Community invited to jazz concert, artist's lecture

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A celebrated jazz singer and an acclaimed international artist will be on campus and in the village of Hamilton in the coming days.

 

Jane Monheit, who has established herself as one of the post-millennial jazz world’s foremost vocalists, will perform a free concert at 8 p.m. Friday in the Palace Theater.

Doors open at 7:30 for the show, which is part of the Katharine Elizabeth Gould Memorial Concert series and is sponsored by the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts (ICPA) and the Department of Music.

Monheit has released seven CDs and collaborated with artists such as Michael Bublé, Ivan Lins, Terence Blanchard and Tom Harrell.

Her latest CD — The Lovers, The Dreamers, and Me — mixes a blend of world music with her jazz roots. It includes standards such as Cole Porter’s “Get Out of Town” to Fiona Apple’s “Slow Like Honey.”

Monheit’s drummer and husband is Rick Montalbano Jr., who grew up in nearby Rome, N.Y. They met in 1997 while students at the Manhattan School of Music.

Next week, artist Eduardo Kac will be on campus for a lecture and an interdisciplinary panel discussion.

Eduardo Kac, Natural History of the Enigma, transgenic work, 2003-08.

Kac, who considers himself a bio artist, first gained prominence with his transgenic work GFP Bunny (2000), centered on the green-glowing bunny named Alba that he created through genetic engineering.

He will give a free public lecture at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday in Meyerhoff Auditorium in the Ho Science Center. The Harvey Picker Distinguished Lecture in the Visual Arts is co-sponsored by the Picker Art Gallery and the ICPA.

Kac will discuss his projects, including a recent transgenic artwork called Natural History of the Enigma.

The central work in that series is a plantimal, a new life form Kac created and that he calls Edunia, a genetically engineered flower that is a hybrid of the artist and petunia. The Edunia expresses Kac’s DNA, taken from his blood, exclusively in the flower’s red veins.

At 11:30 a.m. Thursday in Golden Auditorium, the artist will take part in a panel discussion that will examine the relationship and confluence of art and science and the implications it has on contemporary society.

Other panelists are Jason Meyers, biologist at Colgate; W.C. Richardson, professor, University of Maryland, College Park; Anthony F. Aveni, Russell B. Colgate Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate; and Lynn Gamwell, director-emerita, Binghamton University Art Museum.