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The Athenaeum presents various series of art and music lectures, including topics in classical music and jazz, visual art, art history, and architecture, with speakers from San Diego and beyond.


 

Special Reading/Performance
Orpheus Speaks
Presented by Write Out Loud
Mondays, November 14, 2011, January 16, 2012, and April 16, 2012
All performances begin at 7:30 p.m.
Joan & Irwin Jacobs Music Room, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla, CA

Series: $30 member/45 nonmember


Single lecture: $12 member/17 nonmember
Purchase here or Call 858.454.5872 to reserve

 

Write Out Loud, a unique theatre troupe that reads literature aloud, made its Athenaeum debut last May to a large and enthusiastic audience. Write Out Loud returns this year with three new programs of literature about art and music. Most of us were read to as children, but too few of us ever get such tender loving care as adults. Write Out Loud changes that with professional actors who breathe such verve into stories and poems that they seem to jump off the page--alive and aloud! Orpheus Speaks is a unique series of programs, designed especially for the Athenaeum to explore the indispensable role of arts in our lives.


David Fenner, Veronica Murphy, Walter Ritter and Amanda Sitton

 

Stuart Dybek's Chopin in Winter, read by Walter Ritter
Katherine Mansfield'sThe Singing Lesson, read by Amanda Sitton
Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Listening Woman, read by Veronica Murphy
P.G. Wodehouse's The Agonies of Writing a Musical Comedy, read by David Fenner

January 16, 2012



April 16, 2012







Art Lecture Series
The Sacred and the Profane in Art: From the Greeks to the Renaissance
Presented by Linda Blair
Tuesdays, January 17, 24 and 31 and February 7, and 14, 2012
All lectures begin at 7:30 p.m.
Joan & Irwin Jacobs Music Room, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla, CA

Series: $50 member/75 nonmember


Single lecture: $12 member/17 nonmember
Click here or Call 858.454.5872 to reserve




“The way a nation goes, whether that of the mind or that of the spirit, is decisive in its effect upon art.”
-Edith Hamilton


The history of the West is a recurring dialectic between eras that are either resolutely secular or that emphasize spirituality—two extremes that pace each other throughout history. For example, the humanism of the ancient Greeks disappeared for an entire millennium, but, like a stream that runs underground only to burst forth in a torrent far from its source, Greek humanism reappeared in the Renaissance.

It is axiomatic that the art of any society is a mirror, the truest, most pure reflection of the values and beliefs of a people. As this lecture series traces the tag team race of history from ancient Greeks to the Byzantines to the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, it will focus on the art of each successive society—secular and sacerdotal.

The lectures will begin where Western civilization most surely begins—with the art and architecture of the ancient Greeks. Tiny Athens was the first to contemplate what it means to be... man—man as individual and man in the collective, man as a member of a polity. The Greeks exalted man—even their gods bore a suspicious resemblance to themselves—and in the process, they produced art of astonishing nobility.

The lectures will then contrast the Greek emphasis on humanism and secularism with the Byzantine Christian world, an age marked by intense religiosity that resulted in art of great, glittering beauty and insubstantial otherworldliness. The theme of the sacred continues with Europe’s medieval art and that crowning glory of man’s search for the divine: the Gothic cathedral.

These two gloriously spiritual eras, the Byzantine and the medieval, will then yield to the Renaissance and the resurrection of the humanism of ancient Greece after a thousand-year interregnum. In the early 1400s, Florentine philosophers discover classical texts preserved by the Byzantines and Arab copyists, and so, with opened eyes and minds, Renaissance man again proclaims, “Man is the measure of all things.”


Tuesday, January 17, 2012



Tuesday, January 24, 2012



Tuesday, January 31, 2012



Tuesday, February 7, 2012



Tuesday, February 14, 2012








Art Lecture Series
Dialogues in Art & Architecture 2011-2012
Then, Now & Beyond: The Evolution of Dialogues in Art & Architecture over 20 years toward Interdisciplinary and Social Practices the Environment and Sustainability
Thursdays, October 20, November 10, 2011, February 9 and March 22, 2012
All lectures begin at 7:30 p.m.
Joan & Irwin Jacos Music Room, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla, CA

Admission is Free


Water + Life Museums complex in Hemet, CA

 

For our 20th year of Dialogues in Art & Architecture, we are inviting back some of our outstanding speakers to reflect over 20 years on the changes that have shaped their practice.

The series is coordinated by the Athenaeum with artist and environmental sculptor Joyce Cutler-Shaw. The program is co-sponsored by the San Diego NewSchool of Architecture, as well as the San Diego Council of Design Professionals, the San Diego Architectural Foundation and Public Address.

Thursday, October 20, 2011
Art & Architecture, Sustainability and the Social Realm

Catherine Herbst, Undergraduate Chair of Architecture at Woodbury University
Chris Genik, Dean of NewSchool of Architecture
Rob Quigley, San Diego Architect
David Antin, author, poet, writer, scholar

Thursday, November 10, 2011
Landscape, Environment and Ecology

Byron Washom, Director of Strategic Energy Initiatives, UCSD
Michael Lehrer, LA architect, won first LEED platinum rating ever in 2008 for his Water+ Life Museums in Hemet, CA
Ruth Wallen, Ecological artist

Thursday, February 9, 2012
Art and the Crossover Phenomena


Suzanne Lacy, Installation and performance artist, writer
Helen and Newton Harrison, Ecological artist
Victoria Vesna, Media artist, author, Director of UCLA Arts/Sci Center

Thursday, March 22, 2012
Overview: Then, Now and Beyond: 1990 to Now


Mary Bebee, Director of the Stuart Collection at UCSD







Music Lectures
The Poets of Broadway
Presented by Bruno Leone
Tuesdays, March 6, 13 and 20, 2012
All lectures begin at 7:30 p.m.
Joan & Irwin Jacobs Music Room, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla

Series of three concert lectures: $36 member/51 nonmember


Individual lectures: $14 member/19 nonmember

Call 858.454.5872 to reserve



The Broadway Musical is indebted as much to lyricists as it is to composers.  The ability to creatively find thousands of different ways to say “I Love You”—along with countless other common phrases— is a remarkable undertaking requiring an uncommon gift for words and rhyme. Moreover, like the great composers themselves, notable lyricists each possess their own distinctive, signature styles. It is to these lyricists, the so-called “Poets of Broadway”, that pianist, humorist and raconteur Bruno Leone turns with an entirely new Athenaeum performance.  Leone will play, sing and chat his way around and through the lives, lyrics and music of some of Broadway’s and America’s greatest lyricists and composers.  As he did with last year’s sellout series “Broadway Legends”, Bruno Leone’s brand new performance will not only feature much of America’s most famous music and lyrics but also will be depicting the colorful periods which generated these musical gems.

Tuesday March 6, 2012



Tuesday March 13, 2012



Tuesday March 20, 2012







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