The Enduring Power of Aesthetic Hellenism

All photos by A.Rosa C.®

http://www.portlandartmuseum.org/page.aspx?pid=387

Fund Raising for a Film on Greek American Elderly Women

Olympia Dukakis and Rose Gregorio play 

Greek-American women in their 70s who create stories to avoid the realities of growing older

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1033214476/olympia-dukakis-and-rose-gregorio-are-irene-and-ma

Celebrating G. Papanicolaou's Achievements for Humanity

http://gr.voanews.com/content/papanikolaou/1547091.html

Μάνος Χατζιδάκις – 3 Τραγούδια Για Τον Ρόννυ

http://bibliotheque.gr/?p=6088

Μία από τις πολλές πτυχές της συνάντησης 

του Χατζιδάκη με τη Νέα Υόρκη

AHI – Future of Hellenism in the US Conference

One hopes that the proceedings of this conference will be made available for wider public reflection

At OSU: About the Jewish Future in America, Voting, and Engagement

THREE EVENTS FEATURING AMERICA'S TOP JEWISH DEMOGRAPHERS, STEVEN COHEN AND IRA SHESKIN

THE JEWISH FUTURE IN AMERICA: Problems, Possibilities, and Projections  Sunday, Oct. 14 | 12 pm   Columbus Jewish Community Center | 1125 College Avenue  What does the future hold for American Jewry? Are we doomed to falling numbers and lower commitments? Or is there hope for growth and vitality? What will happen to our philanthropic commitments and relationship with Israel? How will synagogues, federations and JCCs fare? What about intermarriage? If there is anyone who can answer these questions it is Professors Steven Cohen and Ira Sheskin, two of our country's top Jewish demographers, who have their finger of the pulse of the American Jewish present and future. JEWISH VOTING PATTERNS AND THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS Sunday, Oct. 14, 7 pm    Ohio State's Fawcett Center | 2400 Olentangy River Road Ohio is a critical state again in the 2012 elections. Jews are important in the Ohio vote and in many other states. What issues are most important to Jewish voters?   Have their priorities changed? Which way have Jewish voters gone historically?   Are there regional differences in the Jewish vote? Learn the answers to these questions and much more from some of the country's top experts on Jews and voting. Panelists:   Professors Steven Cohen and Ira Sheskin                      Ohio State Emeritus Professors Herb Asher and Herb Weisberg                   Joyce Garver Keller, executive director of Ohio Jewish Communities     FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION: Variations in Jewish Engagement  Monday, October 15, 12pm  OSU Hillel | 46 E. 16th Ave., 43210  Includes a free lunch, rsvp required by Wednesday, October 10, call (614) 292-0967.  Many young Jews have shifted their focus from people and organizations to purpose and principles. They resist what they see as coercive expectations and once widely accepted normative standards such as intermarriage and support of Israel as optional, tentative, and at best a means to expressing a higher Jewish purpose.

Reflections on Sam Karres' Art - By Artemis Leontis

An Artist’s Sketchbooks
Reception to Honor Artist Sam Karres
and His Gift to Hatcher Graduate Library by Artemis Leontis

Sketchbooks are an artist’s laboratory, where the artist gathers his ingredients: his eyes’ and hands’ quick view of life as it unfolds.

This at least is true of the sketchbooks of Sam Karres, an artist of miraculous dexterity. Born in Wyandotte, Michigan in 1929, Karres completed a degree in Art at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in 1953, and worked as an illustrator for Ford Motor Co. from 1955 until his retirement in 1980. Whether a student, or fully employed, or a retiree with time to devote fully to his art, Karres was always sketching. The paint- ings he shows at Karres Gallery at the end of Sixth Street near the train tracks in Royal Oak draw their ideas from sketchbooks he began to fill from the time he was a young boy.

In a conversation with me this summer, the 83-year-old Karres talked about scenes that inspired him in Detroit over the course of a lifetime: the storefronts, music halls, cafe’s, restaurants, bars, public and private spots that lit up at night, became dreamlike in the day. A regular visitor to Greektown, always with sketchbook and pencil or pen and ink in hand, Karres made personal contact with its dramatis personae. Over the course of decades, the regulars in Greektown made cameo appearances in his notebooks, whether seated darkly in a corner with a demitasse of coffee or ecstatically dancing to the rhythms of a bouzouki band.

