Roxane Gay - Reading & Book Signing

Thursday, September 5   7:30pm

UNT Coliseum

601 N. Texas Blvd, Denton, TX 76201

Tickets at UNTuniontickets.com

Tickets are Free for Students; $5 UNT student guest ticket (limit 1)
$10 for UNT Staff / Faculty /Alumni
$20 for General Public

(This event is a reading/lecture)

Content Warning: The speaker and discussion may make mention of several forms of trauma, including sexual assault, abuse, and sexual violence.

Roxane Gay is an author and cultural critic whose writing is unmatched and widely revered. Her work garners international acclaim for its reflective, no-holds-barred exploration of feminism and social criticism. With a deft eye on modern culture, she brilliantly critiques its ebb and flow with both wit and ferocity.

Words like “courage,” “humor,” and “smart” are frequently deployed when describing Roxane. Her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is universally considered the quintessential exploration of modern feminism. NPR named it one of the best books of the year and Salon declared the book “trailblazing.” Her powerful debut novel, An Untamed State, was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize.

Roxane co-hosts Hear to Slay with Tressie McMillan Cottom – a podcast with an intersectional perspective on celebrity, culture, politics, art, life, love, and more. She is also a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, was the co-editor of PANK, and formerly was the non-fiction editor at The Rumpus. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nation and many other publications. She was the first black woman to ever write for Marvel, writing a comic series in the Black Panther universe called World of Wakanda.

 

 

Words and Pictures: Vernon Fisher 

Friday, October 11, 1:00 - 3:00pm : Opening Reception

Saturday, October 12, 2:00pm : Exhibition Tour with curator Tracee Robertson

UNT Art Gallery – College of Visual Arts and Design   1201 W Mulberry St, Denton, TX 76201

On View: October 8, 2019 to December 7, 2019

Visit gallery.unt.edu for hours and more information

(This event is an art exhibition with a reception and curator tour)

Words and Pictures by UNT Regents Professor of Art Emeritus Vernon Fisher is an exhibition of paintings and sculptures from 1980 to the present and celebrates the grand opening of the expanded and integrated College of Visual Arts and Design building at the University of North Texas.

Born in 1943 in Fort Worth, Vernon Fisher is one of Texas's most internationally recognized artists. He has lived and worked in Fort Worth since 1977. Fisher received a BA in English literature from Hardin-Simmons University in 1967 and an MFA from the University of Illinois in 1969. He was Associate Professor of Art at Austin College in Sherman, Texas from 1969 to 1978 and Regents Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of North Texas in Denton from 1978 to 2006. Influenced by artists such as Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari, Fisher constructs visual narratives, combining images and language in a wide range of media. His work has been featured in two Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial exhibitions and in over 80 solo exhibitions worldwide. His works are in the collections of more than 40 museums. Vernon Fisher has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1995), the College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art Award (1992), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1984), and the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Fellowship (1974, 1980, 1981).

 

Tyshawn Sorey Quintet

Monday, October 28   7:30pm

University Union Lyceum

1155 Union Cir, Denton, TX 76203

Tickets at UNTuniontickets.com - available Setpember 26

Free for UNT Students; $5 UNT student guest ticket (limit 1)
$5 for UNT Staff / Faculty /Alumni
$10 for General Public

(This event is a live music performance)

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Tyshawn Sorey is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and an extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. The New York Times has praised Sorey for his instrumental facility and aplomb, “he plays not only with gale-force physicality, but also a sense of scale and equipoise”; The Wall Street Journal notes Sorey is, “a composer of radical and seemingly boundless ideas.” The New Yorker recently noted that Sorey is “among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone…An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape.”

Sorey has released seven critically acclaimed recordings that feature his work as a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and conceptualist. His latest, Pillars (Firehouse 12 Records, 2018), has been praised by Rolling Stone as “an immersive soundworld… sprawling, mysterious… thrilling” and has been named as one of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction 2018 albums of the year.

He will be accompanied  by Sasha Berliner (Vibes), Morgan Guerin (Saxophone, EWI), Lex Korten (Piano), & Nick Dunston (Bass).

 

Tanya Tagaq

Tuesday, February 4  7:30pm

University Union Lyceum

1155 Union Cir, Denton, TX 76203

Free - No tickets required

(This event is a live music performance)

Content Warning: The speaker and discussion may make mention of several forms of trauma, including sexual assault, abuse, and sexual violence.

