from Here: Works of Kanako Sasaki
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photography has the ability to wrap whole novels into a single image. One look and the viewer can absorb the mood, the narrative, and the key characters. Much like reading a book, the story unfolds and an event unravels. Some stories are short and to the point; others are lengthy and complicated. Kanako Sasaki's images are both. By casting herself as the single protagonist or including just a few characters in each frame, Sasaki is able to build many layers of suggested narrative into each image. These layers hold many surprises built with humor and a quirky, unexpected depth.

In her images Sasaki captures energy and joy, childlike wonder, and naivety. In the world of her pictures social etiquette does not matter, and occasional embarrassment is accepted as a fact of life. Only the expression of emotion as action is important in Sasakis sometimes upside-down world. She sets her figures apart within the grandness of nature, inspired by childhood memories, novels, and Ukiyo-e paintings. Ukiyo, literally translated as "floating world," is a Japanese genre in literature and painting that developed in the sixteenth century. It depicts a reality that embraces the coexistence of life and death. By wrapping whole novels into each of her images, Kanako Sasaki gives us a rich and poetic description of her imagination and memory.

Gallery reception Thurs., Sept. 29, 6-8pm

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The hallway space of Light Work's main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition consisting of about 100 images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over 30 years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects' visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Read a review!

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members' wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan.

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition of photojournalist Eugene Smith includes his service as a World War II photographer in the Pacific theater, a group from a 1950s Life magazine photo essay on the rise of America's chemical industry, and a selection of images from his Pittsburgh project.

Modern Prints from the International Graphic Arts Society
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Included are prints by Garo Antresian, Gabor Peterdi, and Donald Saff, three printmakers who taught a generation of artists and had a profound impact on the art of printmaking in the latter half of the 20th century.

Aftermarket: Art, Objects and Commerce
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Interdisciplinary artist John Freyer returns to his native Syracuse for his first museum exhibition. The exhibit includes components of three different, but inter-related projects: his nationally renowned web-based performance piece, AllMyLifeForSale.Com; a new interactive installation entitled Walm-Art.Com; and Surplus, a sculpture/installation comprised of one-ton bales of surplus clothing. In addition, a twelve-foot rotating Bob's Big Boy sculpture, purchased by Freyer on eBay for the University of Iowa Museum of Art, will be on view in the Sculpture Court. Freyer was recently appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and a pilot of his Second Hand Stories continues to be broadcast by PBS, which is developing a series of the same name.

Carrie Mae Weems: Forms of Memory
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Forms of Memory consists of four recent works -- The Hampton Project, a large scale gallery installation with audio, and three video projections: In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Time; A Woman on a Journey; and Speak to Me, Say Something. Each artwork is thematically engaged with various aspects of memory.

The Hampton Project is Weems' response to photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1899 for Johnston's project, The Hampton Album. Using these vintage images as a starting point, Weems questions Hampton University's role in mainstreaming Native Americans and freed African slaves as well as addressing the larger issue of the need to maintain one's own heritage while becoming a member of a diverse culture through force or free will. It consists of 26 digitally reproduced photographs printed with ink on semi-transparent muslin scrims and canvas. This creates an installation in which visitors move around and between the images; there is also a sound component to the work.

Two video pieces from the series Coming Up for Air (2003-04) will be shown. In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Times is a 15-minute piece referencing Bergman's film classic Cries and Whispers, in which Weems produces a video trilogy that explores the discomfort of love and longing among three embattled sisters. A Woman on a Journey is a 5-minute piece about a woman on a journey back to reclaim herself, who has failed to calculate the true price of the ticket.

The third artwork, Speak to Me, Say Something, (2005), is a 4-minute powerful narrative using singular images of local Syracuse activists that explores the difficult questions of a struggling community situated on the edge. In this work, Weems asks, "What did you know and when did you know it?" in order to further the notion of personal responsibility.

Borders and Memory: Works by Chien-Chi Chang, Chan Chao, Jeeyun Kim, Bari Kumar, and Daniel Lee
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Borders and Memory, a selection of works by artists born in Asia but who now live in the United States, includes artists working in different media, from different countries, at different points in the trajectory of their careers. Each artist deals with borders and memory, although in profoundly different ways as judged by content, imagery, materials, and techniques. Yet within this diversity, there is this common thread: each of these artists, either in obvious or subtle ways, using direct evidence or working through more metaphorical means, examines the continuum where border and memory merge.

We live in a country filled in large part with immigrants and their descendants. This population, whether through choice, necessity, or force, has come to settle and live in a land that for them or their ancestors was not originally theirs. To reach this place they have crossed physical, cultural, and political borders sometimes at enormous risk. We have come to think of this process as intrinsic to the American Dream.

What our country has experienced, however, is part of a larger narrative, as hundreds of millions of people across the globe move, relocate, or travel to destinations that were not the places where they were born. From the executive looking for business or the student seeking an education to the peasant driven from the land by political and religious oppression or lack of economic opportunity, people are on the move.

Whether tourist, traveler, or refugee, crossing borders - political, ethnic, religious, or geographic - has become a way of life.

The Artist Revealed: Artists Portraits and Self-Portraits
Syracuse University Art Museum

University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Artists in the exhibition (in a range of media) are Berenice Abbott, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Paul Cezanne, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Edward Manet, Reginald Marsh, and Edward Steichens.

Body Art: Duane Sauro
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Bodies have long been adorned with ink. Body decorations are sometimes purely artistic and often symbolic, but always a personal statement. An individual chooses to be tattooed and selects the subject matter as a manner of self-expression and individuality. In this collection of works, the photographer's intention is to acclaim the art of tattoo in conjunction with the character of the recipient. Soft, bold, gory, surreal, a tattoo is a visual window, a veneer, through which a person wishes to be perceived. Tattoos themselves are proudly displayed on a wall of skin. The images in this exhibition are graphic and emotional art statements that express something personal to those that choose to display them on a wall of their own.

See it With Different Eyes
Delavan Art Gallery

Delavan Art Gallery
501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Robert Carroll: photography
Liliya Lifanova: still lifes
Angelo Puccia: sculpture
Eric W. Shite: paintings
Sculpture exhibit by the clients of Enable, created under the guidance of Angelo Puccia

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of Segregation in America
Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts
Featuring James Loewen

Shemin Auditorium, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

James Loewen, a historiographer who researches how Americans remember their past, taught race relations at the University of Vermont for 20 years and authored the best-selling books Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Got Wrong. His latest book, Sundown Towns, will be released just prior to the conference and will be available for purchase outside the lecture.

This event is the kKeynote address for the weekend's Contesting Public Memories interdisciplinary conference.

Folkus Project
Joe Davoli and Harvey Nusbaum

Price: $10
May Memorial Unitarian Society
3800 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Sometimes what you are looking for is right in your own back yard. Central New York is lucky to have Joe Davoli and Harvey Nusbaum, two proficient and well-rounded musicians who explore various traditional fiddle-based music styles. Both have played in a variety of bands, but have joined together for the past three years. Now they are looking forward to the culmination of their efforts as a duo: a new CD called Fiddle and Guitar that they had hoped to have ready for their concert at May Memorial, but anticipate will be available in the weeks just after this concert.

