News Bureau

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Demonstrations of Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, will be among the activities celebrating Japanese culture that will be held during the annual Spring Open House at Japan House, 2000 S. Lincoln Avenue, Urbana.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - An award-winning author who studies the religious culture of Braj, India, will be the featured speaker at the opening of an exhibition of work by landscape architecture graduate students at the University of Illinois. The students are collaborating with officials in India to restore a sacred site that is endangered by the incursion of religious pilgrims.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Five students from the University of Illinois are among the artists who have been selected to exhibit their work at Art Chicago 2010, an annual international fair of contemporary and modern art.

Urbana resident Tauby Shimkin, 77, was able to walk without a cane for the first time in six years shortly after beginning a UI program aimed at helping people with disorders such as hers.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jeffery S. Poss, a professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. Poss was one of 134 AIA members to be elevated to fellowship by the 2010 Jury of Fellows.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A first-time performance by pianist Ian Hobson, and performances by jazz artist Jon Faddis, violinist Stefan Milenkovich and Grammy Award winners Nathan Gunn and the Pacifica Quartet will be among the highlights of the fourth annual Allerton Music Barn Festival, Sept. 2-6.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A team of four undergraduate students from the University of Illinois has designed a concept for an interactive thrill ride that has been named a finalist in Walt Disney Imagineering's 19th ImagiNations design competition. The students will travel to Glendale, Calif., June 8-16 to present their completed project to a judging panel of 25 Walt Disney Imagineering executives.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - While high school music students may be able to identify Pyotr Tchaikovsky as the composer of the ballet "Swan Lake," and George Frederic Handel as the genius behind "Messiah," few, if any, students may be aware of how the composers' masterworks were influenced by their homosexuality and homophobia in the societies in which they lived.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jose Marquez, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois, is one of seven people selected to participate in Urban Design Regional Employment Action for Minorities 2010, also known as UDream, an internship/immersion program sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University's School of Architecture and its Remaking Cities Institute.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Although there is widespread interest in producing biofuels from algae, the high cost associated with production has been a stumbling block. But a group of students at the University of Illinois has overcome that obstacle by developing a bioreactor that not only produces algae quickly and inexpensively, it solves yet another environmental puzzle - what to do with the millions of computers that consumers discard every year.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The School of Music at the University of Illinois Friday announced that it has canceled its fourth annual Summer Piano Institute, which was to have been held next week (June 14-18).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A program that helps low-income residents save money and fuel by improving their homes' energy efficiency is being expanded.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Internationally acclaimed pianist and conductor Ian Hobson, the Swanlund Professor of Piano and the Center for Advanced Studies Professor of Music in the School of Music at the University of Illinois, will perform a series of 10 concerts in New York City beginning in August as a tribute to two of the world's greatest composers.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - As residents of the Gulf Coast in the U.S. brace themselves for what is expected to be another active hurricane season, the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looms on Aug. 29, a grim reminder of the suffering wrought when people are unprepared for nature's worst.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Acclaimed Israeli writers and filmmakers Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen will visit the Illinois campus Aug. 23-Sept. 3 and participate in several public events focusing on their work.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Motorcycle culture, the fallout of war and imagism will be among the themes explored in six new exhibitions at Krannert Art Museum on the University of Illinois campus this fall. The exhibitions, which open on Aug. 26, will be celebrated with a free public reception from 5-7 p.m. Aug. 25.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The School of Music at the University of Illinois will commemorate the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. with its annual memorial concert.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion at the University of Illinois was recently reaccredited by the American Association of Museums, the highest form of national recognition for museums.

