Arts And Culture

For television writer and producer Saladin Patterson, MA’96, an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from MIT was not the start of his career—at least not as he’d initially planned. Thanks to his on-campus job in tech support at Wilson Hall, Patterson plotted a career that led straight to Hollywood. Read More

The symbolism of frayed, worn flags in "Flag Exchange" by Mel Ziegler, Paul E. Schwab Professor of Fine Arts, raises questions about the capacity of the American experiment to be sustained through national triumphs and shortcomings, including our own time of divisiveness. Read More

A two-year, $17,000 National Endowment of the Arts research grant will support a Vanderbilt analysis of how the characteristics and practices of more than 500 local arts agencies help or hinder their efforts to expand access to the arts in their communities. Read More

"Dream for Light Years," a collaboration between contemporary artist Ali Smith and Blair School of Music's Michael Alec Rose, can now be enjoyed online. Read More

Qualitative Data Collection Tools: Design, Development, and Applications, (2020, Sage Publishers) by Felice D. Billups, EdD’91 This unique supplementary text will guide students and new researchers to design, develop, pilot and employ qualitative tools in order to collect qualitative data. Templates of interview protocols, focus group moderator guides, content analysis… Read More

Actress Kirsten Dunst, left, and co-star Théodore Pellerin film a scene for On Becoming a God in Central Florida, a quirky Showtime comedy created by alumnus Robert Funke about a cultish, Amway-like marketing scheme. Courtesy of SHOWTIME On Becoming a God in Central Florida is an oddly academic-sounding title for… Read More

Senior Sarah Clements sings—accompanied by sophomore Calendula Cheng at the keyboards—during the dress rehearsal for January’s concert A Humming Under My Feet. Photo by Joe Howell Many women encounter glass ceilings during their careers. For women composers, those ceilings are seemingly laminated and bulletproof. That’s especially true for women who… Read More

Clara Morera, The Preboste Juan (King Juan), 2017, mixed media on canvas, 72 x 48 inches (courtesy of the artist and Dorfsman Fine Arts, Miami) Artists from the United States, Cuba and Haiti envision social change through reinterpretation of a lost work Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom brings together… Read More

Nothing to See Here (2019, Ecco/HarperCollins), the latest novel by Kevin Wilson, BA’00, explores female friendship, along with the question of how to raise spontaneously combustible twins. In its review, Kirkus says, “One of his greatest strengths is the ability to craft an everyday family drama and inject it… Read More

Seventh Flag: A Novel (2019, SparkPress) by Sid Balman Jr., BA’80. No place is immune from radicalism, including the small West Texas town of Dell City, where four generations of an iconic American family and a Syrian Muslim family carve a farming empire out of the unforgiving high desert. Their… Read More

Sophomores Amber Yun and Jared Schmidt, and junior Joe Pehrson of Vanderbilt University Theatre scream as they perform a scene from Catharsis, by sophomore Natalie Martinez-White, during the August Spotlight Showcase for first-year students. Photo by Anne Rayner During their first week at Vanderbilt, first-year students are met with an… Read More

Chin, shown creating in his workshop, is known for his large-scale art installations. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Visionary artist Mel Chin, BA’75, was named Sept. 25 among the class of 26 MacArthur Fellows for 2019. Given by the John D. and Catherine T. Read More

The opera The Ghosts of Gatsby, by Joshua McGuire, left, andEvan Mack, was staged in October at the Blair School. Photo by David Pike Many of history’s greatest musical collaborators have pursued a creative approach perhaps best described as “you wash, I’ll dry.” Mozart was more than happy to… Read More

Webb—with his dogs, Daisy (as in Buchanan, from The Great Gatsby) and Zelda (as in Fitzgerald)—at Longshore, the Connecticut estate that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald. Photo by Jim Swaffield As a boy in Westport, Connecticut, Richard Webb, BA’85, was haunted by the ghosts of artists. His affluent waterfront town, about… Read More

Michael Alec Rose, associate professor of composition, had the premiere of his musical drama, Lolly Willowes, based on the novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner, in April at the MATCH–Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston. In July he was interviewed about the work and his life as a composer by Nashville… Read More

Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (2019, W.W. Norton) by Dale Cockrell, professor of musicology, emeritus Everybody’s Doin’ It is the eye-opening story of popular music’s 70-year rise in the brothels, dance halls and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular… Read More

This tall, earth-tone glazed vase is one of Susan DeMay’s classroom demonstration pieces, 17x8x8 inches, completed in stages throughout a semester for an assignment involving numerous objectives for honing pottery wheelwork techniques. Photo by Bill Luton Clay artist Susan DeMay’s retirement exhibit showcases a three-pronged approach to ceramic art From… Read More

Vanderbilt M.F.A. graduate Matthew Baker has sold eight of his stories to media production companies for film adaptation during the past two years. Photo by Logan Werlinger Matthew Baker, MFA’12, never expected to see his work inspire a Hollywood bidding war. When an agent contacted him in 2017 about pitching… Read More

Anna Fisher, a certified nuclear medicine technologist, scans an ancient stamp using the PET/CT scanner. Photo courtesy Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery When the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science installed a new state-of-the-art PET/CT scanner in early 2018, the team probably never imagined it would be used for an art… Read More

The Blair Big Band, Photo by Susan Urmy The Blair Big Band is the undergraduate collegiate winner in the category Large Jazz Ensemble in DownBeat magazine’s 42nd annual Student Music Awards, announced April 23. This is the Blair School of Music’s first award from DownBeat, which is widely considered the… Read More