Check out this list of arts-related events for this month, including an Earth Day concert at the Frost School of Music.
The Frost School of Music is set to present an evening of music, art, and science to honor Earth Day. On April 22, Maria Schneider, artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute and seven-time Grammy Award winner, will host a concert with conductor Scott Flavin. Frost School student composers and the Mancini Institute Fellows will perform student-written pieces inspired by a research project being conducted at the University of Miami.
“It’s a wonderful thing for researchers working in areas outside of the arts to discover how the arts can bring attention to their work and illuminate aspects of their work in a new and special light,” said Schneider, who has been mentoring the students. “My wish is to also show the wider University what a resource they have in this powerful music program.”
Students set to perform at the concert have chosen a variety of different research projects being done across the University, which span fields of study including health, atmospheric sciences, computer science, physics, and marine biology.
Casey Dickey, a Henry Mancini Institute Composition Fellow who will be performing, was motivated to create a composition about tropical cyclones after learning about the work being done by two researchers at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Dickey teamed up with Quinton Lawton, a researcher studying hurricane formation, and Sam Nebylitsa, a researcher studying rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, to find inspiration for his composition.
“Sam and Quinton, the researchers who graciously shared their work with me, emphasized the chaotic nature of hurricane formation which makes them difficult to predict,” said Dickey. “In this piece I have left some of the musical decisions up to the players, so the sound of the orchestra will grow unpredictably as they feed off each other’s energy. The piece reflects the power and chaos of the storm.”
Dickey said that he believes that music can spread the message of sustainability in a unique way.
“Art can be used to focus our attention on important issues,” he said. “Hurricanes are more frequent than ever, and the work that Sam, Quinton, and other researchers are doing to understand and predict their formation could literally save lives. I hope this concert highlights the urgent need to take care of our planet.”
Schneider explained that the students can experience how life, science, the arts, or the human condition can inspire music.
“Music can be such a wonderful conduit to express and illuminate things outside of music. I want the students to experience writing not only for music’s sake, but rather writing music for life’s sake,” she said.
Ultimately, she would like that when the students graduate and leave the University they know that their music can provide advocacy, illuminate complex ideas in a fresh light, and help them delve into subjects they never imagined.
“Music is transformative—it can heal,” Schneider noted. “I hope these students will discover that their music can touch subjects they never imagined, illuminating many wonders of this wide world we live in.”
Purchase tickets.
Lowe Art Museum
Tuesdays at 1 p.m.—April 5, 12, 19, 26
Mindfulness with the Lowe
The Lowe’s Art of Mindfulness remote sessions take place on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Each session will last approximately 40 minutes (a 30-minute guided practice with a 10-minute reflection and Q&A).
Registration is required to participate in these free virtual sessions. Visit the Lowe for more information.
Friday, April 29, 2-3 p.m.
Usketch
Students are invited to join the Lowe Art Museum for an in-person sketch class. The goal is to de-stress and enjoy creative time together. No art experience is necessary. Pre-registration is requested. All materials will be provided. Meet at the Lowe Art Museum.
On view through June 12
Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art from the 1980s
A landmark exhibition, Radical Conventions is the first major museum presentation to focus solely on Cuban American art created during the 1980s. By exploring the heterogeneous nature of Cuban diasporic work from this pivotal decade, the show offers a critical counterpoint to an often binary, identity-focused narrative by framing the artists’ works more expansively within the aesthetic frameworks prevalent in the American avant-garde of the late 70s–80s and the era’s broader socio-economic, cultural, and political landscape. The exhibition features nearly 100 works by more than 25 Cuban American artists representative of various generations including Luis Cruz Azaceta, Fernando García, Nereida García-Ferraz, Félix González-Torres, Tony Labat, María Martínez-Cañas, Luis Medina, Ana Mendieta, and Carmelita Tropicana.
Visit the Lowe for more museum hours.
Frost School of Music
Friday, April 8, 8 p.m.
Storytellers—Luciana Souza and Vince Mendoza
Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts
Featuring Frost Concert Jazz Band, John Daversa Quintet, opening act
Melding Brazilian pop and American jazz, Grammy Award-winning vocalist Luciana Souza brings her deeply personal, colorful, and illuminated musicality to big-band arrangements of songs by her fellow Brazilians Chico Buarque, Ivan Lins, Gilberto Gil, and more. Souza’s work transcends traditional musical boundaries, offering solid roots in jazz, a sophisticated lineage in world music and an enlightened approach to the latest sounds. She will be joined onstage by Grammy winner Vince Mendoza and the Frost Concert Jazz Band.
Visit the Arsht Center for more information.
Monday April 11, 7:30 p.m.
U.S. Coast Guard Band
Maurice Gusman Concert Hall
Formed in 1925, the 55-member United States Coast Guard Band is the premier band representing the United States Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security. It has performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and internationally. The repertoire includes a variety of music, from wind ensemble classics to swinging jazz charts.
Monday, April 25, 7:30 p.m.
