Boulder celebrates creative landscape during Arts Week
Oscar Wilde once said, "Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known." It's a powerful tool for expression, communication, and making sense of the world. All of that will be on display during the 8-days of Boulder Arts Week. It all starts with First Friday Arts Walk on April 4, 2025. The NoBo Arts District will be stepping up it's regular First Friday events. Beyond that there will be some 150 exhibits, performances, and activities.
"The Downtown Boulder Partnership does this event every year. It's the Taste of Pearl. It's where local businesses partner with restaurants, and breweries, and distilleries, and wineries to do kind of a progressive culinary arts celebration. We have some other arts that we're bringing to the Pearl Street Mall while that's happening," said Cindy Sepucha, Manager of Boulder Arts Week.
That is happening on Sunday, April 6, 2025. For the first time ever, organizers will be giving out 5 awards during Boulder Arts Week. Funded through the Community Vitality Department's Office of Arts and Culture, winners will get a $1,000 stipend.
This year's award categories are:
"I like to say for people to look at Boulder Arts Week kind of like a restaurant week where it's an opportunity to test out something new. If you're really into one kind of art, try something different," Sepucha suggested.
LINK:
Boulder Arts Week
Boulder Arts Week runs April 4 - 12, 2025.
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Washington Post
a day ago
- Washington Post
His biography of James Joyce was a masterpiece. Now he gets his due.
Forty years ago, I telephoned Richard Ellmann, then recently retired as Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford, and asked him to review the critic William Empson's last book, 'Using Biography.' Like many readers, I regarded Ellmann as our greatest literary biographer, mainly because of his intensely documented and beautifully written 'James Joyce' but also for the much shorter 'Yeats: The Man and the Masks.' His biography of Oscar Wilde would appear posthumously in 1988, then go on to win both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Ellmann's review appeared on the front page of Book World on May 18, 1985, almost precisely two years before he died at age 69 on May 13, 1987. The piece spoke admiringly of Empson's originality and sometimes capricious brilliance but took him to task over some of his ideas about Joyce's 'Ulysses,' most significantly that near the novel's end, Leopold Bloom offers his wife, Molly, to Stephen Dedalus. Having now read Zachary Leader's 'Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker,' I realize that I failed to perform due diligence in assigning 'Using Biography.' Back in 1959 when 'James Joyce' first appeared, Empson had written a gently critical review, claiming that the book's American author had been too credulous in believing some of the Dublin gossip he was told and that he failed to take the writer's socialism seriously. Nonetheless, a quarter-century later, the gentlemanly Ellmann ended his Book World piece with graciousness, while also taking a swipe at a new generation of Joyceans: 'The great secret in 'Ulysses,'' he wrote, 'is not the Bloom offer. It is, now that critics are coating the book with ice, Joyce's warmth about life and literature. This Empson understands better than most present-day critics. It is sad to say farewell to such an independent and original mind. Even his mistakes are what Joyce called the portals of discovery.' That second sentence — the one about ice — obliquely refers to the critical shift away from Ellmann's humanist reading of 'Ulysses,' one that approaches this modernist classic as a difficult but essentially traditional novel, to one that views the book much more as an artistic experiment with language, a stepping stone on the way to the neologistic wordplay of 'Finnegans Wake.' In general, Ellmann sets 'Ulysses' against the backdrop of the people and institutions that shaped Joyce — his family, teachers and friends; Nora Barnacle, with whom he shared his life; the Catholic Church, against which he rebelled; and, later, the financial supporters whom he charmed and the fellow writers who paid him homage. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1971, Ellmann declared: 'More than anything else we want in modern biography to see the character forming, its peculiarities taking shape.' Leader — who has previously published lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow — follows this same principle in 'Ellmann's Joyce,' especially in its first half, labeled 'The Biographer.' Here he shows how much Ellmann's life, especially his early years and young manhood, affected his intellectual development and, eventually, his interpretation of Joyce. In the second half, 'The Biography,' Leader charts the creation of Ellmann's masterwork through encounters and interviews with Joyce's surviving family members, including the writer's brother Stanislaus, as well as numerous acolytes, such as bookseller Sylvia Beach, who published 'Ulysses,' and Maria Jolas, who protected a trunk full of letters, working notes and other papers during World War II. Together, Leader's two halves seek to better understand what Ellmann called 'the controlled seething out of which great works come,' in this case his own great biography of Joyce. 'Ulysses' takes place during one day in Dublin — June 16, 1904, now known as Bloomsday — and exemplifies what Ellmann called 'the justification of the commonplace,' that is the faithful depiction of ordinary people leading ordinary lives. To achieve this, Joyce depended on an abundance of exact detail. Ellmann and Leader adopt a similar approach in their biographies — their books are rich in the minute, even trivial particulars that give vivacity to a narrative. Still, there can be too much of a good thing. Leader, for instance, reprints long extracts from the love letters sent by Ellmann's girlfriends. There are numerous pen portraits of his teachers and classmates at Yale (where he earned a PhD), his various colleagues at Northwestern (where he taught for 17 years) and the many people he interviewed — more than 300 — when he was researching Joyce's life. Because Ellmann couldn't fully discuss his service during World War II, mostly spent in intelligence agencies overseen by fellow Yalies, that section of the book remains somewhat fuzzy. Still, unlike Ellmann, who consistently defended a biographer's right to speculate and conjecture when hard data were missing, Leader seldom needs to face this issue: Knowing the value of letters and documents, Ellmann never threw anything away. Born in 1918, Richard 'Dick' Ellmann was the second of three sons from