Joe and Harvey's repertoire of music for fiddle, mandolin and guitar draws from Celtic music, American traditional fiddling, contra dance tradition and the standards. Joe is the fiddler and mandolinist, and Harvey is the guitarist. Each is the product of a mixture of formal training and close study based on musical interest.

Joe and Harvey's CD title Fiddle and Guitar is deceptively simple. The CD honors multiple musical legacies, and represents a mixture of the tried and true and the unexpected. Take their medley of Liverpool Hornpipe, Fishers Hornpipe and the Arkansas Traveler. The first tune is from Irish tradition, the second is played by Irish and American players, and the third is a hoedown from the American south. Joe and Harvey find the stylistic points of convergence inherent in the tunes, and wed them to form a unified whole.

Pops Series: Let's Dance -- A Tribute to Fred and Ginger
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Grant Cooper, conductor
Featuring Debbie Gravitte, vocalist; Sal Viviano, vocalist; Joan Hess, dancer; Noah Racey, dancer

Price: $16 - $54
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Kick up your heals and hold onto your seats as vocalists Debbie Gravitte and Sal Viviano along with dancers Joan Hess and Noah Racey pay tribute to the great Hollywood icons Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. You'll enjoy the music of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Kern and much more. This concert will have you singing in the streets and dancing in the aisles!

Read a review!

Alice Fulton, poet
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

A reading by poet Alice Fulton, author of Cascade Experiment.

Bermuda Avenue Triangle
Baldwinsville Theatre Guild

Price: $15 adults, $12 students
First Presbyterian Church of Baldwinsville
64 Oswego St., Baldwinsville

The Baldwinsville Theatre Guild presents the Central New York premier of Bermuda Avenue Triangle, a a risqué and riotous comedy written by Joe Bologna and Renee Taylor.

The Sound of Music
Theatre '90

Price: $22 regular; $14 children under 13
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

Read a Review!

Looking for Normal
Rarely Done Productions
Linda Lance, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Playwright June Anderson asks, "What is Normal?" Although undergoing a sex change is not as unusual a procedure as it once was in days gone by, it is still hardly an everyday occurrence.

Read a Review!

Lost in Yonkers
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Teenage Jay and Arty are in for a rough 1942. Pop owes nine grand to a loan shark and has to hightail it out of town, so he drops the boys in Yonkers in the care of his mother. Grandma may own a sweet shop, but she's no box of chocolates. She's so tough her own grown-up children are afraid of her. And forget about sneaking a treat or two. She counts the salt on the pretzels. How's she going to take it when Uncle Louie shows up to hide out from gangsters and Aunt Bella (who's a little off) announces she wants to marry an usher from the local movie theatre? Neil Simon placed these wonderful characters into a very funny play and earned the 1991 Pulitzer and Tony Awards for his effort. Our reward is laughter and a truly great night in the theatre.

Read a Review!

The Wild Party
Syracuse University Drama Department
Rodney Hudson, director

Price: $18 adults, $16 students/seniors
Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, set in the Roaring Twenties, tells the decadent tale of one licentious soiree in Manhattan. Queenie and Burrs, both vaudeville performers, aim to throw THE party of the year. Jealousy and passion ensue between the pair as the guests arrive and the evening progresses. Based on Joseph Moncure March's 1928 jazz-age poem of the same name, The Wild Party is a moralizing tale of excess and debauchery that transcends its era. Lippa's award-winning jazz-infused score features music that ranges from raucous and danceable (Raise the Roof and A Wild, Wild Party) to tender ballads (Poor Child and Maybe I Like it this Way) and draws from both the bygone era in which the play is set and the present.

Read a Review!

Saturday, October 8, 2005

See it With Different Eyes
Delavan Art Gallery

Delavan Art Gallery
501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Robert Carroll: photography
Liliya Lifanova: still lifes
Angelo Puccia: sculpture
Eric W. Shite: paintings
Sculpture exhibit by the clients of Enable, created under the guidance of Angelo Puccia

Aftermarket: Art, Objects and Commerce
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Interdisciplinary artist John Freyer returns to his native Syracuse for his first museum exhibition. The exhibit includes components of three different, but inter-related projects: his nationally renowned web-based performance piece, AllMyLifeForSale.Com; a new interactive installation entitled Walm-Art.Com; and Surplus, a sculpture/installation comprised of one-ton bales of surplus clothing. In addition, a twelve-foot rotating Bob's Big Boy sculpture, purchased by Freyer on eBay for the University of Iowa Museum of Art, will be on view in the Sculpture Court. Freyer was recently appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and a pilot of his Second Hand Stories continues to be broadcast by PBS, which is developing a series of the same name.

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

Modern Prints from the International Graphic Arts Society
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Included are prints by Garo Antresian, Gabor Peterdi, and Donald Saff, three printmakers who taught a generation of artists and had a profound impact on the art of printmaking in the latter half of the 20th century.

W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition of photojournalist Eugene Smith includes his service as a World War II photographer in the Pacific theater, a group from a 1950s Life magazine photo essay on the rise of America's chemical industry, and a selection of images from his Pittsburgh project.

Carrie Mae Weems: Forms of Memory
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Forms of Memory consists of four recent works -- The Hampton Project, a large scale gallery installation with audio, and three video projections: In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Time; A Woman on a Journey; and Speak to Me, Say Something. Each artwork is thematically engaged with various aspects of memory.

The Hampton Project is Weems' response to photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1899 for Johnston's project, The Hampton Album. Using these vintage images as a starting point, Weems questions Hampton University's role in mainstreaming Native Americans and freed African slaves as well as addressing the larger issue of the need to maintain one's own heritage while becoming a member of a diverse culture through force or free will. It consists of 26 digitally reproduced photographs printed with ink on semi-transparent muslin scrims and canvas. This creates an installation in which visitors move around and between the images; there is also a sound component to the work.

Two video pieces from the series Coming Up for Air (2003-04) will be shown. In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Times is a 15-minute piece referencing Bergman's film classic Cries and Whispers, in which Weems produces a video trilogy that explores the discomfort of love and longing among three embattled sisters. A Woman on a Journey is a 5-minute piece about a woman on a journey back to reclaim herself, who has failed to calculate the true price of the ticket.

The third artwork, Speak to Me, Say Something, (2005), is a 4-minute powerful narrative using singular images of local Syracuse activists that explores the difficult questions of a struggling community situated on the edge. In this work, Weems asks, "What did you know and when did you know it?" in order to further the notion of personal responsibility.

Borders and Memory: Works by Chien-Chi Chang, Chan Chao, Jeeyun Kim, Bari Kumar, and Daniel Lee
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Borders and Memory, a selection of works by artists born in Asia but who now live in the United States, includes artists working in different media, from different countries, at different points in the trajectory of their careers. Each artist deals with borders and memory, although in profoundly different ways as judged by content, imagery, materials, and techniques. Yet within this diversity, there is this common thread: each of these artists, either in obvious or subtle ways, using direct evidence or working through more metaphorical means, examines the continuum where border and memory merge.