Tanya Tagaq is an improvisational singer, avant-garde composer and bestselling author. A member of the Order of Canada, Polaris Music Prize and JUNO Award winner and recipient of multiple honourary doctorates, Tagaq is one of the country’s most original and celebrated artists.

In 2014, Tagaq sent shockwaves through the music world with Animism. The album’s Polaris Music Prize victory disrupted the music industry and contributed to a change in conversation about Indigenous artists. The follow-up, 2017’s Retribution, brought Tagaq’s inimitable and powerful artistic vision to even broader audiences. Tagaq’s recent projects include debut novel Split Tooth, nominated for the Giller Prize and other awards, and National Maritime Museum commission Toothsayer, a soundscape for the permanent “Polar Worlds” exhibit.

Tagaq’s improvisational approach lends itself to collaboration across genres and forms. Her work includes numerous guest vocal appearances (Buffy Sainte-Marie, Weaves, A Tribe Called Red, F*cked Up), original avant-garde classical compositions (Kronos Quartet, Toronto Symphony Orchestra),  commissions (National Maritime Museum in London, UK) and more. Her music appears in film soundtracks (Thoroughbreds, Searchers) and television (Vikings, Sirens).

In its many forms Tanya Tagaq’s art challenges static ideas of genre and culture, and contends with themes of environmentalism, human rights and post-colonial issues. In interviews, Tagaq stresses the importance of considering her work in the context of contemporary – not traditional – art. This statement is not just about sound, although her music is decidedly modern and technically intricate, but about deep-rooted assumptions about indigenous culture in general.

 

yMusic

Tuesday, February 25  7:30pm

University Union Lyceum

1155 Union Cir, Denton, TX 76203

Tickets at UNTuniontickets.com - available January 13, 2020

Tickets are Free for UNT Students
$5 for UNT Staff / Faculty /Alumni
$15 for General Public

(This event is a live music performance)

yMusic, "six contemporary classical polymaths who playfully overstep the boundaries of musical genres,” (The New Yorker) performs in concert halls, arenas and clubs around the world. Founded in New York City in 2008, yMusic believes in presenting excellent, emotionally communicative music, regardless of style or idiom. Their virtuosic execution and unique configuration (string trio, flute, clarinet, and trumpet) has attracted the attention of high profile collaborators—from Paul Simon to Bill T. Jones to Ben Folds—and inspired original works by some of today’s foremost composers, including Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli and Andrew Norman.

 

Joyce Scott

Monday, March 16  5:30pm

Greater Denton Arts Council

400 E Hickory St, Denton, TX 76201

Free - No tickets required

(This event is an artist lecture)

Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist best known for her depictions of racially and politically charged subjects, crafted from bead work. Also working with jewelry and glass, Scott’s works are influenced by a variety of cultures, including Native American and African. Born on November 15, 1948 in Baltimore, MD, she is the daughter of renowned quilt maker and folk artist Elizabeth Talford Scott. First attending Maryland Institute College of Art for her BFA, she went on to receive her MFA from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Today, Scott’s works are held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others. 

DCTA is free for students, faculty, and/or staff with a valid UNT ID.  Take DCTA Route 7.  It will pick up at Welch and Mulberry and travel down Hickory.  Get off the bus at the Downtown Denton Transit Center (DDTC). Walk one block back over the tracks to the Greater Denton Arts Council entrance doors on Hickory Street.

8 minute bike ride from main campus

25 minute walk from main campus

Reggie Watts

Tuesday April 14    7:30pm

University Union Lyceum

1155 Union Cir, Denton, TX 76203

Tickets at UNTuniontickets.com - available March 2, 2020

Tickets are Free for Students; $5 UNT student guest ticket (limit 1)
$10 for UNT Staff / Faculty /Alumni
$20 for General Public

(This event is part music and part comedy performance)

Reggie Watts is an internationally renowned Musician/Comedian/Writer/Actor who currently stars as the bandleader on CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden. Using his formidable voice, looping pedals, and his vast imagination, Watts blends and blurs the lines between music and comedy, wowing audiences with performances that are 100% improvised.

Watts’ first Netflix special Spatial released to massive critical acclaim, with the New York Times calling it “a giddy rush of escapist nonsense” and dubbing Watts “the most influential absurdist in comedy today.” The A.V. Club described Spatial as “signature Watts, meaning it’s alternately exhilarating, silly, exhausting and transcendent.”

 

Please note: All events are subject to change.  Please check back closer to the event date for the most up-to-date schedule.