Board Lecture Series
In the coming season, the Board will be hosting a series of lectures by distinguished experts in the fields of photography, visual arts, writing and dance. The series is part of our organization's mission of building community through the arts and it will make the arts accessible to an even wider audience than CHAW currently serves.
Admission in $10 and reservations can be made by calling 202.547.6839. Space is limited.
History is Fiction Agreed Upon
Presented by Bruce McKaig, Chair of CHAW’s Photography Department
Saturday, January 12th, 2008
4-5:30 pm
Writing in his diary on December 4, 1839, Philip Hone described a visit to see some daguerreotypes. "Every object," he wrote, "is a perfect transcript of the thing itself." This presentation looks at veracity in photography, questioning its capacity to be a 'perfect transcript,' examining technical manipulations, censorship, omission, and staged shots. Historical and contemporary photographs will provide examples of fact or fiction, looking at images from the Soviet revolution, four decades of Playboy, the Farm Securities Administration in the 1930s, public school photography projects in this century, advertising, art and politics. Images from Photojournalism, commercial and vernacular photography will be shown, as well as works by artists, including Edward S. Curtis, Vik Muniz, Ansel Adams, Eadweard Muybridge, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Jason Salavon. The presentation ends with a brief look at how Bruce McKaig's current work explores notions of veracity in photography.
Music and the Historical Imagination
Presented by Robert Convrey
Saturday, October 27, 2007
11:30 am-1:00 pm
Convery’s lecture, Music and the Historical Imagination, presents a dynamic and lively survey of western music’s language, its purposes and stylistic evolutions, citing key events, influences, composers and works which, through imagination and accomplishment, have led to the diverse musical languages of today. The interactive lecture will include examples of opera, cantata, oratorio, symphony, concerto, chamber music, song, piano, and choral music from works by Palestrina, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Schutz, J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Wagner, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, and Bartok.
Robert Convery is among the handful of composers writing effectively for the voice today. His music is expressed in a distinctly personal voice of lyricism, rhythmic vitality, a keen harmonic sense, and transparent textures. Convery has written five one-act operas, twenty-seven cantatas, Mass for choir and orchestra, choral works of every description, twelve song cycles, and more than two hundred songs for voice and piano. Convery’s fifth opera, Clara, based on the life of Clara Schumann, was commissioned by the University of Maryland and was produced in 2004 at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland. Convery’s song cycle, Five Settings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and a short comic opera, The Owl and the Nightingale, were premiered in February 2007 at Weill Recital Hall in New York City under the auspices of Center for Contemporary Opera.
