Rokia Traoré

Rokia’s a Malian singer with a difference. The daughter of a diplomat who was posted to the US, Europe, and the Middle East, her music represents a fascinating fusion of cultures. Along with her feather light vocals, Rokia’s music is infused with western pop rhythms and traditional African instruments, making for rare and beautiful music. The result is a beguiling sound that can claim to be “world music” in the purest sense.

Funded in part by the Expeditions program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from the six New England state arts agencies.

Wednesday, April 14
Concert Hall 7:30 PM
$30, $25, $15, Five College/GCC/STCC students and Youth 17 and under: $15

Clean Slate: New Paintings by Anne LaPrade Seuthe

Monday, April 12 – Friday, April 30
Augusta Savage Gallery

The paintings in this exhibition started out as, what LaPrade Seuthe calls, clean slates. Beginning with discarded maps, she carefully color matches the hues in the existing maps and applies these opaque paint mixtures to eradicate names, symbols and other location identifiers. Once the clean slate has been established, she adds drawings of images culled from encyclopedias, dictionaries, travel guides and assorted manuals. The images are separated by layers of grid lines – a device suggesting there is a connection between all that exists in the natural world. Translucent layers of paint are built up in a process that unifies the surface while modifying the imagery in various ways. Some images become obscured while others become more pronounced. For her, this process seems to parallel an internal process of creating a clean slate or starting over. Some experiences remain vivid in our minds and can easily be recalled, while others exist as vestiges. Her painting is complete when connections between seemingly random images are revealed. Since her first solo show in 1994, Massachusetts-born LaPrade Seuthe has participated in numerous group exhibitions including most recently the London Biennale, and the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. She is Director of Hampden and Central Galleries at the University of Massachusetts.

Ensemble Galilei and Neal Conan with actress Lily Knight

A remarkable collaboration between the National Geographic Society, NPR’s Neal Conan, Ensemble Galilei and actress Lily Knight, First Person: Stories from the Edge of the World, features spectacular photographs and images projected on a large, on-stage screen. Conan’s compelling narration, with evocative music created specifically for this project, works seamlessly to take the audience along on some of the world’s most extraordinary expeditions. Travel to 14th Century Iraq, climb with Mallory as he attempts the summit of Mount Everest, attend the last days of the Empire of the Incas in Peru. Listen to Darwin’s doubts aboard the Beagle or brave a howling gale aboard a Cape Horn windjammer. Probe the ocean’s depths with Cousteau, Beebe and Ballard, and listen to the exploration of the human spirit of discovery in the poetry of Mary Oliver, Constantine Cavafy, Sara Vial and Jim Harrison as glorious music surrounds the senses.

Saturday, April 10
Concert Hall 8:00 PM
$35, $25, $15, Five College/GCC/STCC students and Youth 17 and under: $15

New Moves

Thursday, April 8
Concert Hall from 10:00 am to 11:00 am
$6 students, $8 adults

Reserve Tickets Online

Complete with sound and lighting effects, this exciting new dance group fuses Freestyle Hip Hop with Poppin’, Lockin’, Mime, House, Jazz, Contemporary and Ethnic dance with martial arts, comedy and visual illusion. Kenichi & Company’s unique dance show, “New Moves,” successfully introduces students to the world of dance by using elements from current youth culture. All ages.

Kenichi Ebina & Dancers: New Moves

Thursday, April 8
Concert Hall 7:30 pm
$25,$ 20,$15; Five College/GCC/STCC students/17 & under $15

Kenichi Ebina & Company is an exciting new dance group that fuses Freestyle Hip Hop with Poppin’, Lockin’, Mime, House, Jazz, Contemporary and Ethnic dance styles, as well as martial arts, comedy and visual illusion. Kenichi & Company’s unique dance show, “New Moves,” is complete with sound and lighting effects, and successfully entertains many people who are not often interested in the performing arts.

Kathleen Camaratta: Where to Now?

Kathleen Camaratta’s Artist Statement:

My paintings are imaginary worlds subject to growth, change, explosion, and rebirth. These worlds are moving, morphing, fluctuating: the landscape having meaningfulness beyond its familiar physical identity. The sky is a non-frivolous black above a whimsically colored ground. The forms are purposely seductive against the deep dark. They are robust as well as sensual, rotund as well as elongated. They kiss, they spit, they hiss, they drip, they spew. They stick their tongues out.
The viewer is a traveler taken to the threshold of sensation, to the body of the mother earth and to the generating power of nature.
My drawings are also imaginary worlds but rather than confront they provoke mystery. They whisper possibilities in the distance. The forms are gently folding and unfolding, undulating and holding. The blacks retain the deep space while the whites enhance the near space with subtle texture. A peculiar silence hovers over the landscape.
The viewer is a dreamer embarking on an excursion, drifting slowly through the space, roaming quietly as if on tiptoe.
Studio Gallery Exhibition Dates: Sunday April 4 to Wednesday, April 28 Reception Date/Time: Thursday April 8, 5-7 Collaborative Drawing Project Led by Kathleen Camaratta in collaboration with University of Massachusett’s undergraduate and graduate art students.