We live in a country filled in large part with immigrants and their descendants. This population, whether through choice, necessity, or force, has come to settle and live in a land that for them or their ancestors was not originally theirs. To reach this place they have crossed physical, cultural, and political borders sometimes at enormous risk. We have come to think of this process as intrinsic to the American Dream.

What our country has experienced, however, is part of a larger narrative, as hundreds of millions of people across the globe move, relocate, or travel to destinations that were not the places where they were born. From the executive looking for business or the student seeking an education to the peasant driven from the land by political and religious oppression or lack of economic opportunity, people are on the move.

Whether tourist, traveler, or refugee, crossing borders - political, ethnic, religious, or geographic - has become a way of life.

The Artist Revealed: Artists Portraits and Self-Portraits
Syracuse University Art Museum

University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Artists in the exhibition (in a range of media) are Berenice Abbott, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Paul Cezanne, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Edward Manet, Reginald Marsh, and Edward Steichens.

Body Art: Duane Sauro
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Bodies have long been adorned with ink. Body decorations are sometimes purely artistic and often symbolic, but always a personal statement. An individual chooses to be tattooed and selects the subject matter as a manner of self-expression and individuality. In this collection of works, the photographer's intention is to acclaim the art of tattoo in conjunction with the character of the recipient. Soft, bold, gory, surreal, a tattoo is a visual window, a veneer, through which a person wishes to be perceived. Tattoos themselves are proudly displayed on a wall of skin. The images in this exhibition are graphic and emotional art statements that express something personal to those that choose to display them on a wall of their own.

Family Series: The Haunted Orchestra
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Grant Cooper, conductor
Featuring Dan Kamin, special guest

Price: $12-$25, half-price for children under 12
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Witness firsthand as the Orchestra plays magical, musical pranks on nerdy Mr. Kirby (Dan Kamin). You'll be amazed as Mr. Kirby is tricked and transformed through the power of music and kids will be delighted with music from spooky to kooky including Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries and Anderson's The Typewriter.

SU Women's Choir Invitational Festival
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music

Price: Free
Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The Syracuse University Women's Choir, under the direction of Dr. Barbara M. Tagg, will be the host of the 4th Annual SU Women's Choir Invitational Festival. Guest choirs for the 2005 event include the Skaneateles High School Women's Choir under the direction of Mickey Kringer, and the Oneida High School Women's Choir under the direction of Jeffrey Welcher. Each of the three women's choirs will perform their own repertoire and combine for three selections under the direction of Barbara Tagg and invited guest conductor Dr. Robert Harris from Northwestern University.

Parking is available in the Q1 lot behind Crouse College or in the Irving Ave. garage.

Folkus Project
Westcott Community Center
Joe Crookston

Price: $10
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Joe Crookston's music and songwriting is deeply rooted in the grand celebration of life, death, ancestry and the interconnectedness of us all. Born and raised in rural Ohio, with Hungarian musical blood in his veins, he inherited his love of music and song from his late mother, an extremely prolific gospel singer/songwriter and accordion polka wizard. His music draws from his rural Ohio roots and exudes a remarkable intergenerational, universal, and timeless quality.

Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music
Vermeer Quartet
Featuring Peter Frankl, piano

Price: $20 regular, $15 senior, $10 student, children under 13 free
H. W. Smith School Auditorium
1130 Salt Springs Rd., Syracuse

Dvorak Quartet No. 8 in E major, op.80
Janacek Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters"
Shostakovich Piano Quintet in G minor, op. 57

Read a review!

Pops Series: Let's Dance -- A Tribute to Fred and Ginger
Syracuse Symphony Orchestra
Grant Cooper, conductor
Featuring Debbie Gravitte, vocalist; Sal Viviano, vocalist; Joan Hess, dancer; Noah Racey, dancer

Price: $16 - $54
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Kick up your heals and hold onto your seats as vocalists Debbie Gravitte and Sal Viviano along with dancers Joan Hess and Noah Racey pay tribute to the great Hollywood icons Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. You'll enjoy the music of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Kern and much more. This concert will have you singing in the streets and dancing in the aisles!

Read a review!

An Evening of Music and Film
Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts

Goldstein Auditorium, Schine Student Center
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Michael Gordon, best known as a founding director of the new music ensemble Bang on a Can, and his band will perform as part of the "Contesting Public Memories" conference. Gordon's six-member ensemble will perform selections from their CD Light is Calling (Nonesuch Records, 2003) to several new film projections by Bill Morrison. This evening of music and film will offer challenging and beautiful works exploring memory, longing, and the inaccessibility of the past.

Puppet Vaudeville
Open Hand Theater
Purple Rock Productions

Price: $9 adults; $6 children (members get $1 off)
International Mask and Puppet Museum
518 Prospect Ave., Syracuse

Purple Rock Productions' Rolande Duprey presents a wonderful performance for the whole family. She is a noted puppeteer who has taught at the Mask and Puppet Center in Scotland and toured internationally with The Yuch Lung Shadow Theatre and The Czech-American Marionette Theatre.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

Price: $5
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Audience-interactive version of the classic story.

Fractured Fairy Tales
Onondaga Community College
Syracuse Stage and Syracuse University Drama Department

Storer Auditorium
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Favorite fairy tales are twisted inside and out -- the results are a sublimely kooky and clever theatrical experience that sparks the imagination with sharp wit and humor.

For more information, phone 315-498-ARTS (2787).

Lost in Yonkers
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Teenage Jay and Arty are in for a rough 1942. Pop owes nine grand to a loan shark and has to hightail it out of town, so he drops the boys in Yonkers in the care of his mother. Grandma may own a sweet shop, but she's no box of chocolates. She's so tough her own grown-up children are afraid of her. And forget about sneaking a treat or two. She counts the salt on the pretzels. How's she going to take it when Uncle Louie shows up to hide out from gangsters and Aunt Bella (who's a little off) announces she wants to marry an usher from the local movie theatre? Neil Simon placed these wonderful characters into a very funny play and earned the 1991 Pulitzer and Tony Awards for his effort. Our reward is laughter and a truly great night in the theatre.

Read a Review!

Bermuda Avenue Triangle
Baldwinsville Theatre Guild

Price: $15 adults, $12 students
First Presbyterian Church of Baldwinsville
64 Oswego St., Baldwinsville

The Baldwinsville Theatre Guild presents the Central New York premier of Bermuda Avenue Triangle, a a risqué and riotous comedy written by Joe Bologna and Renee Taylor.

The Sound of Music
Theatre '90

Price: $22 regular; $14 children under 13
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

Read a Review!

Looking for Normal
Rarely Done Productions
Linda Lance, director

Price: $15
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Playwright June Anderson asks, "What is Normal?" Although undergoing a sex change is not as unusual a procedure as it once was in days gone by, it is still hardly an everyday occurrence.

Read a Review!

