Willson Center-Supported Projects and Initiatives In the News
Each academic year at the University of Georgia, the Willson Center sponsors numerous events, projects, and initiatives whose impacts reverberate well beyond campus. The 2012 fall semester has been a particularly auspicious one in that regard, as evidenced by the following achievements by Willson-supported faculty and students.
In October, Martijn van Wagtendonk, associate professor and chair of the ArtX: Expanded Forms area in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, won second place in the fourth annual ArtPrize exhibition in Grand Rapids, Mich. The $75,000 prize in the international competition was awarded by public vote for “Song of Lift,” a room-filling installation Wagtendonk, a current Willson Center Fellow, describes as “a five-minute-long, fully automated, viewer-sensitive opera.” Wagtendonk will give a talk about the project in the 2012 – 2013 Willson Center Fellows Lecture Series Thursday, Nov. 15 at 4 p.m. in room 248 of the Miller Learning Center.
Video courtesy Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (UICA)
At the 2012 Leonard Falcone International Euphonium and Tuba Festival in Twin Lake, Mich. this August, UGA Hugh Hodgson School of Music students David McLemore and Simon Waldman took first and second place, respectively, in the Tuba Artist Division of the competition, while Gary Garvin and Alex Avila placed second and third in the Euphonium Artist Division. The students attended the festival with the support of a Willson Center grant awarded to David Zerkel, Hodgson School professor of tuba and euphonium.
Roger Vogel, professor emeritus of music in the Hodgson School, premiered his new song cycle Things Fall Apart, based on Chinua Achebe’s classic novel, on campus in early September. The performance featured bass-baritone soloist Odekherin Amaize, whose visit to UGA was sponsored by a Willson Center grant. A recording of the premiere will be broadcast on WUGA-TV five times during the coming month: Nov. 19 at 8 p.m., Nov. 23 at 4 p.m., Nov. 24 at 10 p.m., Nov. 26 at 7 p.m., and Dec. 2 at 11 p.m.