When:
Sunday, April 4 – Wednesday, April 28

Hidden Worlds

Tuesday, March 30 – Wednesday, April 28
Central Gallery

D.Dominick Lombardi
Mixed media sculpture and drawings.
Curated by David Gibson

Urchins, scamps, rascals are common to all cultures and eras. Like Chaplin, a lone sole fighting against the insanely powerful dominance of our global society,these mixed media sculptures and drawings with collage are a metaphor for the marginalized.

Zakir Hussain presents Masters of Percussion

Zakir Hussain is appreciated both in the field of percussion and in the music world at large as an international phenomenon. A classical tabla virtuoso of the highest order, his consistently brilliant and exciting performances have not only established him as a national treasure in his own country, India, but earned him worldwide fame. His playing is marked by uncanny intuition and masterful improvisational dexterity, founded in formidable knowledge and study. The favorite accompanist for many of India’s greatest classical musicians and dancers, he has not let his genius rest there. The concert features not just Hussain, but a number of musicians, mostly from India, playing percussion instruments as well as sitar and sarangi (a north Indian stringed instrument played with a bow).

“Mr. Hussain’s drumming was a marvel of time and texture… for a concert of spectacular rhythmic fireworks.”
The New York Times

Co-presented with the Asian Arts & Culture Program.

Saturday, March 27
Concert Hall 8:00 PM
$35, $25, $15, Five College/GCC/STCC students and Youth 17 and under: $15

William Parker and Hamid Drake with Lewis “Flip” Barnes and Rob Brown

Thursday, March 25
Bezanson Recital Hall 8:00 pm
$12 General Public; $7 Students
“William Parker and Hamid Drake are the best rhythm section in jazz right now,” says Alternative Press. This has been true for 15 years. We celebrate this dynamic duo — respected around the world for their commitment and musicality — with three concerts, featuring special guests.

“Not since Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell joined forces have two musicians so organically wedded world-music influences with free jazz,” writes Jazziz. Since the late1970’s, Hamid Drake has moved easily between work with top jazz improvisers like David Murray, Don Cherry and Pharaoh Sanders, and international artists like Foday Muso Suso, Mahmoud Gania and Gigi. In 1972 Parker began playing with musicians such as Bill Dixon, Milford Graves, Billy Higgins and Sunny Murray, before becoming a member of the Cecil Taylor Unit, where he played a prominent role for over a decade. Time Out New York proclaimed William Parker one of “the 50 greatest New York musicians of all time.”

Parker and Drake invite their colleagues Lewis ‘Flip’ Barnes (trumpet) and Rob Brown (alto saxophone), the so-called Raining on the Moon Quartet. “What marks Raining on the Moon as unique in Parker’s long list of recordings is its raw accessibility,” writes Nils Jacobson. “William Parker is one of those extremely rare musicians who seem to impart a warm glow to every musical group he joins.” “When jazz historians look back on improvised music at the turn of this century,” writes The Boston Phoenix, “William Parker will stand as a giant among men.”

Untouchable Reaches Out: The Dalit Art of Savi Savarkar

Monday, March 22 – Thursday, April 8

In this exhibition, curator and art historian Gary Tartokov introduces Indian artist Savi Savarkar to our community in a thoughtfully organized exhibition. In addition to highlighting Savarkar’s prowess, the exhibition demonstrates Tartokov’s tremendous skill, insight, and sensitivity as a longstanding scholar of Indian art. Savi Savarkar’s art is most remarkable for the expression of his social situation in South Asian culture as a Dalit, and for the immediacy, depth and power with which he expresses the meaning of that situation to us. In India, a nation with over a billion people, Dalits —the people usually known in the United States by their Brahmanical caste title as “untouchables”— make up seventeen per cent of the population and occupy a social and economic place at the bottom of the famous caste system, comparable to the situation of African Americans in the United States. Savarkar is the rare case of a gallery artist with a national and international reputation built upon role of being a Dalit artist, and a critique of the caste system. Viewing his art, even in the United States, brings up difficult and painful questions of intercultural and international communication and understanding. While Savarkar’s art reveals the sophistication and strength of contemporary India’s elite gallery culture, it also dwells at length in polemic confrontation with one of the greatest problems of contemporary Indian society. For all of us there is the challenge of looking not only through sensitive eyes at what may be unfamiliar, but of looking with nuanced minds. As India’s most prominent Dalit artist, he has exhibited in the international gallery scene in New Delhi, Mumbai and around India, is represented in the National Gallery of Modern Art and The Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and has appeared at the Frankfort Book fair and in exhibitions and collections in Mexico, Germany, Sweden and the United States.