Lost in Yonkers
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Teenage Jay and Arty are in for a rough 1942. Pop owes nine grand to a loan shark and has to hightail it out of town, so he drops the boys in Yonkers in the care of his mother. Grandma may own a sweet shop, but she's no box of chocolates. She's so tough her own grown-up children are afraid of her. And forget about sneaking a treat or two. She counts the salt on the pretzels. How's she going to take it when Uncle Louie shows up to hide out from gangsters and Aunt Bella (who's a little off) announces she wants to marry an usher from the local movie theatre? Neil Simon placed these wonderful characters into a very funny play and earned the 1991 Pulitzer and Tony Awards for his effort. Our reward is laughter and a truly great night in the theatre.

Read a Review!

The Wild Party
Syracuse University Drama Department
Rodney Hudson, director

Price: $18 adults, $16 students/seniors
Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, set in the Roaring Twenties, tells the decadent tale of one licentious soiree in Manhattan. Queenie and Burrs, both vaudeville performers, aim to throw THE party of the year. Jealousy and passion ensue between the pair as the guests arrive and the evening progresses. Based on Joseph Moncure March's 1928 jazz-age poem of the same name, The Wild Party is a moralizing tale of excess and debauchery that transcends its era. Lippa's award-winning jazz-infused score features music that ranges from raucous and danceable (Raise the Roof and A Wild, Wild Party) to tender ballads (Poor Child and Maybe I Like it this Way) and draws from both the bygone era in which the play is set and the present.

Read a Review!

Sunday, October 9, 2005

View from Here: Works of Kanako Sasaki
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photography has the ability to wrap whole novels into a single image. One look and the viewer can absorb the mood, the narrative, and the key characters. Much like reading a book, the story unfolds and an event unravels. Some stories are short and to the point; others are lengthy and complicated. Kanako Sasaki's images are both. By casting herself as the single protagonist or including just a few characters in each frame, Sasaki is able to build many layers of suggested narrative into each image. These layers hold many surprises built with humor and a quirky, unexpected depth.

In her images Sasaki captures energy and joy, childlike wonder, and naivety. In the world of her pictures social etiquette does not matter, and occasional embarrassment is accepted as a fact of life. Only the expression of emotion as action is important in Sasakis sometimes upside-down world. She sets her figures apart within the grandness of nature, inspired by childhood memories, novels, and Ukiyo-e paintings. Ukiyo, literally translated as "floating world," is a Japanese genre in literature and painting that developed in the sixteenth century. It depicts a reality that embraces the coexistence of life and death. By wrapping whole novels into each of her images, Kanako Sasaki gives us a rich and poetic description of her imagination and memory.

Gallery reception Thurs., Sept. 29, 6-8pm

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members' wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan.

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The hallway space of Light Work's main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition consisting of about 100 images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over 30 years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects' visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Read a review!

W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition of photojournalist Eugene Smith includes his service as a World War II photographer in the Pacific theater, a group from a 1950s Life magazine photo essay on the rise of America's chemical industry, and a selection of images from his Pittsburgh project.

Modern Prints from the International Graphic Arts Society
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Included are prints by Garo Antresian, Gabor Peterdi, and Donald Saff, three printmakers who taught a generation of artists and had a profound impact on the art of printmaking in the latter half of the 20th century.

Aftermarket: Art, Objects and Commerce
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Interdisciplinary artist John Freyer returns to his native Syracuse for his first museum exhibition. The exhibit includes components of three different, but inter-related projects: his nationally renowned web-based performance piece, AllMyLifeForSale.Com; a new interactive installation entitled Walm-Art.Com; and Surplus, a sculpture/installation comprised of one-ton bales of surplus clothing. In addition, a twelve-foot rotating Bob's Big Boy sculpture, purchased by Freyer on eBay for the University of Iowa Museum of Art, will be on view in the Sculpture Court. Freyer was recently appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and a pilot of his Second Hand Stories continues to be broadcast by PBS, which is developing a series of the same name.

Carrie Mae Weems: Forms of Memory
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Forms of Memory consists of four recent works -- The Hampton Project, a large scale gallery installation with audio, and three video projections: In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Time; A Woman on a Journey; and Speak to Me, Say Something. Each artwork is thematically engaged with various aspects of memory.

The Hampton Project is Weems' response to photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1899 for Johnston's project, The Hampton Album. Using these vintage images as a starting point, Weems questions Hampton University's role in mainstreaming Native Americans and freed African slaves as well as addressing the larger issue of the need to maintain one's own heritage while becoming a member of a diverse culture through force or free will. It consists of 26 digitally reproduced photographs printed with ink on semi-transparent muslin scrims and canvas. This creates an installation in which visitors move around and between the images; there is also a sound component to the work.

Two video pieces from the series Coming Up for Air (2003-04) will be shown. In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Times is a 15-minute piece referencing Bergman's film classic Cries and Whispers, in which Weems produces a video trilogy that explores the discomfort of love and longing among three embattled sisters. A Woman on a Journey is a 5-minute piece about a woman on a journey back to reclaim herself, who has failed to calculate the true price of the ticket.

The third artwork, Speak to Me, Say Something, (2005), is a 4-minute powerful narrative using singular images of local Syracuse activists that explores the difficult questions of a struggling community situated on the edge. In this work, Weems asks, "What did you know and when did you know it?" in order to further the notion of personal responsibility.

Borders and Memory: Works by Chien-Chi Chang, Chan Chao, Jeeyun Kim, Bari Kumar, and Daniel Lee
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Borders and Memory, a selection of works by artists born in Asia but who now live in the United States, includes artists working in different media, from different countries, at different points in the trajectory of their careers. Each artist deals with borders and memory, although in profoundly different ways as judged by content, imagery, materials, and techniques. Yet within this diversity, there is this common thread: each of these artists, either in obvious or subtle ways, using direct evidence or working through more metaphorical means, examines the continuum where border and memory merge.

We live in a country filled in large part with immigrants and their descendants. This population, whether through choice, necessity, or force, has come to settle and live in a land that for them or their ancestors was not originally theirs. To reach this place they have crossed physical, cultural, and political borders sometimes at enormous risk. We have come to think of this process as intrinsic to the American Dream.

What our country has experienced, however, is part of a larger narrative, as hundreds of millions of people across the globe move, relocate, or travel to destinations that were not the places where they were born. From the executive looking for business or the student seeking an education to the peasant driven from the land by political and religious oppression or lack of economic opportunity, people are on the move.

Whether tourist, traveler, or refugee, crossing borders - political, ethnic, religious, or geographic - has become a way of life.

The Artist Revealed: Artists Portraits and Self-Portraits
Syracuse University Art Museum

University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Artists in the exhibition (in a range of media) are Berenice Abbott, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Paul Cezanne, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Edward Manet, Reginald Marsh, and Edward Steichens.

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

The Five Senses
Redhouse

Price: $8
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Directed by Jeremy Podeswa. This award-winning film explores life and love through the five senses. Five characters that have almost nothing in common except the desire to experience true intimacy struggle to make sense of their senseless worlds. Through taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell, their secret lives unfold, until, one by one, each is drawn out of her/his own shell and into a world that promises to re-ignite the passion in their souls.

106 minutes, rated R.

