Because next Wednesday is the Veteran's Day holiday, we will include two weeks worth of events in one weekender.

This blog compiled by Michelle Villagomez, News and Media Relations Intern

UC Davis Nightmare Harvest Festival Art walk submissions due

Submit your work for the next Basement Gallery Show, Nightmare Harvest Festival Art Walk, here by Monday, Nov. 9 at noon. The Basement Gallery will review submissions before making acceptance determinations. Student and non-student submissions are welcomed for the upcoming show. Further details about the event will be posted on the Basement Gallery’s Instagram here. Don’t worry, the art walk will be socially distanced and all participants must wear a mask. See the full event release here. 

Bach on viola in concert today

Shinkoskey Noon Concert: Solo Viola, Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, Thursday, Nov. 5, 12:05 p.m. to 1 p.m., free, online via Youtube

• This week, the concert presents a solo featuring violist and UC Davis lecturer in music, Ellen Ruth Rose playing the viola. Rose will perform music by Bach, Shulamit Ran, and by UC Davis Professor of Music in composition, Kurt Rohde. 
• For more information on the event, click here. If you miss the concert, the video will be posted here. 

Next week: Shinkoskey Noon Concert: Music For Violin and Piano, Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, Thursday, Nov. 12, 12:05 p.m. to 1 p.m., free, online via Youtube

• The concert will feature violist and UC Davis lecturer in music, Dagenais Smiley, playing the violin and Sacramento State piano professor and staff pianist, John Cozza playing the piano. They will perform Ysaÿe: Sonata No. 3 (“Ballade”) and Bartók: Contrasts.
• For more information on the event, click here. If you miss the concert, the video will be posted here. 

Mondavi offers table-top Shakespeare at home

Live Streamed from Sheffield, London & Berlin

Originally conceived in 2015, Complete Works features six performers who create condensed versions of all of the Shakespeare plays, comically and intimately retelling them, using a collection of everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the stage made from a tabletop.

More information on Complete Works here. This HomeStage event is available to UC Davis students and Mondavi Center Members. Members can find this event in the “Digital Content” section of their Mondavi Center account.

Complete Works this week; all are at noon

• Thursday, Nov. 5.: Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Friday, Nov. 6.: Troilus and Cressida
• Saturday, Nov. 7:  As You Like It
• Sunday, Nov. 8.:  Othello - followed by a post-show discussion*

Alberini Family Speakers Series: Lesley-Ann Noel

By Jeffrey Day, College of Letters and Science

Lesley-Ann Noel, an innovator in design education, research and practice who is known for her work on “emancipatory design,” will be the speaker for the fourth annual Alberini Family Speaker Series in Design at UC Davis Friday. Noel’s lecture, “Envisioning Pluriversal Design,” will be held online at 11 a.m. PST. Register here. 

Noel is the associate director for design thinking for social impact and a professor of practice at the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design at Tulane University. She focuses on developing design curriculum for intercultural audiences that challenges traditional norms and promotes the work of designers outside of Europe and North America whose views have often been overlooked. Her research, drawing on anthropology, education and business, is guided by an emancipatory philosophy aimed at correcting the power imbalance between some researchers and subjects who come from marginalized or oppressed groups.

In her talk, Noel will address the concept of “pluriversal” design. In pluriversalism, one method of understanding the world is not considered more valid than others, especially the largely dominant Eurocentric one. Pluriversality accepts many worlds, worldviews and epistemologies in which no particular worldview and description is placed in a position of privilege. 

She is a founder of the international Design Research Society, which aims to “create a liberatory and radical space in the design research community to promote/create intercultural and pluralistic conversations about design.” The group recently held the first-ever pluriversal design conference. Prior to joining Tulane in 2020, Noel was a fellow and lecturer at Stanford University and part of the Ocean Design Teaching Fellowship that brought together experts in design, ocean science and international policy.

A former Fulbright scholar, Noel earned a doctorate in design from North Carolina State University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of the West Indies.

The Alberini Family Speaker Series, supported through an endowment by the Carlos and Andrea Alberini Family Foundation, brings renowned innovators and thinkers in design to campus to inspire students and encourage community engagement and learning.

Read more here.

Coming up

Because of the Veteran’s Day holiday next week, the Arts Blog will not post a weekender next Thursday. So, next week’s events are detailed here.

Nigerian American Artist Will Give Thiebaud Endowed Lecture 

By Jeffrey Day, College of Letters and Science

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose art negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in the United States and her native Nigeria through collage and photo transfer-based paintings, will give the seventh annual Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture at University of California, Davis, on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 4:30 p.m.

This year’s online free lecture celebrates art Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud’s 100th birthday on Nov. 16. Click here for more information and to register.

Akunyili Crosby is a recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship; a 2020 Carnegie Corporation “Great Immigrant, Great American” Award; a Financial Times’ 2016 Women of the Year award; and a 2019 African Art Award.

Drawing on political, personal and art historical references, Akunyili Crosby creates densely layered, figurative compositions focused on interiors and everyday scenes that reflect the complexity of contemporary experience, her own cross-cultural experiences and Nigeria’s thorny history. The artworks showing families watching television, friends socializing, couples sharing intimate moments, or lone figures lost in thought are constructed of family portraits, snapshots and images from Nigerian movies, advertisements and history.

For more information on the lecture and full story, go here. 

UC Davis Humanities Institute/Human Rights Film Festival begins next week

This 13-day festival brings a selection of human rights watch films to screen remotely. Question-and-answer sessions with filmmakers and scholars are from 5:10 p.m to 6 p.m. for the events Nov. 16-20. For more information visit the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Movie details for next week below.

Gather

Screening: Thursday, Nov.12 — Tuesday, Nov. 24

Q & A: Monday, Nov. 16 from 5:10 p.m. to 6 p.m. with filmmaker, Sanjay Rawal

Starting off the 2020 Human Rights Film Festival, we have Gather. This film “celebrates the fruits of the indigenous food sovereignty movement, profiling innovative changemakers in Native American tribes across North America reclaiming their identities after centuries of physical and cultural genocide. On the Apache reservation, a chef embarks on an ambitious project to reclaim his tribe’s ancient ingredients; in South Dakota, a gifted Lakota high school student, raised on a buffalo ranch, is using science to prove her tribe’s native wisdom about environmental sustainability; and in Northern California, a group of young men from the Yurok tribe is struggling to rehabilitate its rivers to protect the salmon. Gather shows how the reclaiming and recovery of ancient foodways provides a form of resistance and survival, collectively bringing back health and self-determination to their people.” For more information about streaming or film details, click here. 

To watch all films, purchase festival pass here or tickets for Gather here.

View the full catalog of films here.

Art Social Media of the Week

We came across this tweet, that reminded us to vote this week. And your vote still counts (and is probably being counted as you read this). See what our friends at the Crocker Museum posted on twitter.