Students Arts
The Matter of Music Quick, before this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony, check out one of last year’s winners. The winner of the 2012 Grammy for Best Clockwise from top left: Opening night for “Raid the Archive: The de Menil Years at Rice,” Rice University Media Center, 2012; view of “Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz: The Art Show,” Rice Museum, 1984–85; “The Machine” exhibit, Rice Museum, 1969. (Photo credits: Carolyn Van Wingerden, Hickey-Robertson, Geoff Winningham ’65)
smoking and casually selecting materials for his sculpture. He talks about how much he enjoys it when his sculptures break and have to be repaired, reveling in the chance and chaos of the whole thing. Comments from the artist and his decidedly nonprofessional welder assistant were intercut with commentary from the beleaguered conservator sent along from MOMA to keep the sculptures in working repair. Not only is the film an insight into the artist’s work, it is also an insight into an artistic climate that continues today in Houston, where artists often draw on and collaborate with industry to execute projects. During the de Menil years, the Media Center brought in the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Peckinpah and Henri Langlois. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas came into town to screen “THX 1138” as well. For Rice students and the Houston community to have had this kind of access is stunning. In one of many memorable events, Dennis Hopper came in 1983 to speak about a new film, but instead bused the audience out to the Big H Speedway to see him “blow himself up” in the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act — i.e., a chair with dynamite under it. View the video online at timeline.centennial.rice.edu/entry/368/. Those years were a lively, experimental and provocative time. The de Menils, in supporting and establishing the arts at Rice University, involved a number of students and young people in their endeavors, many of whom, like artist Mel Chin, would go on to become significant contributors to the art world in their own right. The de Menils were also instrumental in bringing in young and influential faculty like William Camfield, the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor Emeritus of Art History, and Thomas McEvilley, Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus of Art History and critic. Dominique de Menil would leave the university to establish the Menil Collection, but experimental exhibitions continue on at Rice in the site-specific installation program of Rice Gallery; in the art department’s new experimental exhibition spaces EMERGEncy Room and Matchbox Gallery; and in the continuing activities of the Rice Media Center. And the de Menils’ involvement and interest in Rice through the years helped set it all in motion. —Kelly Klaasmeyer
Opera Recording is “Doctor Atomic,” a Sony DVD recording of a 2008 production at the Metropolitan Opera, conducted by Alan Gilbert. Shepherd School alumna Sasha Cooke ’04 starred as Kitty Oppenheimer opposite Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer. The contemporary opera is by American composer John Adams, with libretto by Peter Sellars. The opera tells the story of the Manhattan Project scientists who created and tested the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. In a New York Times review of the production, critic Anthony Tommasini had plenty of praise for Cooke, writing, “The scenes with Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, sung with aching, wistful intensity by the mezzosoprano Sasha Cooke, are beautifully rendered.”
• No. • No. • 2010 43 Rice Rice Magazine Magazine 15 7• 2013 3