Sunday in Recital
Civic Morning Musicals
Trio Mondiale: Cristina Buciu, violin; Gregory Wood, cello; Ida Trebicka, piano

Price: $15 adults, students free
Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Joaquin Turina Piano Trio No. 2 in b minor, op. 76
Marc Mellits Fruity Pebbles for violin, cello and piano (1997)
Johannes Brahms Piano Trio No. 2 in C major, op. 87

Lost in Yonkers
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Teenage Jay and Arty are in for a rough 1942. Pop owes nine grand to a loan shark and has to hightail it out of town, so he drops the boys in Yonkers in the care of his mother. Grandma may own a sweet shop, but she's no box of chocolates. She's so tough her own grown-up children are afraid of her. And forget about sneaking a treat or two. She counts the salt on the pretzels. How's she going to take it when Uncle Louie shows up to hide out from gangsters and Aunt Bella (who's a little off) announces she wants to marry an usher from the local movie theatre? Neil Simon placed these wonderful characters into a very funny play and earned the 1991 Pulitzer and Tony Awards for his effort. Our reward is laughter and a truly great night in the theatre.

Read a Review!

The Wild Party
Syracuse University Drama Department
Rodney Hudson, director

Price: $18 adults, $16 students/seniors
Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, set in the Roaring Twenties, tells the decadent tale of one licentious soiree in Manhattan. Queenie and Burrs, both vaudeville performers, aim to throw THE party of the year. Jealousy and passion ensue between the pair as the guests arrive and the evening progresses. Based on Joseph Moncure March's 1928 jazz-age poem of the same name, The Wild Party is a moralizing tale of excess and debauchery that transcends its era. Lippa's award-winning jazz-infused score features music that ranges from raucous and danceable (Raise the Roof and A Wild, Wild Party) to tender ballads (Poor Child and Maybe I Like it this Way) and draws from both the bygone era in which the play is set and the present.

Read a Review!

The Sound of Music
Theatre '90

Price: $22 regular; $14 children under 13
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

Read a Review!

Monday, October 10, 2005

Flood of Florence Photos
Syracuse University School of Art and Design
Featuring Works of Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna

Price: Free
Office of the Dean, 200 Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Kraczyna teaches printmaking and art-on-paper classes for the studio arts program at SU's Division of International Programs Abroad Florence Center. He is the founder and past director of Il Bisonte International School of Advanced Printmaking in Florence, where he taught techniques of color etching. Kraczyna co-authored I Segni Incisi, the first Italian textbook on the history and techniques of etching. He has directed "Studio for Color Etching" workshops in Barga, Lucca and at the International Symposium for Color Etching at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Columbia, Czech Republic and Japan, and is represented in the Uffizi Print Collection. Kraczyna holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Paid parking is available in the Irving Avenue garage.

The Great New York State Fair Series
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Local artist Mick Mather brings his series of digitally altered State Fair photographs to the Westcott Community Art Gallery. Mather's photo series captures the mad joy of the New York State Fair and takes the viewer through a funhouse of familiar images seen through different eyes. By digitally changing the images in his photographs, Mather shows the viewer a different way to look at the people, places and animals at the fair. The series of 18 photos captures the essence of the New York State Fair and those who love it.

View from Here: Works of Kanako Sasaki
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photography has the ability to wrap whole novels into a single image. One look and the viewer can absorb the mood, the narrative, and the key characters. Much like reading a book, the story unfolds and an event unravels. Some stories are short and to the point; others are lengthy and complicated. Kanako Sasaki's images are both. By casting herself as the single protagonist or including just a few characters in each frame, Sasaki is able to build many layers of suggested narrative into each image. These layers hold many surprises built with humor and a quirky, unexpected depth.

In her images Sasaki captures energy and joy, childlike wonder, and naivety. In the world of her pictures social etiquette does not matter, and occasional embarrassment is accepted as a fact of life. Only the expression of emotion as action is important in Sasakis sometimes upside-down world. She sets her figures apart within the grandness of nature, inspired by childhood memories, novels, and Ukiyo-e paintings. Ukiyo, literally translated as "floating world," is a Japanese genre in literature and painting that developed in the sixteenth century. It depicts a reality that embraces the coexistence of life and death. By wrapping whole novels into each of her images, Kanako Sasaki gives us a rich and poetic description of her imagination and memory.

Gallery reception Thurs., Sept. 29, 6-8pm

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The hallway space of Light Work's main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition consisting of about 100 images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over 30 years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects' visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Read a review!

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members' wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan.

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

The Station Agent
Beyond Borders: The Illusion of Normalcy in Film

Price: Free
Watson Theater, Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave. (Syracuse University), Syracuse

A young man of short stature seeks a life of solitude in an abandoned train station.

For more information, visit the website at bccc.syr.edu.

Beyond Borders: The Illusion of Normalcy in Film is a semester-long film series sponsored by the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee (BCCC) and the Center on Disability Studies, Law, and Human Policy of Syracuse University. The goal of this year's film series is to challenge the idea of "normal."

Linda Maxey Marimba Master Class
Onondaga Community College

Gordon Student Center, room 204
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Linda Maxey was the first marimbist on the roster of Columbia Artists Management in New York and has performed hundreds of concerts throughout the United States, Europe and Canada.

For more information, visit www.sunyocc.edu/~bridger or call 315-498-2208.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Flood of Florence Photos
Syracuse University School of Art and Design
Featuring Works of Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna

Price: Free
Office of the Dean, 200 Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Kraczyna teaches printmaking and art-on-paper classes for the studio arts program at SU's Division of International Programs Abroad Florence Center. He is the founder and past director of Il Bisonte International School of Advanced Printmaking in Florence, where he taught techniques of color etching. Kraczyna co-authored I Segni Incisi, the first Italian textbook on the history and techniques of etching. He has directed "Studio for Color Etching" workshops in Barga, Lucca and at the International Symposium for Color Etching at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Columbia, Czech Republic and Japan, and is represented in the Uffizi Print Collection. Kraczyna holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Paid parking is available in the Irving Avenue garage.

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members' wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan.

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The hallway space of Light Work's main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition consisting of about 100 images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over 30 years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects' visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Read a review!

View from Here: Works of Kanako Sasaki
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photography has the ability to wrap whole novels into a single image. One look and the viewer can absorb the mood, the narrative, and the key characters. Much like reading a book, the story unfolds and an event unravels. Some stories are short and to the point; others are lengthy and complicated. Kanako Sasaki's images are both. By casting herself as the single protagonist or including just a few characters in each frame, Sasaki is able to build many layers of suggested narrative into each image. These layers hold many surprises built with humor and a quirky, unexpected depth.

In her images Sasaki captures energy and joy, childlike wonder, and naivety. In the world of her pictures social etiquette does not matter, and occasional embarrassment is accepted as a fact of life. Only the expression of emotion as action is important in Sasakis sometimes upside-down world. She sets her figures apart within the grandness of nature, inspired by childhood memories, novels, and Ukiyo-e paintings. Ukiyo, literally translated as "floating world," is a Japanese genre in literature and painting that developed in the sixteenth century. It depicts a reality that embraces the coexistence of life and death. By wrapping whole novels into each of her images, Kanako Sasaki gives us a rich and poetic description of her imagination and memory.

