Jazz faculty concert

The Department of Music presents a concert by Cornell jazz faculty, Sept. 9 at 7 p.m. in the Carriage House Loft, Stewart Avenue, Ithaca. Admission is free and open to the public.

The performance will feature Peter Chwazik on bass, Greg Evans on drums, Melissa Gardiner on trombone, Scott Harell and Paul Merrill on trumpet, Joe Salzano on alto sax, Dave Solazzo on piano and James Spinazzola on alto and tenor saxes. They will play selections by Charlie Parker, Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller and others, with arrangements by Oliver Nelson, Steve Brown and Merrill.

“The Search for Happiness”

Rev. Dominic Legge will give a lecture, “The Search for Happiness: Wisdom from Aquinas and the Classical Tradition,” Sept. 10 at 6:30 p.m. in 120 Physical Sciences. Free and open to the public, the talk will be followed by a Q&A and a reception at 7:30 p.m.

Legge holds advanced degrees in law and sacred theology and is assistant director of the Thomistic Institute, a Catholic entity with a Cornell chapter and part of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.

The reluctant surrealist

The College of Architecture, Art and Planning is hosting the first solo exhibition in the U.S. of Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van-Leo, a portraitist with an experimental practice on the fringe of the surrealist movement.

On display through Sept. 26 in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery in Milstein Hall, the self-portraits and documents in “Van-Leo: The Reluctant Surrealist” capture important events and metamorphoses in the artist’s life, and highlight Van-Leo’s obscure connection to the mid-century Egyptian surrealist movement.

A reception, Sept. 11 at 5 p.m., is free and open to the public and features a gallery talk by Salah Hassan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture.

Van-Leo (1920-2002), born Levon Boyadjian, ran a successful studio in Cairo while the Art and Liberty Group of surrealists was flourishing at the other end of the city.

His artistic self-portraits, particularly those produced in the 1940s, echo Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, and foreshadow Cindy Sherman’s work 30 years later in their approach to genre and role-play. Constantly experimenting, he used his self-portraits to test new setups and photographic techniques including solarisation, use of glass shields and filters, sandwiched negatives, multiple exposures and creative lighting effects.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Ola Seif, who lectured on Van-Leo last March on campus, and Hassan, ICM’s director. Van-Leo’s archive is maintained by the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the American University in Cairo.

Threats to democracy

Harvard University government professor Daniel Ziblatt will speak on current dangers to American democracy and preventing its breakdown Sept. 12 at 4:30 p.m. in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall.

His lecture, “Lessons from How Democracies Die: Can It Happen Here?”, is free and open to the public as part of “Politics and Justice in the Era of Donald Trump,” sponsored by the Program on Ethics and Public Life. The lecture series seeks to shed light on the transformations and challenges in American politics since the rise of Trump.

Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, is the co-author of “How Democracies Die” (2018) with Cornell A.D. White Professor-at-Large Steven Levitsky, and author of “Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy” (2017), winner of the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Award.

The next lecture in the series is Oct. 15, with Michael Dawson, a scholar of African-American political movements, discussing the role of identity politics in current struggles for change.

Brian Schaffner will discuss the roles of racism, sexism and economic anxiety in support for Trump on Nov. 12. The series continues in the spring.

Men and mountains

Cornell Cinema presents the travelogue drama “Gabriel and the Mountain,” Thursday, Sept. 13, at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. Cosponsored with the Office of Global Learning, the film will be followed by a discussion led by Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs.

Director Fellipe Barbosa retraces the last few months of the life of a friend, a Brazilian student who took a year off to backpack through Africa before entering graduate school in California, and died on a mountain in Malawi.

Also showing: The Ithaca premiere of “Mountain,” Sept. 13 and 16, cosponsored with Cornell Outdoor Education. Narrated by Willem Dafoe, the documentary follows mountaineers and thrill-seekers as they tackle challenging summits from Tibet to Alaska and Norway.

Concert series

The Grammy-winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth will open the 2018-19 season of the Cornell Concert Series with a performance Friday, Sept. 14, at 8 p.m. in Bailey Hall. Tickets are $19 for students and $25-$30 for adults, available at www.cornellconcertseries.com.

Roomful of Teeth also will discuss the process of working with composers in creating their repertoire, in a public conversation Friday, Sept. 14, from 3 to 4 p.m. in the Klarman Hall auditorium. Admission is free.

This fall, the concert series in Bailey Hall includes violinist Jennifer Koh’s Limitless, with the Cornell Chamber Orchestra and composer-pianist Vijay Iyer, Sunday, Oct. 21, at 3 p.m.; and Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer, Friday, Nov. 16, at 8 p.m.