Arts and Culture

Rowe Galleries will host an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m., Thursday, March 17, for three coinciding exhibitions.

“Drawing into Space,” will feature works by Hollis Hammonds, a visiting artist at the McColl Center, and students from the Department of Art + Art History. Their efforts explore drawing and its relationship to three-dimensional space. Hammonds and student will speak about the work in a panel discussion at 4 p.m., March 17, in Rowe Arts Building, Room 130.

Faculty members from two universities in Nigeria and a professor from Davidson College will be guest speakers for a spring lecture series organized by the University’s African Studies Academy.

Enajite Ojaruega, senior lecturer, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria, will present “Songs Only Women Sing: Female Struggle with Identity in African Traditional and Modern Poetry” at 3:30 p.m., Thursday, March 24. Ojaruega researches African women and conflict in literature and gender studies.

Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, was born March 2, 1904, and in honor of his birthday, UNC Charlotte will hold its annual Seuss-a-thon from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, March 5, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road.

During this event, area educators and literacy advocates will read Dr. Seuss books aloud to children in a marathon fashion for four continuous hours. Children will have opportunities to participate in Dr. Seuss-related craft projects.

The Department of Music Faculty and Friends Concert Series will present a jazz performance at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 23, in Rowe Recital Hall. 

Four UNC Charlotte jazz faculty – Will Campbell (saxophone), Michael Hackett (trumpet), Noel Freidline (piano) and Ron Brendle (bass) – will be joined by guests Ocie Davis (drums) and Troy Conn (guitar).

Of a recent album featuring Campbell, “All About Jazz” critic Mark Sullivan wrote, “smoking hot … a first-class collection of modern jazz, with strong playing and exciting, varied original compositions.”

Jeffrey Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, will deliver the 32nd annual Loy Witherspoon Lecture at 7 p.m., Monday, Feb. 29, in Cone University Center, McKnight Hall. His talk will address “Biological Gods: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies.”

Thomas Negri, a long-time advocate of diversity, inclusiveness and opportunity for immigrants and refugees, will deliver UNC Charlotte’s annual Levine Lecture at 6 p.m., Wednesday, March 2, at the Levine Museum of the New South.

A documentary that recounts the Cold War struggles of Mario Röllig, UNC Charlotte’s “College of Liberal Arts & Sciences eyewitness-in-residence,” will premiere during the 66th annual Berlin International Film Festival in mid-February. The documentary includes scenes filmed during a visit Röllig made to UNC Charlotte in 2014.

“The Art of the Print,” organized by Erik Waterkotte and assistant professor in the Department of Art + Art History, is on display through Sunday, June 19, at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.

The College of Arts + Architecture lent the museum specialized tools used in the four major types of printmaking: relief, intaglio, lithography and screen printing. In addition, the exhibit is displaying a worked woodblock and lithography stone with corresponding artwork printed from them by recent graduates Lauren Ernst and Andrew Steed.

The Department of Music will present a Faculty and Friends Concert on Monday, Feb. 8, featuring Associate Professor of Voice Brian Arreola. The program, which takes place on Chinese New Year’s Day, is a celebration of music by Asian and Asian-American composers, with songs sung in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and English.

Performing with Arreola, a tenor, will be guest artists Kelvin Chan, baritone; Wei-En Hsu, piano; Kari Giles, violin; and UNC Charlotte Associate Professor of Cello Mira Frisch.

Hamid Dabashi from Columbia University will address “Can Non-Europeans Think?” at 3:30 p.m., Monday, Feb. 1, in Fretwell Building, Room 114.

Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, will bring together historical and theoretical reflections on current affairs and the role of philosophy to argue that, in order to grapple with the problems of humanity today, individuals must eliminate the ethnographic gaze that infects philosophy and casts Arab and other non-Western thinkers as subordinates.