News and Events
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, will speak about her work on April 6, 2009.
POUGHKEEPSIE, NY—Named one of Time magazines “100 Innovators for the Next New Wave,” playwright Suzan-Lori Parks will speak at Vassar College on Monday, April 6. The program, free and open to the public, will begin at 6pm in the second floor of the Students’ Building. A question-and-answer session will follow the hour-long lecture.
Parks is the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Topdog/Underdog and is a recipient of a MacArthur Award. She has said of her presentations: “My lectures aren’t your typical writer-behind-the-podium evening – audiences call them ‘the Suzan-Lori Parks show.’” Her talks are part performance, part storytelling and always high energy, with an inspired sense of humor.
“This is an opportunity for the Vassar campus to witness an innovator who has redefined the playground rhetoric ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.’ Her words do hurt. They hurt, in a good way. They inspire, they mould, they force their way out and sometimes they’re made of syllables we can’t even comprehend,” explained Amielle La' Michel Major, class of 2011, coordinator of the program.
Time magazine wrote that her “dislocating stage devices, stark but poetic language, and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous.” Parks is the author of numerous plays and screenplays as well as a novel Getting Mother’s Body, set in the west Texas of her youth. In addition to her writing projects, Parks will direct the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Fences in 2009.
Her project 365Days/365Plays was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history in 2007. Her other plays include In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (1996 OBIE Award), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award for Best New American Play), and The America Play. Parks’s has written screenplays for Spike Lee, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, and adapted Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God for ABC’s Oprah Winfrey Presents.
In November 2008, Parks became the first recipient of the master writer chair at the Public Theater, a three-year residency in which she will also be a visiting arts professor in dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In addition, she has taught at California Institute of the Arts and Yale School of Drama.
Holding honorary doctorates from Brown University, among others, Parks credits her writing teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, for starting her on the path of playwriting. One of the first to recognize Parks’s writing skills, Baldwin declared her “an astonishing and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time.”
The program is presented by the Vassar Black Students Union with the support from the Vassar Student Association, Helicon, VICE, Strong, FMLA, and Campus Activities.
Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available. Directions to the Vassar campus are available at www.vassar.edu/directions.
Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.
Posted by College Relations Friday, February 27, 2009
About the Arts
Powerhouse Theater
The Powerhouse Theater is a collaboration between New York Stage and Film and Vassar College. It is dedicated to both emerging and established artists in the development and production of new works for theater and film. During an intense eight-week summer residency on the Vassar campus, up to twenty different projects are publicly presented, typically engaging more than 200 professional artists and theater students. Plays, musicals, and screenplays are presented in a variety of forms: readings, workshops, and fully staged productions. Since the first Powerhouse Theater season in 1985, New York Stage and Film and Vassar have served more than 2,000 artists and over 175,000 audience members through the development and production of artistically exceptional and affordably priced performances.
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
Located just inside Vassar's Main Gate, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center houses the college's permanent collection, over 18,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and glass and ceramic wares, charting the history of art from antiquity to the present. The Permanent Collection Galleries feature 350 works, ranging from the sculpted Head of Viceroy Merymose from His Outer Sarcophagus (Egyptian, c 1375 BCE) in the Antiquities Gallery to Marsden Hartley's oil on canvas Indian Composition (1914-15) in the Twentieth Century Gallery. For information on current and upcoming special exhibitions, self-guided and curriculum-based tours, and group visits, please visit the website. The art center is open to the public, and admission is free.
James W. Palmer Gallery
Located in the College Center in Main Building, the James W. Palmer III '90 Gallery presents eight shows annually, including exhibitions by renowned artists and photographers, studio art faculty and students, and local arts organizations. Recent highlights included Andrea Baldeck’s black-and-white photo exhibit, Touching the Mekong: A Southeast Asian Sojourn, organized by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; the Vassar Haiti Project’s annual exhibition and auction of imported arts and handcrafts; and Design Inside, showcasing the work of Vassar’s College Relations design team. All exhibitions are free and open to the public. For information on upcoming exhibitions, visit the website or call (845) 437-5370.
Music Department
Located in the Belle Skinner Hall of Music, the Martel Recital Hall is wonderfully suited, both acoustically and aesthetically, to music performance. With seating for 500, the Martel is home to the Vassar College Orchestra, Choir, Women's Chorus, Madrigal Singers, and numerous chamber groups and ensembles. The Martel concert schedule routinely includes distinguished guest artists, faculty recitals, senior recitals, and special musical events, such as last year's series of organ recitals celebrating the installation and dedication of the college's superb pipe organ, designed by masterbuilder Paul Fritts. For information on upcoming concerts and events (which are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted), please visit the website.
Dance Department
The Department of Dance sponsors several public performances each year. Among those, the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (VRDT) has a series of Works in Progress showings in the fall, a winter Modfest performance in conjunction with the The Department of Music, winter galas at the 1869 Bardavon Opera House, and two All Parents Weekend performances in the spring. The department's Master Class program annually invites at least one ballet and one modern expert to campus in addition to two people in other areas of dance. Public performances and lectures are often associated with these renowned visitors. Guest artists in the past have included: Irina Kolpokova, Arthur Mitchell, Helene Alexopoulos, Gregory Hines, Anna Kisselgoff, Donald Byrd, Edward Villella, Ronald K. Brown, Irene Dowd, Allegra Kent, Gelsey Kirkland, Pilobolus w/Adam Battlestein, Suzanne Farrell, Mummenschantz, Eldar Aliev, Deborah Jowitt, Bill T. Jones, Pascal Rioult, Clinton Luckett of ABT, Bill Irwin, and Donald McKayle. Many of the department's dance performances are in the Frances Daly Fergusson Dance Theater, located in Kenyon Hall.