Gallery reception Thurs., Sept. 29, 6-8pm

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

Modern Prints from the International Graphic Arts Society
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Included are prints by Garo Antresian, Gabor Peterdi, and Donald Saff, three printmakers who taught a generation of artists and had a profound impact on the art of printmaking in the latter half of the 20th century.

W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition of photojournalist Eugene Smith includes his service as a World War II photographer in the Pacific theater, a group from a 1950s Life magazine photo essay on the rise of America's chemical industry, and a selection of images from his Pittsburgh project.

Aftermarket: Art, Objects and Commerce
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Interdisciplinary artist John Freyer returns to his native Syracuse for his first museum exhibition. The exhibit includes components of three different, but inter-related projects: his nationally renowned web-based performance piece, AllMyLifeForSale.Com; a new interactive installation entitled Walm-Art.Com; and Surplus, a sculpture/installation comprised of one-ton bales of surplus clothing. In addition, a twelve-foot rotating Bob's Big Boy sculpture, purchased by Freyer on eBay for the University of Iowa Museum of Art, will be on view in the Sculpture Court. Freyer was recently appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and a pilot of his Second Hand Stories continues to be broadcast by PBS, which is developing a series of the same name.

Carrie Mae Weems: Forms of Memory
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Forms of Memory consists of four recent works -- The Hampton Project, a large scale gallery installation with audio, and three video projections: In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Time; A Woman on a Journey; and Speak to Me, Say Something. Each artwork is thematically engaged with various aspects of memory.

The Hampton Project is Weems' response to photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1899 for Johnston's project, The Hampton Album. Using these vintage images as a starting point, Weems questions Hampton University's role in mainstreaming Native Americans and freed African slaves as well as addressing the larger issue of the need to maintain one's own heritage while becoming a member of a diverse culture through force or free will. It consists of 26 digitally reproduced photographs printed with ink on semi-transparent muslin scrims and canvas. This creates an installation in which visitors move around and between the images; there is also a sound component to the work.

Two video pieces from the series Coming Up for Air (2003-04) will be shown. In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Times is a 15-minute piece referencing Bergman's film classic Cries and Whispers, in which Weems produces a video trilogy that explores the discomfort of love and longing among three embattled sisters. A Woman on a Journey is a 5-minute piece about a woman on a journey back to reclaim herself, who has failed to calculate the true price of the ticket.

The third artwork, Speak to Me, Say Something, (2005), is a 4-minute powerful narrative using singular images of local Syracuse activists that explores the difficult questions of a struggling community situated on the edge. In this work, Weems asks, "What did you know and when did you know it?" in order to further the notion of personal responsibility.

Borders and Memory: Works by Chien-Chi Chang, Chan Chao, Jeeyun Kim, Bari Kumar, and Daniel Lee
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Borders and Memory, a selection of works by artists born in Asia but who now live in the United States, includes artists working in different media, from different countries, at different points in the trajectory of their careers. Each artist deals with borders and memory, although in profoundly different ways as judged by content, imagery, materials, and techniques. Yet within this diversity, there is this common thread: each of these artists, either in obvious or subtle ways, using direct evidence or working through more metaphorical means, examines the continuum where border and memory merge.

We live in a country filled in large part with immigrants and their descendants. This population, whether through choice, necessity, or force, has come to settle and live in a land that for them or their ancestors was not originally theirs. To reach this place they have crossed physical, cultural, and political borders sometimes at enormous risk. We have come to think of this process as intrinsic to the American Dream.

What our country has experienced, however, is part of a larger narrative, as hundreds of millions of people across the globe move, relocate, or travel to destinations that were not the places where they were born. From the executive looking for business or the student seeking an education to the peasant driven from the land by political and religious oppression or lack of economic opportunity, people are on the move.

Whether tourist, traveler, or refugee, crossing borders - political, ethnic, religious, or geographic - has become a way of life.

The Artist Revealed: Artists Portraits and Self-Portraits
Syracuse University Art Museum

University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Artists in the exhibition (in a range of media) are Berenice Abbott, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Paul Cezanne, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Edward Manet, Reginald Marsh, and Edward Steichens.

The Five Senses
Redhouse

Price: $8
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Directed by Jeremy Podeswa. This award-winning film explores life and love through the five senses. Five characters that have almost nothing in common except the desire to experience true intimacy struggle to make sense of their senseless worlds. Through taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell, their secret lives unfold, until, one by one, each is drawn out of her/his own shell and into a world that promises to re-ignite the passion in their souls.

106 minutes, rated R.

Consumption and Identity
Everson Museum of Art
Featuring Robert Thompson

Price: Free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Robert Thompson, Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture at the Newhouse School, Syracuse University, will offer his observations about consumption and identity in today's society and marketplace.

Henry Petroski
Friends of the Central Library Author Series

Price: $25
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

A professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University and author of Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering (Knopf, 2004) and The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers Came to be as They Are (Vintage, 1994).

George C. Wolfe
University Lectures

Price: Free
Hendricks Chapel
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Director, writer, and producer George C. Wolfe has had a distinguished career in the theater. Among the numerous awards and prizes that he has garnered are two Tony Awards. In addition to directing such important works as Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Wolfe has also written a number of plays and musicals, several of which have had successful runs on Broadway. Since 1993, he has been the producer and artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Joseph Papp Public Theater, positions that give him one of the most influential voices in American theater.

Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
SU Symphony Orchestra
James Tapia, conductor
Featuring Liz Lyons, piano

Price: Free
Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Ms. Lyons is a VPA junior and 2005 Concerto and Aria Winner. The program will feature works by Camille Saint Saens, Samuel Barber and Johannes Brahms. Parking is available in Irving Garage.

Lost in Yonkers
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Teenage Jay and Arty are in for a rough 1942. Pop owes nine grand to a loan shark and has to hightail it out of town, so he drops the boys in Yonkers in the care of his mother. Grandma may own a sweet shop, but she's no box of chocolates. She's so tough her own grown-up children are afraid of her. And forget about sneaking a treat or two. She counts the salt on the pretzels. How's she going to take it when Uncle Louie shows up to hide out from gangsters and Aunt Bella (who's a little off) announces she wants to marry an usher from the local movie theatre? Neil Simon placed these wonderful characters into a very funny play and earned the 1991 Pulitzer and Tony Awards for his effort. Our reward is laughter and a truly great night in the theatre.

Read a Review!

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Jack White Art Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Flood of Florence Photos
Syracuse University School of Art and Design
Featuring Works of Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna

Price: Free
Office of the Dean, 200 Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Kraczyna teaches printmaking and art-on-paper classes for the studio arts program at SU's Division of International Programs Abroad Florence Center. He is the founder and past director of Il Bisonte International School of Advanced Printmaking in Florence, where he taught techniques of color etching. Kraczyna co-authored I Segni Incisi, the first Italian textbook on the history and techniques of etching. He has directed "Studio for Color Etching" workshops in Barga, Lucca and at the International Symposium for Color Etching at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Columbia, Czech Republic and Japan, and is represented in the Uffizi Print Collection. Kraczyna holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Paid parking is available in the Irving Avenue garage.

