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From Cigarettes to Human Hair: Exhibition Uses Materials to Explore Chinese Art
A farming scene, drawn intricately with incense ash found in Buddhist temples. A dark metal pillar, acting as a canvas above a pool of water. And at first glance, a 36-foot-long tiger skin rug—an illusion created by hundreds of thousands of carefully placed cigarettes.
These are just a few of the artworks displayed in The Allure of Matter, hosted by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and Wrightwood 659. Conceived by Prof. Wu Hung, the new exhibition marks a public introduction to “material art,” or caizhi yishu—a term he coined to distill a four-decade-long trend of artistic development in China.
Experimental Composer Channels The Doors During UChicago Residency
Constructed by longtime collaborator Winfried Ritsch, Music’s Over was the centerpiece of Ablinger’s nine-day residency at UChicago’s Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. The residency featured a range of talks, discussions, composition seminars and performances—reflecting the Gray Center’s mission as a forum for experimental collaboration between artists and scholars.
The residency inaugurated Gray Sound, a new program conceived by Gray Center director Seth Brodsky, a leading scholar of 20th- and 21st-century musical modernism. Envisioned as a regular performance and discussion series, Gray Sound represents a chance for prominent artists and the UChicago community to tease the boundaries of sound—when it moves from voice to music, from a recognizable tune to noise.
Media Mentions: February 2020
The latest media mentions, quotes, profiles, and writings from Division of the Humanities faculty, students, staff, and alumni. Visit us on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.
UChicago Alum Tim Cassedy Receives the MLA First Book Award
Tim Cassedy (AM’05) is fascinated with the role language played at the turn of the 19th century, and how language served to identify and differentiate people. For his cultural study of early America, Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolution (University of Iowa Press, 2019), Cassedy recently received the Modern Language Association’s annual First Book Award, which recognizes his contribution to linguistics, the history of the book, and the cultural history of British imperialism.
