Return from Tour Concert

The Cornell University Chorus toured the Gulf Coast during the winter break and will share its tour repertoire with the community in a free concert, Jan. 27 at 3 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church, 315 N. Cayuga St., Ithaca. The performance is open to the public and presented by the Department of Music.

Under the direction of Robert Isaacs, the chorus performed 11 concerts in Texas, Louisiana and Florida Jan. 5-20.

The concert program, with the theme “Alone/Together,” features works about solitude and community, ranging from Renaissance motets to folk songs, gospel and world music. The chorus also performs contemporary compositions including “The Grail Bird” by Canadian composer Christine Donkin, a new commission premiered by the ensemble in October.

Festival 24, PMA auditions

Students from the Department of Performing and Media Arts (PMA) will present a free evening of newly created theater, film and dance at Festival 24, Jan. 27 at 7:30 p.m. in the Schwartz Center’s Flex Theatre.

At the start of each semester, PMA students write, cast, choreograph, rehearse and perform plays, film and dance pieces over the course of 24 hours. The festival is produced by Irving Torres-Lopez ’18.

Admission is free and seating is limited. Doors open at 7 p.m.; a full house is expected and arriving 15 or 20 minutes beforehand is recommended.

PMA hosts auditions for spring performances Jan. 29, starting at 7 p.m. in the Flex Theatre; callbacks are Jan. 30 and 31.

Auditions will be held for four spring productions: “Current I Corriente,” March 15-17; a film and reading from the annual Heermans-McCalmon writing contest, March 23; “The Loneliness Project,” April 19-21; and “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play,” April 27-May 5.

Auditions are open to all Cornell students, faculty and staff. Sign up on the online callboard.

A history of art

When the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art opened on campus in 1973, the 60,000 square foot, I.M. Pei-designed building offered the campus and community exciting new opportunities to engage with the visual arts. “Highlights from the Collection: 45 Years at the Johnson,” opening Jan. 27, provides a window into the richness and diversity of the museum’s permanent collection, which has grown in the intervening years.

Curated by Stephanie Wiles, the Richard J. Schwartz Director of the museum, the exhibition features a selection of works spanning centuries, from pre-Columbian Ecuador and Mexico to contemporary paintings, drawings and sculpture from Asia, the Americas and Europe. These works, by artists including Edward Hopper and Pablo Picasso, are shown in conjunction with other important pieces from the permanent collection on view throughout the museum, such as Alberto Giacometti’s “Walking Man II.”

The Johnson celebrates its new exhibitions (including “Matthew Weinstein: The Living End” and “Debating Art: Chinese Intellectuals at the Crossroads”) with a public reception, A Winter Party 2018, Feb. 1 from 5 to 7 p.m.

Museum admission is free, Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursdays until 7:30 p.m. from Feb. 1 through May 30.

Women scientists

The area premiere of “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” is Jan. 31 at Cornell Cinema. The 2017 documentary is included in a “Women Scientists & Inventors” series featuring five recent films about accomplished real-life women in science including Jane Goodall and Marie Curie.

Lamarr was more than a glamorous Hollywood star – a prolific inventor, her work with radio frequencies paved the way for wireless communications. She is now considered one of the most important inventors of all time. She and film composer George Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, for a frequency-hopping technique they developed at the beginning of World War II for use by the Allies to prevent the jamming of torpedo-guidance systems.

Screenings of “Bombshell” are Jan. 31 and Feb. 2 at 7:15 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. Other films in the series include “Jane” and “Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge,” both showing Feb. 7 and 10; and “Hidden Figures,” Feb. 21, the untold story of brilliant African-American women working at NASA, starring Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer.

Folk duo

WVBR’s “Bound for Glory” begins its winter 2018 series Jan. 28 in Anabel Taylor Café with singer-songwriter Peggy Lynn and “Bound for Glory” veteran Dan Duggan on hammer dulcimer.

Hosted by Phil Shapiro, M.A. ’68, and now in its 51st season, the folk music program broadcasts Sunday nights from 8 to 11 p.m. at 93.5 and 105.5 FM and online. Admission to live concerts is free and open to all ages, with three half-hour sets of music starting at 8:30 p.m. and refreshments available.

Upcoming shows feature Kyle Carey on Feb. 4 and local Celtic band Arise and Go (Tim Ball, Ellie Goud and Michael Roddy) on Feb. 11; Richie Stearns and Rosie Newton, Feb. 25; Mustard’s Retreat, March 4; Michael Jerling with Tony Markellis, March 11; Alfie Smith and Nicole Christian, March 18; fiddler John Specker, March 25; and Bill Staines, April 15.

For more information, contact Shapiro at 607-844-4535 or pds10@cornell.edu.

Poetry reading

Poet Julie Sheehan will read from her work Feb. 1 at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall. A reception and book signing will follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Free and open to the public, the reading is the first event in the Spring 2018 Zalaznick Reading Series, presented by the Department of English Creative Writing Program.

Sheehan is the Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer in the Department of English this semester. She is a core faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook’s Southampton campus. Her honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and prizes from the Poetry Society of America and The Paris Review.

She is the author of three poetry collections: “Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise” (2010); “Orient Point” (2006) and “Thaw” (2001). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner and The Yale Review, among other publications; and in anthologies including “The Best American Poetry” and “Good Poems, American Places.”