“The School of Art + Design Faculty Exhibition” continues through Sept. 26 in the UI's Krannert Art Museum.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $449,000 grant to a multi-institutional research team led by a disaster recovery specialist at the University of Illinois that is studying China's recovery from a devastating earthquake in 2008. The goal of the project is to develop a model of recovery management that outlines appropriate governmental roles and actions to ensure fast, efficient, equitable and sustainable recovery from disasters.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Shozo Sato, the founding director of Japan House on the University of Illinois campus, will be the special guest at the Japan House's annual fall open house, on Oct. 2.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The world's largest land mammal and one of its most intelligent and vulnerable species - the elephant - will be the focus of a series of shows at the University of Illinois in late September.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The fall film series sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities will comprise a variety of films that have only one thing in common: They didn't attract large audiences during their initial showings early in the series' 10-year history and deserve second screenings, according to Christine Catanzarite, senior associate director at IPRH and organizer of the series.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois is opening an exhibition space called Figure One in downtown Champaign that will link creative activity on campus with the surrounding community.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The School of Art + Design has announced that Billie Jean Theide, program leader in metals and the chair of the crafts program, has been named the first James Avery Endowed Chair in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the U. of I. The Avery Chair, the first college-wide endowed chair in FAA, was established with a $1.5 million gift from alumnus and entrepreneur James Avery.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - On Oct. 29, Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion will debut "The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux," a mid-career retrospective of work by the conceptual mixed media artist. A public reception to celebrate the exhibition opening - which will begin with a gallery conversation with Lemieux - will take place from 6-8 p.m. on Oct. 28.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Music lovers in Central Illinois will have the rare opportunity of hearing selections from the symphonic works of Gustav Mahler performed on the piano during a free concert on the University of Illinois campus. The Oct. 23 performance and lecture are in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Festival passes will go on sale Nov. 1 for the 13th annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival, or "Ebertfest," to be held April 27 to May 1 at the Virginia Theater in Champaign, Ill., and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A round-trip ticket to Japan, dinner for six people at Nanakusa Japanese Restaurant in Milwaukee, a stay in a Colorado vacation home, and a private shopping expedition at Circles Boutique in Champaign are just a few of the items that will be auctioned to raise funds for Japan House, the teaching facility on the University of Illinois campus that focuses on the Japanese arts.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Retired University of Illinois architecture professor and inveterate traveler James P. Warfield has spent more than 45 years trekking the remote regions of the world and documenting in photographs, travel sketches and in writing rustic villages and their charming inhabitants, stunning countryside and intriguing wildlife. He and his travelling companion, wife Chelle, have explored China's ancient ruins, ghost towns in the American West and fishing villages in Newfoundland. They have worked as elephant handlers in Thailand and visited with tattooed women from the Chin tribe in Myanmar and headhunters in Borneo.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The first major exhibition on the visualization of history in medieval French manuscripts, to be held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, is being co-curated by a faculty member of the University of Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A century after composer-conductor Gustav Mahler's death, his music is perhaps more popular today than it was during the half century that he lived. After his death in 1911, Mahler was nearly forgotten, until conductor Leonard Bernstein's performances of his work beginning in the mid-1960s sparked a renewed interest in Mahler, propelling the Czech-born composer from virtual obscurity to the cultural-icon status that he has today. The sesquicentennial of Mahler's birth has been marked during 2010 with a flurry of memorial concerts and releases of recordings of his music; the commemorations will continue in 2011, marking the centenary of his death.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A voice student in the School of Music at the University of Illinois won first place in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Central Region finals in Evanston, Ill., on Sunday (Nov. 7).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Performance sculpture, endurance drawing and photographs that explore the ties between people and place will be featured in upcoming exhibitions at Figure One, the School of Art + Design's exhibition space in downtown Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The work of young artists in the Champaign-Urbana area will be showcased during an exhibition hosted by Krannert Art Museum and the School of Art + Design, a unit in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois.