View from Here: Works of Kanako Sasaki
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photography has the ability to wrap whole novels into a single image. One look and the viewer can absorb the mood, the narrative, and the key characters. Much like reading a book, the story unfolds and an event unravels. Some stories are short and to the point; others are lengthy and complicated. Kanako Sasaki's images are both. By casting herself as the single protagonist or including just a few characters in each frame, Sasaki is able to build many layers of suggested narrative into each image. These layers hold many surprises built with humor and a quirky, unexpected depth.

In her images Sasaki captures energy and joy, childlike wonder, and naivety. In the world of her pictures social etiquette does not matter, and occasional embarrassment is accepted as a fact of life. Only the expression of emotion as action is important in Sasakis sometimes upside-down world. She sets her figures apart within the grandness of nature, inspired by childhood memories, novels, and Ukiyo-e paintings. Ukiyo, literally translated as "floating world," is a Japanese genre in literature and painting that developed in the sixteenth century. It depicts a reality that embraces the coexistence of life and death. By wrapping whole novels into each of her images, Kanako Sasaki gives us a rich and poetic description of her imagination and memory.

Gallery reception Thurs., Sept. 29, 6-8pm

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members' wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan.

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The hallway space of Light Work's main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition consisting of about 100 images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over 30 years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects' visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Read a review!

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition of photojournalist Eugene Smith includes his service as a World War II photographer in the Pacific theater, a group from a 1950s Life magazine photo essay on the rise of America's chemical industry, and a selection of images from his Pittsburgh project.

Modern Prints from the International Graphic Arts Society
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Included are prints by Garo Antresian, Gabor Peterdi, and Donald Saff, three printmakers who taught a generation of artists and had a profound impact on the art of printmaking in the latter half of the 20th century.

Aftermarket: Art, Objects and Commerce
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Interdisciplinary artist John Freyer returns to his native Syracuse for his first museum exhibition. The exhibit includes components of three different, but inter-related projects: his nationally renowned web-based performance piece, AllMyLifeForSale.Com; a new interactive installation entitled Walm-Art.Com; and Surplus, a sculpture/installation comprised of one-ton bales of surplus clothing. In addition, a twelve-foot rotating Bob's Big Boy sculpture, purchased by Freyer on eBay for the University of Iowa Museum of Art, will be on view in the Sculpture Court. Freyer was recently appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and a pilot of his Second Hand Stories continues to be broadcast by PBS, which is developing a series of the same name.

Carrie Mae Weems: Forms of Memory
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Forms of Memory consists of four recent works -- The Hampton Project, a large scale gallery installation with audio, and three video projections: In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Time; A Woman on a Journey; and Speak to Me, Say Something. Each artwork is thematically engaged with various aspects of memory.

The Hampton Project is Weems' response to photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1899 for Johnston's project, The Hampton Album. Using these vintage images as a starting point, Weems questions Hampton University's role in mainstreaming Native Americans and freed African slaves as well as addressing the larger issue of the need to maintain one's own heritage while becoming a member of a diverse culture through force or free will. It consists of 26 digitally reproduced photographs printed with ink on semi-transparent muslin scrims and canvas. This creates an installation in which visitors move around and between the images; there is also a sound component to the work.

Two video pieces from the series Coming Up for Air (2003-04) will be shown. In Love, In Trouble, and Out of Times is a 15-minute piece referencing Bergman's film classic Cries and Whispers, in which Weems produces a video trilogy that explores the discomfort of love and longing among three embattled sisters. A Woman on a Journey is a 5-minute piece about a woman on a journey back to reclaim herself, who has failed to calculate the true price of the ticket.

The third artwork, Speak to Me, Say Something, (2005), is a 4-minute powerful narrative using singular images of local Syracuse activists that explores the difficult questions of a struggling community situated on the edge. In this work, Weems asks, "What did you know and when did you know it?" in order to further the notion of personal responsibility.

Borders and Memory: Works by Chien-Chi Chang, Chan Chao, Jeeyun Kim, Bari Kumar, and Daniel Lee
Lowe Art Gallery

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Borders and Memory, a selection of works by artists born in Asia but who now live in the United States, includes artists working in different media, from different countries, at different points in the trajectory of their careers. Each artist deals with borders and memory, although in profoundly different ways as judged by content, imagery, materials, and techniques. Yet within this diversity, there is this common thread: each of these artists, either in obvious or subtle ways, using direct evidence or working through more metaphorical means, examines the continuum where border and memory merge.

We live in a country filled in large part with immigrants and their descendants. This population, whether through choice, necessity, or force, has come to settle and live in a land that for them or their ancestors was not originally theirs. To reach this place they have crossed physical, cultural, and political borders sometimes at enormous risk. We have come to think of this process as intrinsic to the American Dream.

What our country has experienced, however, is part of a larger narrative, as hundreds of millions of people across the globe move, relocate, or travel to destinations that were not the places where they were born. From the executive looking for business or the student seeking an education to the peasant driven from the land by political and religious oppression or lack of economic opportunity, people are on the move.

Whether tourist, traveler, or refugee, crossing borders - political, ethnic, religious, or geographic - has become a way of life.

The Artist Revealed: Artists Portraits and Self-Portraits
Syracuse University Art Museum

University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Artists in the exhibition (in a range of media) are Berenice Abbott, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Paul Cezanne, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Edward Manet, Reginald Marsh, and Edward Steichens.

Gallery Talk
Lowe Art Gallery
Featuring Daniel Lee, artist

Price: Free
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Daniel Lee was born in China, raised in Taiwan and currently lives in New York City. Lee received his bachelor's in fine arts from Culture University in Taipei and his master's from Philadelphia College of Art. He has worked as an art director, creative director and photographer. In the early 1980s, Lee received many awards for his commercial work. He was selected as a judge for the Art Director's Annual and the New York Festival several times. Lee's exhibition venues have included the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the Landes Museum, Linz, Austria; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; O.K. Harris Works of Art, NYC; and the Science Museum, London. Lee's works were shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the 2004 Whitstable Biennial in Kent, U.K. Borders and Memory shows work from Lee's Origin series, in which he uses digital imaging to transform his subjects into animal-like forms.

The talk is in conjunction with the Gallery's exhibition Borders and Memory, which runs through October 12.

Civic Morning Musicals
Elizabeth Shuhan, flute; Alexander Shuhan, horn

Price: Free
Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Chamber music for flute, horn and piano.

George Saunders, fiction
Raymond Carver Reading Series

Price: Free
Gifford Auditorium, Huntington Beard Crouse Hall
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Reading is preceded by a question and answer session from 3:45-4:30 p.m.

