Internationally renowned visual and performance artist Nick Cave will serve as the artist-in-residence for UNT's Institute for the Advancement of the Arts in 2011-12. Cave, who studied at UNT in the 1980s, will visit UNT twice this fall and twice in the spring to work with students, faculty and community members in master classes, workshops and public lectures. He also has been commissioned by the UNT Art Galleries and the institute to create a new performance piece on campus in the spring with collaborators from the College of Music, the Department of Dance and Theatre and other UNT arts programs. The piece will incorporate 30 newly created Soundsuits in the shapes of horse-like forms that move through campus and evolve into hybrid beings. Cave is renowned for his elaborate Soundsuits sculptures — wearable art made of materials such as twigs, beads, Easter grass and dryer lint that make sounds as they brush together.
Cave will speak at the annual Nasher Lecture Series Oct. 11 at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. For ticket information, call 940-565-4001.
Watch a video of Nick Cave explaining his art>>
The institute also named two 2011-12 faculty fellows to work on creative research projects that will further raise the profile of the arts at UNT. Marimba specialist Mark Ford, coordinator of percussion, plans to compose a concerto for wind ensemble and percussion soloist to be performed by the UNT Wind Symphony and plans a version for orchestra. He also will study with internationally known composer Edward Gregson, retired from the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and Jack Stamp, Indiana University Wind Ensemble director and composer.
Watch performances by Mark Ford>>
Award-winning poet Corey Marks, associate professor of English, will use the fellowship to work on his third manuscript of poetry, specifically writing a sequence of six poems exploring the theme of the modern zoo and its embodiment of "a complicated set of impulses: intellectual curiosity, preservation, entertainment, titillation, the performance of power." He also proposes to write a central poem about Dallas real-estate mogul Harlan Crow's collection of sculptures of 20th-century dictators.