A Familiar Stage—Sandra Lopez and Alan Johnson
Maurice Gusman Concert Hall
The New York Times calls her voice, “meltingly beautiful.” Opera News says it is “a dark-hued lyric instrument capable of considerable emotional power.” Lopez has performed internationally to great acclaim. She shares the stage with Drama Desk winner and Frost Professor Alan Johnson. The program includes operatic repertoire drawn from signature roles created by Lopez’s MET Opera performances. They will perform Italian repertoire and songs by women composers. This is Lopez’s first faculty voice recital since her 2019 Frost School appointment.
Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.
Frost Latin Jazz Orchestra
Maurice Gusman Concert Hall
Dafnis Prieto, drums, director, Brian Lynch, trumpet
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and Grammy Award-winner Dafnis Prieto conducts the DownBeat Award-winning Frost Latin Jazz Orchestra. The program will highlight music from the Grammy-winning album, “The Omni-American Book Club,” by Frost professor and Grammy-winner Brian Lynch. DownBeat said the album “has elevated Lynch’s vast oeuvre to ambitious new heights of accomplishment and acclaim.” Lynch joins on trumpet and Prieto on drums. NPR says Prieto, who is Cuban, “stretches and often shatters the expectations of straight-ahead jazz.” Don’t miss this special night.
Wynwood Gallery
On view until April 4
“Manmay Lakay” by Charlisa Montrope
The exhibition features a compilation of large scale, colorful, mixed media prints and artists’ books. Montrope seeks to create a hybrid visual language combining traditional and digital methodologies in contemporary printmaking, heavily layering color and form through collage techniques.
2750 NW Third Ave., Suite 4
Miami, FL 33127
Get more information.
Center for the Humanities
Thursday, April 7, 7 p.m.
Henry King Stanford Distinguished Professors Lecture Series with Stephanie Burt: “Does Poetry have a Future?”
Lakeside Pavilion
Great poems present intimate moments, intense feelings, ways to look back at the past—so we have often been asked to believe; poems express mixed feelings, lament what’s gone, react to what cannot be helped. Yet much of our energy, much of the time, today, goes into imagining a better tomorrow or preparing for a worse one: working to make the world of tomorrow less racist, or less wasteful, or less dangerous, or less stressful, than the world of today. Can poems contribute to those efforts? How? Why? Which ones?
Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University with interests in 20th- and 21stt-century poetry, science fiction, literature and geography, contemporary writing, comics and graphic novels, literature, and other arts.
Wednesday, April 13, 8 p.m.
Book Talk: Love and Sex in the Time of Plague
Guido Ruggiero, professor of history and Cooper Fellow, College of Arts and Sciences
For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the “Decameron” has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio’s collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero’s words, a “symphony of life.’’
“Love and Sex in the Time of Plague” guides 21st-century readers back to Boccaccio’s world to recapture how his work sounded to 14th-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron’s cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo—the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio’s stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment.
Location TBA.
Visit the Center for the Humanities for more information.
University Libraries
Thursday, April 7, and Friday, April 8
La Florida Missions: Spaces of Globalization, Resistance, and Transformation.
Kislak Center
The Spanish Florida missions were established in 1587 and lasted for more than a century and a half. Outstanding scholars in pre-contact and early modern Florida anthropology, archaeology, cultural studies, ethnohistory, linguistics, literature, and theology will convene in this symposium to share their efforts in documenting the story and struggles of the indigenous peoples of Florida as they were drawn into a tumultuous web of colonial missionary and global connectivity that changed their world forever.
Tuesday, April 19, 7 p.m.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Civic Activism, and Environmental Justice in Contemporary South Florida
Kislak Center
The year 2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s landmark book, “The Everglades: River of Grass” (1947). Though Douglas is most noted as an environmentalist, she also engaged in activism for many other causes, including women’s rights, civil liberties, civil rights, and efforts to improve the social conditions of African Americans and of migrant laborers. The Center for the Humanities is partnering with the Office of Civic and Community Engagement to organize a panel discussion that will highlight the connections between the history of the environmental movement and the fight for racial justice.
Cosford Cinema
Saturday, April 2, 5 p.m.
Watching Movies with Dave Barry
Join Dave Barry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist who wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald, for a screening and discussion of Barry Levinson’s film “Diner.”
Saturday, April 16, 5 p.m.
Watching Movies with Carlos Frías
Join Miami Herald food editor Carlos Frías for a screening and discussion of Campbell Scott’s and Stanley Tucci’s “Big Night.”
Other showings this month include: “Last Night in Soho,” “Spencer,” “Licorice Pizza,” “Encanto” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
Visit the Cosford Cinema for showtimes and more information.
Ring Theatre
April 21–April 30
Cabaret
“Come hear the music play” at “Cabaret,” one of the most successful musicals of all time. With its unforgettable score by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Joe Masteroff, this timeless classic invites you to forget all your troubles at the Kit Kat Club while the world is changing forever. Featuring BFA and BA Theatre Arts majors.