The Wild Party
Syracuse University Drama Department
Rodney Hudson, director

Price: $18 adults, $16 students/seniors
Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, set in the Roaring Twenties, tells the decadent tale of one licentious soiree in Manhattan. Queenie and Burrs, both vaudeville performers, aim to throw THE party of the year. Jealousy and passion ensue between the pair as the guests arrive and the evening progresses. Based on Joseph Moncure March's 1928 jazz-age poem of the same name, The Wild Party is a moralizing tale of excess and debauchery that transcends its era. Lippa's award-winning jazz-infused score features music that ranges from raucous and danceable (Raise the Roof and A Wild, Wild Party) to tender ballads (Poor Child and Maybe I Like it this Way) and draws from both the bygone era in which the play is set and the present.

Read a Review!

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Jack White Art Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Flood of Florence Photos
Syracuse University School of Art and Design
Featuring Works of Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna

Price: Free
Office of the Dean, 200 Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Kraczyna teaches printmaking and art-on-paper classes for the studio arts program at SU's Division of International Programs Abroad Florence Center. He is the founder and past director of Il Bisonte International School of Advanced Printmaking in Florence, where he taught techniques of color etching. Kraczyna co-authored I Segni Incisi, the first Italian textbook on the history and techniques of etching. He has directed "Studio for Color Etching" workshops in Barga, Lucca and at the International Symposium for Color Etching at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico, Columbia, Czech Republic and Japan, and is represented in the Uffizi Print Collection. Kraczyna holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Paid parking is available in the Irving Avenue garage.

View from Here: Works of Kanako Sasaki
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Photography has the ability to wrap whole novels into a single image. One look and the viewer can absorb the mood, the narrative, and the key characters. Much like reading a book, the story unfolds and an event unravels. Some stories are short and to the point; others are lengthy and complicated. Kanako Sasaki's images are both. By casting herself as the single protagonist or including just a few characters in each frame, Sasaki is able to build many layers of suggested narrative into each image. These layers hold many surprises built with humor and a quirky, unexpected depth.

In her images Sasaki captures energy and joy, childlike wonder, and naivety. In the world of her pictures social etiquette does not matter, and occasional embarrassment is accepted as a fact of life. Only the expression of emotion as action is important in Sasakis sometimes upside-down world. She sets her figures apart within the grandness of nature, inspired by childhood memories, novels, and Ukiyo-e paintings. Ukiyo, literally translated as "floating world," is a Japanese genre in literature and painting that developed in the sixteenth century. It depicts a reality that embraces the coexistence of life and death. By wrapping whole novels into each of her images, Kanako Sasaki gives us a rich and poetic description of her imagination and memory.

Gallery reception Thurs., Sept. 29, 6-8pm

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members' wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan.

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969-1999
Light Work Gallery

Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

The hallway space of Light Work's main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition consisting of about 100 images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over 30 years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects' visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Read a review!

Photo Images - Three Views
Associated Artists of Syracuse

Price: Free
Manlius Village Library
Manlius Village Center, 1 Arkie Albanese Dr., Manlius

Featuring the photography of Vivian Geiger, John Keller and Richard Lewis, each of whom reveal their unique vision.

Vivian Geiger works mostly in color, using special papers or enhanced her photos with original artwork.

John Keller has considered himself a photographer since childhood when he first used a Brownie camera. He shoots in color and black&white, addressing varied subject matter, including still life and portraits.

Richard Lewis works in color, primarily nature and landscape photography. A favorite location is the Tibbets Point Lighthouse in Cape Vincent.

Modern Prints from the International Graphic Arts Society
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Included are prints by Garo Antresian, Gabor Peterdi, and Donald Saff, three printmakers who taught a generation of artists and had a profound impact on the art of printmaking in the latter half of the 20th century.

W. Eugene Smith: From Light into Darkness
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibition of photojournalist Eugene Smith includes his service as a World War II photographer in the Pacific theater, a group from a 1950s Life magazine photo essay on the rise of America's chemical industry, and a selection of images from his Pittsburgh project.

Aftermarket: Art, Objects and Commerce
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Interdisciplinary artist John Freyer returns to his native Syracuse for his first museum exhibition. The exhibit includes components of three different, but inter-related projects: his nationally renowned web-based performance piece, AllMyLifeForSale.Com; a new interactive installation entitled Walm-Art.Com; and Surplus, a sculpture/installation comprised of one-ton bales of surplus clothing. In addition, a twelve-foot rotating Bob's Big Boy sculpture, purchased by Freyer on eBay for the University of Iowa Museum of Art, will be on view in the Sculpture Court. Freyer was recently appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, and a pilot of his Second Hand Stories continues to be broadcast by PBS, which is developing a series of the same name.

The Artist Revealed: Artists Portraits and Self-Portraits
Syracuse University Art Museum

University Art Collection
Sims Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Artists in the exhibition (in a range of media) are Berenice Abbott, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Paul Cezanne, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Edward Manet, Reginald Marsh, and Edward Steichens.

See it With Different Eyes
Delavan Art Gallery

Delavan Art Gallery
501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Robert Carroll: photography
Liliya Lifanova: still lifes
Angelo Puccia: sculpture
Eric W. Shite: paintings
Sculpture exhibit by the clients of Enable, created under the guidance of Angelo Puccia

Artists Open
CNY Arts

Price: Free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Local artists share their talent in a bistro-like setting in the Everson's Sculpture Court. The audience has the opportunity to ask questions about and discuss the artwork and performances with each of the artists. A cash bar and complimentary snacks are available, and the galleries remain open.

Sam Hamill, poet
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free for DWC members; $5 for non-members
BeVard Room, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

A reading by poet Sam Hamill, author of Almost Paradise and founder of Poets Against War. For tickets, phone 315-474-6851 x314.

Florence of Moravia
Acme Mystery Company

Price: $25.95 plus tax and gratuities
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Interactive mystery dinner theater.

Lost in Yonkers
Syracuse Stage
Robert Moss, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Teenage Jay and Arty are in for a rough 1942. Pop owes nine grand to a loan shark and has to hightail it out of town, so he drops the boys in Yonkers in the care of his mother. Grandma may own a sweet shop, but she's no box of chocolates. She's so tough her own grown-up children are afraid of her. And forget about sneaking a treat or two. She counts the salt on the pretzels. How's she going to take it when Uncle Louie shows up to hide out from gangsters and Aunt Bella (who's a little off) announces she wants to marry an usher from the local movie theatre? Neil Simon placed these wonderful characters into a very funny play and earned the 1991 Pulitzer and Tony Awards for his effort. Our reward is laughter and a truly great night in the theatre.

Read a Review!

The Wild Party
Syracuse University Drama Department
Rodney Hudson, director

Price: $18 adults, $16 students/seniors
Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, set in the Roaring Twenties, tells the decadent tale of one licentious soiree in Manhattan. Queenie and Burrs, both vaudeville performers, aim to throw THE party of the year. Jealousy and passion ensue between the pair as the guests arrive and the evening progresses. Based on Joseph Moncure March's 1928 jazz-age poem of the same name, The Wild Party is a moralizing tale of excess and debauchery that transcends its era. Lippa's award-winning jazz-infused score features music that ranges from raucous and danceable (Raise the Roof and A Wild, Wild Party) to tender ballads (Poor Child and Maybe I Like it this Way) and draws from both the bygone era in which the play is set and the present.

Read a Review!