Two shows – a solo exhibition of drawings and paintings by emerging artist Maria Lux and a collection of lifestyle products designed by University of Illinois art students as a study in community-based entrepreneurship – will open Dec. 10 at Figure One, the School of Art + Design’s exhibition space in downtown Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - For centuries, barn raisings have brought neighbors together to build structures to help families prosper and to celebrate the fruits of their communal labor once the last rafter is hoisted into place. This Friday (Dec. 10), the department of dance and the School of Architecture, both in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, will celebrate the grand opening of the Graduate Dance Center, a 5,000-square-foot facility for dance research that was realized through the collaborative efforts of student and faculty volunteers and donated materials from an Iowa barn and a campus basketball court.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - College students: Blow the dust off those once-cutting-edge phones, desktop computers and VCR players that were muscled into the back of the closet by their smarter and slicker descendants. Your outdated electronic components - spruced up with a bit of ingenuity - may still have productive lives ahead, reducing electronic waste and helping save the planet.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In March 1950, Look magazine published a two-page photo spread about the University of Illinois' third annual contemporary arts festival. The headline read "Corn Country Campus Puts on Biggest U.S.A. Arts Festival," and the caption under pictures of abstract paintings explained that this artwork would spark "heated back-country discussion." Despite the cultural jabs, the article went on to describe the event as "the biggest, most ambitious program of its kind on any U.S. campus." In addition to the photos of paintings, one image showed the student orchestra rehearsing under the baton of famed composer Igor Stravinsky. Other guest artists included composer John Cage, choreographers Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham and writer Dylan Thomas.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Just listen. That's the first thing anyone should do with the new CD "Freeplay," released this month by the University of Illinois' Concert Jazz Band.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A nonprofit publishing enterprise once described by its founder as "a hopelessly quixotic venture" has been named recipient of the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In the world of music, the bicentennial of Franz Liszt is a cause for celebration. The New York Times, for example, recently referred to Liszt as a "chick magnet" and "19th-century rock star" who garnered groupies because of his piano technique, described as "jaw-dropping." The Liszt Society of the United Kingdom describes him as a pianist who achieved "fame of altogether greater proportion than the world of art music has seen before or since." Wikipedia refers to him simply as "perhaps the greatest pianist of all time."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A new display of a very old assignment will open Friday

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - What was Dmitri Shostakovich saying - or not saying - with his cycle of 15 string quartets? And why do we interpret his music as we do? Twenty scholars from fields ranging from musicology to Slavic, European and East Asian literatures and cultures to Russian and Soviet history will try to answer these questions during a two-day symposium at the University of Illinois. The Feb. 21-22 event will end with the Pacifica Quartet's performance of quartets 11, 13, 14 and 15 by Shostakovich.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Hold that thought - and Johann Rischau, a graduate student in industrial design at the University of Illinois, will etch it in wood. Rischau has come up with a way to capture brain waves, run them through a computer and into a CNC (computer numerical control) router that can engrave a graphic image of the waves onto a piece of wood. It's all part of his thesis on physical fabrication.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Marilyn Monroe is poolside in a lawn chair, wearing a bathing suit and sipping a cocktail. She sets her drink down, turns toward the camera, and says, "I always hated careless men." Thus ends an obscure Air Force training film, one of several that conclude with the actress encouraging military recruits to keep working, and to keep their work under wraps.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Figure One - the exhibition space of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois - is presenting a series of one-day shows designed to give the public a taste of what's cooking in the creative arts at Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A few years ago, Robert Dale Parker was in a basement library reading microfilm he had ordered from the Library of Congress when he found a trove of poems written by an Ojibwe Indian. The fact that the poems were literate and lyrical pleased Parker, a literary critic, but the fact that they were from 1815 made him ecstatic.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The technical documents weren't making sense to Heather Hyde Minor. Most researchers studying 18th-century buildings in Rome rely on the "measurements and estimates" logs kept on each construction site, but Minor, now a professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois, was missing the spatial component necessary to understand the logs.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The first time Ben Aqua was offered the chance to sell one of his photographs as a "stock" illustration, he wasn't sure whether to be flattered or insulted. After all, in the publishing trade, the term "stock photography" has traditionally referred not to fine art but rather to generic images that can be used to illustrate "soft" news articles, such as stories about lifestyle trends, season events, or health advice. Aqua, a photographer and new media artist, has participated in exhibitions in Paris, Los Angeles, Dallas and Philadelphia. Did he really want to sell his artistic photographs to illustrate a lifestyle story in a German fashion magazine?