Students

Objects and Voices Exhibition Foregrounds Smart Museum's Collection and the Craft of Curation

Attributed to Wassily Kandinsky, Composition, 1914, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Dolores and Donn Shapiro in honor of Jory Shapiro, 2012.51. Courtesy of Smart Museum of Art
For the second time in four months, the Smart Museum of Art is featuring artworks from its permanent collection throughout its entire space. Following the success of the fall show Carved Cast and Crumpled: Sculpture All Ways, the Smart galleries have again been transformed into a wide-ranging exhibition in honor of the museum’s 40th anniversary, along with this year’s campus-wide celebration of shared anniversaries, UChicago Artennial.

Linguists Tackle Computational Analysis of Grammar

Children don’t have to be told that “cat” and “cats” are variants of the same word—they pick it up just by listening. To a computer, though, they’re as different as, well, cats and dogs. Yet it’s computers that are assumed to be superior in detecting patterns and rules, not 4-year olds. John Goldsmith and Jackson Lee are trying to solve that puzzle or at least provide the tools to do so.

Graduate Student Kate Pukinskis Premieres Composition

This edited version originally appeared in UChicago News on 26 February.

Kate Pukinskis loves to sing in choirs, to be on stage with others enveloped by the “crazy, loud sounds” of Beethoven’s Ninth or Verdi’s Requiem. “Choral music comes very naturally to me,” said Pukinskis, a doctoral student in composition in the Department of Music who has sung in professional choirs since she was a child.

“There is great joy in making music with other people—and it’s such a cool thing to use your voice as your instrument and feel it resonate inside your body.”

Pukinskis enjoys crafting that experience for others as she has done with her latest work, Water on the Thirsty Land: Three Songs from the Book of Isaiah, a set of choral pieces for unaccompanied choir that premiered February 28 at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, as part of the Quire & Place concert series.

Entitled Sacred Powers of Water, the concert explored water themes and features commentary by Christopher Neill, director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., where the concert will be repeated later this year.

Pukinskis chose three excerpts from Isaiah that use water as metaphors for the divine—as protector, life giver, and strengthener. She realizes them musically, creating moments where words and sounds invoke the comfort of being enveloped in a pool, or the relief that comes when one’s thirst is quenched. She draws inspiration from her carefree childhood in New England, roaming through woods and swimming in ponds. “I remember playing in the water and how insulating that felt,” she said. “Anyone can relate to that protective feeling.”

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