an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Highland Park, Michigan. His parents, especially his lawyer father, were extremely controlling as well as deeply committed to the preservation of Jewish identity. When Ellmann met Mary Donoghue — Irish and a lapsed Catholic — and the two eventually decided to marry, he couldn't face his parents' inevitable disapproval. As Ellmann admits in a letter, he never introduced them to Mary because 'I foresaw that you would give me excellent reasons for [not marrying her] … and I loved and respected you too much to feel I could be proof against such reasons.' Instead Ellmann only told them of his wedding plans — a civil ceremony in Paris, far from Highland Park — in a letter mailed just before he boarded a ship for France. In response, his parents sent a telegram of three words: 'We forgive you.' In fact, they didn't. In a subsequent letter, the father writes: 'I feel completely lost. … I am trying to fortify myself and fortify mother to carry this new emotional burden, but how are we to withstand the strain? How much can one human being take?' The parents were only partially reconciled to the marriage when Mary agreed to raise the children in the Jewish faith (something that the couple never bothered to do). I mention this episode for two important reasons. First, it underscores how Leader roots his narrative in letters and similar documentation. Second, and even more important, this family drama — especially the relationship of father and son — forms one of several parallels, verging on self-identification, between Ellmann and Joyce and explains some of the biographer's distinctive understanding of the novelist's life. Just as the Irish genius Joyce rejected Catholicism's dogmas and constraints, so the humanist, European-minded Ellmann freed himself from his parents' obsession with Jewish identity. On the very last page of Leader's biography, a nurse asked the dying Ellmann what religion he had, if any. His daughter Lucy answered for him: 'Jewish.' At which point, the almost speechless, bedridden scholar managed to veto this answer and croak out a single word: 'None.' A few sentences later, the biography is over. I've hardly touched on the second half of Leader's book. Again and again, Ellmann charms his way into the good graces, and the archives, of almost everyone possessing Joycean material or memories he needs. Throughout his career, Ellmann worked his scholarly prestige for all it was worth — top dollar from Northwestern, generous leaves of absence, a featherlight teaching schedule, and so many fellowships it's hard to keep count. While lackluster as a lecturer, in other academic contexts, he has been described as 'scrupulous, winningly pleasant, and unbending.' Still, according to his daughters, the modernist scholar Maud Ellmann and the award-winning novelist Lucy Ellmann, it was their mother who had the real brains in the family. When annoyed with her husband, Mary Ellmann would refer to him as 'Dickie-boy' and could leave him deflated by saying that he sounded just like his mother. In 1968, she finally brought out her own excellent book, 'Thinking About Women,' a witty, pioneering work of feminist thought (which I read long before anything by her husband). But then, on Nov. 4, 1969, disaster struck. Mary suffered a debilitating aneurysm, which left her paralyzed on one side and in a wheelchair. Partly so that ongoing care would be covered by Britain's national health service, her husband took up the offer from Oxford. Some scholars today view Ellmann's 'James Joyce,' as, to quote John McCourt, 'a wonderful product of a particular time — postwar, conservative, 1950s America.' Yet its author isn't so easily slotted. As one of Leader's many endnotes tells us, Ellmann testified 'in support of [James] Baldwin's 'Another Country' when there was a move to remove it from Chicago Public Schools' and, on May 7, 1968, 'he was one of three Northwestern faculty members who circulated a statement — a statement he wrote — in support of the demand of Black students for more recruitment and financial aid for Black Students, desegregation of the university's real estate holdings, and creation of a department of African American Studies.' Ellmann aptly described Joyce's heroes 'as grudged heroes — the impossible young man, the passive adult, the whisky-drinking graybeard. It is hard to like them, harder to admire them. Joyce prefers it so. Unequivocal sympathy would be romancing. He denudes man of what we are accustomed to respect, then summons us to sympathize.' In a muted way, Leader does the same in this evenhanded, well-written and sometimes provocative biography. Richard Ellmann starts out as a good little straight-A student but ends up being far better than that. Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and a regular contributor to Book World. The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker By Zachary Leader Harvard University Press. 464 pp. $35.
Axios
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Philadelphia weekend: Odunde, Luke Bryan and First Friday
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Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Yahoo
‘Familiar Places and Spaces' showcases Broome County's beauty
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (WIVT/WBGH) – A local artist is showcasing the beauty and grittiness of Broome County with her latest exhibition. Joanne Thorne Arnold's 'Familiar Places and Spaces' opens on Friday at the Arts Council's Artisan Gallery as part of First Friday. The gallery features oil paintings depicting well-known scenes from around the local area, including Otsiningo Park, Cutler Pond, and the Chenango Street viaduct. There's also a series of paintings of animals and landscapes, as well as abstract paintings representing the change in seasons. Thorne Arnold says she has worked very hard on the exhibit over the last year and a half. She says the use of color makes her paintings feel familiar to viewers, creating a connection with the art. 'It's not trying to find the most prettiest picture or scenery, photographs can do that. This is a way of picking out the gritty with the beauty,' said Thorne Arnold. You can check out Familiar Places and Spaces on Friday from 6 to 9 p.m. It will be on display throughout the month of June. Artisan Gallery is located at 223 State Street in Binghamton. Lockheed Martin secures $9.5 million deal with U.S. Navy 'Familiar Places and Spaces' showcases Broome County's beauty Port Dickinson Elementary opens Outdoor Learning Center Tom's Coffee Cards and Gifts sells one million pounds of coffee Owego Hose Team sells 1,000th memorial brick at Baker Fireman's Fountain Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
