Cornell Homecoming

The past and present will be celebrated at Cornell Homecoming, Sept. 21-22, with a mix of new surprises and time-honored favorite offerings.

The Homecoming website provides a full schedule of events, as well as a guide to transportation, parking, dining and lodging.

Friday night features the popular fireworks and laser light show at Schoellkopf Field. Free and open to all, the event draws more than 18,000 people and this year adds new elements such as 3D projections, a musical time machine and live performances.

On Saturday, the Cornell Chimes celebrates 150 years of music with a Chimesmasters’ reunion and communitywide sesquicentennial celebration, including a concert and festivities, at 11 a.m. on Ho Plaza.

The Cornell Glee Club is also celebrating a 150th anniversary with a special concert with the Cornell Chorus, Saturday, 7-9 p.m. in Bailey Hall.

In the main athletic event Saturday, Cornell football plays Yale at Schoellkopf Field, with kickoff at 3 p.m.

Lecture on modern literature

Rutgers University professor Erica Edwards delivers a talk, “’How Very American’: Black Women Writers and the Long War on Terror,” in the Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature, Sept. 21 at 4:30 p.m. in the English Lounge, Room 258 Goldwin Smith Hall.

Edwards’ talk is drawn from her current book project, “The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Grammars of State Violence,” which analyzes how contemporary black expressive culture has refracted the culture of U.S. empire throughout the long war on terror, from 1968 to the present. Mapping the transformations of African-American literature against global and local campaigns of counterinsurgency, the book argues that black feminist poetry, fiction, television and film have exposed the imperial grammars of blackness while also marking out minor grammars of subsistence, survival and black radical undoing.

Moon Festival at the Johnson

Celebrate the autumn moon at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 114 Central Ave, Ithaca. This family-friendly event, Sept. 21 from 5 to 11 p.m., features free refreshments, late-night gallery hours with tours of the East Asian art in the Moon exhibition and a studio activity to create your own “evening sky” art cards.

It also includes performances by Taoist Tai Chi Society, Shimtah, and activities with the Sciencenter, Cornell Astronomical Society and Cornell's Spacecraft Planetary Imaging Facility. The event is co-hosted by the Museum Club in collaboration with Cornell’s Chinese Student Association, and cosponsored by the Cornell International Students Union.

Gorges history

Matt Pritchard of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences delivers a public lecture Saturday, Sept. 22, noon to 1 p.m., at the Museum of the Earth, 1259 Trumansburg Road, Ithaca. Pritchard discusses the new book by the late professor Arthur Bloom, “Gorges History: Landscapes and Geology of the Finger Lakes Region.” The lecture is hosted at the Paleontological Research Institution and its Museum of the Earth on its Free Day.

‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ in 3D

Cornell Cinema is showing the 2018 film, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” Sept. 21 at 9:15 p.m. and Sept. 22 at 7 p.m., in Willard Straight Theatre. The Sept. 21 showing is in 3D – at 2D prices.

The movie is set four years after the last deadly incident at the Jurassic World theme park, when the island that housed the park has been abandoned, and the dinosaurs left behind are on their own in the wild. When word comes of an impending natural disaster and the government’s decision not to intervene, it’s up to former raptor trainer Owen (Chris Pratt) and park operations manager Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), now the head of the Dinosaur Protection Group, to rescue the surviving dinosaurs and figure out a conspiracy with catastrophic implications for humans and dinosaurs alike.

Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial

The theme for the 2018 Cornell Council for the Arts’ Biennial is Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival. The aim is to stage artistic environments that provoke Universitywide conversation about the persistence of passage, from environments to communities, while emphasizing the challenge of survival in hostile socio-ecological climates.

Exhibitions include:

• “Log Knot: On Perpetual Wood Cycles and Forest Processes,” on the Ag Quad through December, created by the Cornell Robotic Construction Laboratory in the Department of Architecture, in collaboration with the Arnot Teaching and Research Forest. Using an industrial robot, the project team milled and joined together about 70 irregular log sections into a continuous loop, highlighting a process that optimizes the use of wood as a construction material with pieces that would ordinarily be discarded.
• “The Character of Characters,” A.D. White Professor-at-Large Xu Bing’s playful and poetic five-channel animation on Chinese language and drawing traditions, through Dec. 23 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Xu gives a public lecture Sept. 28 at 5:15 p.m. in the museum’s Wing Lecture Room.
• Taiwanese artist Richard Lin’sabstract work “Painting Relief” (1964), at the Johnson Museum through Dec. 23, on loan for the Biennial from China by Shin-Yi Yang, Ph.D. ’06.

Music industry expert speaks

Numerous artists have been launched into chart-topping, award-winning careers by Mathew Knowles – including his daughters Beyoncé and Solange. On Thursday, Sept. 27, Knowles discusses his first two books, “The DNA of Achievers” and “Racism from the Eyes of a Child,” in a panel at 4:30 p.m. in the Africana Studies and Research Center. A reception follows. The event is free, and the public is invited.

The panel includes Riché Richardson, Cornell associate professor of African-American literature, and Marla Frederick, professor of African and African-American studies and the study of religion at Harvard University.

A professor at Texas Southern University, Knowles is founder, president and CEO of Music World Entertainment, a leading music and entertainment conglomerate with record sales exceeding $450 million worldwide. Regularly featured in popular media, he is renowned for his innovations as a top manager and entrepreneur in the music industry.

Jazzy evening

The Dave Solazzo Trio – Dave Solazzo on piano, Mike Solazzo on bass and Tom Killian on drums – perform standards by Thelonious Monk, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and others, as well as some original compositions, Sept. 27 at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. Dave Solazzo is a visiting lecturer with CU Jazz, in the College of Arts and Sciences.