The Yale School of Architecture, in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, organized a symposium last Thursday and Friday titled “Constructed Objects: Architects as Designers in the 20th century.” The event focused on the commoditization of architecture, the role of architects in outfitting interior spaces and the relationship between the built environment and the objects that inhabit it.

-Tanya

Edgar White was born in Montserrat West Indies. He has lived in the United States and England. His plays have been successfully presented in New York, London, and Africa. In the following autobiographical extract, he describes how his radical activities in the seventies led him to being sent down from Yale.

-Tanya

Like this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ruined” by Lynn Nottage, which is set in Congo, “Eclipsed” depicts the harsh realities of women’s lives in a strife-torn African country with both a clear eye and a palpable empathy. Although it is a less skillfully structured drama — partly because the women here are even more powerless than the Mother Courage-like dominant figure in Ms. Nottage’s play — “Eclipsed” presents a complementary, no-less-harrowing portrait of women fighting to retain their dignity and a sense of self-worth under extreme duress.

In War-Torn Liberia, Women Making Do ANITA GATES New York Times October 31, 2009

IF you walked into a room full of sex slaves, you might not expect to find role models. Unless you’ve already seen Danai Gurira’s new drama, “Eclipsed.”

-Tanya

African drama ‘Eclipsed’ at Yale Rep: Mixing fact, fiction in African drama at Yale Rep
By Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post 10/29/2009

-Tanya

A recent front-page article in the News informs us that the Yale Center for British Art suffers from a lack of visibility: Many undergraduates, apparently, do not know it exists. There will be some who turn their nose up at the very idea of pre-twentieth century British art, dismissing it as derivative, dull, second-rate. That said, I encourage everyone, teeming undergraduate masses, skeptics and veterans of the British Art Center alike, to investigate “Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill,” a new exhibition that will be running in New Haven through Jan. 3; it may or may not make you a regular visitor to the museum, but it should leave you with a renewed appreciation for the eccentricities of our cousins across the pond.

-Tanya

“Constructed Objects: Design by Architects in the 20th Century,” a symposium taking place November 12–13 at Yale School of Architecture, will explore ways in which architecture and design infuse and inform the everyday objects we use.

-Tanya

Like libraries that often also find themselves embattled in times of budget cuts (since typically neither museums nor libraries directly generate tuition streams), great university art museums are a “public good,” offering value and possibility to the whole of our university communities as well as to users from outside the walls of the ivory tower. That all university museums do not achieve this centrality of purpose — often, I suspect, for lack of adequate resourcing by their parent institutions in the perpetual fight against the perception that art represents a “luxury” in the logo-and data-centric university — is to be regretted. Without question much work remains to be done to make our museums central to the academic experience.

-Tanya

The survey found that undergraduates comprised just 2 percent of visitors to the [British Arts] center. Attendance at gallery events, such as screenings, lectures and concerts, is composed primarily of New Haven residents, visitors and graduate students, with much lower numbers of undergraduates, Meyers said. This means that approximately 2,000 Yale undergraduates visit the center annually, according to the center’s spokesman, Ricardo Sandoval ’06.

-Tanya

Projection designer Wendall K. Harrington will head the new projection concentration within the design department at the Yale School of Drama, as announced by Ming Cho Lee and Stephen Strawbridge, co-chairs. The program begins in the fall of 2010, as one of the first graduate theatre training programs of its kind in the United States.

-Tanya

The fascinating “Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,” at the Yale Center for British Art, celebrates this exemplary woman’s contributions to botany, the decorative arts and English court society. All of these fields had something to do with order, structure and design (in the divine, as well as the human, sense).

-Tanya

The University filed one motion Oct. 5 to dismiss Pierre Konowaloff’s claim to ownership of “The Night Café,” a painting by Vincent Van Gogh housed in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and another on Oct. 16 to dismiss the Republic of Peru’s suit for the return of Inca artifacts housed in the Peabody Museum of Natural History.

-Tanya

Rosenkranz Hall appears on Yale’s campus like a Piet Mondrian in a room full of Rembrandts: out of place.

-Tanya

Given my work as an ecologist and environmentalist studying environmental impacts and the built environment, that the school’s gallery was hosting “The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture” should have warmed my heart. However, on a routine salvage visit to the loading dock behind Paul Rudolph Hall, I was surprised to find the entire exhibit, eight-foot-tall stands, display boards, tables and all, in a dumpster awaiting its one-way trip to the landfill. So much reusable material was being discarded that an extra dumpster, in addition to the one normally present, was on-site to receive it.

-Tanya

“Bob Stern is a talented architect, and I’m sure whatever he does will be wonderful. But does it require a wholesale bulldozing?” says [William] Moore, adding that saving the buildings would mesh with Yale’s stated eco-friendly mission.

-Tanya