Sam Karres’s dialogue with Detroit was intense. Whenever he sat drawing, things began to happen, as if the city’s scenes in the second half of the twentieth century took shape for Karres’s art: “I can sit down on a bench anywhere and start sketching and nothing’s happening,” he said. “Suddenly, an airplane, a bird, a guy on a bike and before you know it you got a terrific composition.” His hand was both agile and incisive. According to Dan Georgakas, author of My Detroit, the artist’s work is “both a familial photo album offering images to refresh our memories and a personal diary that probes emotions those images sometimes belie. Motor City is privileged to have such an impassioned testament to draw on, and Greek America is fortunate to have a large place within that saga.”

This past year, Sam Karres donated thirty-seven sketchbooks to U-M Hatcher Graduate Library, with assistance from Dr. Denny Stavros, his lifelong friend and a steadfast supporter of Hatcher Library and the Modern Greek Program at U-M, who documented the gift. The sketchbooks date from 1975 to 1996, with a few drawings made during the first decade of the 21st century. They are mostly in pen and ink. They offer a witty, luminous point of entrance into Sam Karres’s art. The sketchbooks will henceforth be part of Hatcher Library’s collection of materials, supporting the study of both Greek America and Detroit.

A sample of Sam Karres’s sketchbooks will be on display this fall in the Audubon Room in the Library Gallery, Room 100, Hatcher Graduate Library 913 S. University Avenue. To bring attention to this wonderful acquisition, the Modern Greek Program invites colleagues, students, and friends to a public reception in the Audubon Room on October 24 from 4 to 6pm. The artist will be present. Come meet Sam Karres and thank him for his tremendous gift!

The Greek-American Review online

Announcement by Prof. Alexander Kitroeff: Haverford College's Magill Library is in the process of providing on line access to the Greek-American Review, a New York City-based monthly magazine edited by Peter Makrias that appeared between 1991-2006. It was the continuation of the magazine Nea Yorki / New York. My thanks to Mr. Makrias for entrusting me with his personal collection of back issues and to Associate Librarian Norm Medeiros for making this project possible. The contents of six annual volumes are currently available in .pdf form at: http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/handle/10066/8468

Celebrating Artist Sam Karres – Public Exhibit – U of Michigan Library

http://www.lib.umich.edu/gallery/events/karres

Symposium on Italian Americans, California Italians

Italian Americans, California Italians

October 22, 2012, 9:30 am, Royce 314

Imbedded in the very title of this conference is the assumption that there is something different, even singular or unique, in Italian migration in California compared with the rest of the United States and beyond. To say "California Italians" is to suggest that this place may be akin to another Italy. We therefore address this question head on, identifying the most important traits of this relationship, challenging the very assumption or elaborating it by reference to internal differentiations within Italian migration to California.

9:30am

Welcome

Thomas Harrison, Chair, Department of Italian, UCLA Giuseppe Perrone, Consul General of Italy

10:00am 

Geographies of Migration

Moderator:  Thomas Harrison, Department of Italian, UCLA Italians in 'Our Italy': Adaptation and Success on the California Frontier

Edward Tuttle Professor, Department of Italian, UCLA Chasing Ghosts: Los Angeles' (Hidden) Italian Roots

Marianna Gatto
Executive Director, Italian American Museum of Los Angeles Italian Los Angeles: Hidden and Emergent Cartographies

Luisa Del Giudice
Independent Scholar, Founder & Former Director of the Italian Oral History Institute

Constructing Ethnicity: Sicilian Women and the Fishing Community of Monterey

Carol Lynn McKibben
Lecturer, Coordinator Public History/Public Service, Stanford University

12:00pm

Lunch Break

1:30pm

Representations, Landscapes, and Theories

Moderator: John Agnew, Professor, Department of Geography, UCLA The Two Bandini Families of California: Examining Transnationalism in History and Fiction

JoAnne Ruvoli
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Italian, UCLA Chi ha prato ha tutto: Environmental Factors which Contributed to the Shaping of the Italian American Settler in California

Gloria Ricci Lothrop
Professor of History Emerita, California State University, Northridge Italian American Identity in California: Landscape, History, and the California Italian American Novel

Kenneth Scambray
Professor of English, University of La Verne

Constructing an Italian-Californian Aesthetic

Laura E. Ruberto
Professor and co-chair, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Berkeley City College

3:30pm

Coffee Break

3:45 pm

Cinematic Voyages in the Italian American Community

Moderator: Claudio Fogu, Associate Professor of Italian Studies, UCSB From Pane amaro to Italians in the Golden State

Gianfranco Norelli and Suma Kurien, Filmmakers Organized by: Claudio Fogu, Thomas Harrison, JoAnne Ruvoli and Massimo Sarti.

Sponsored by UCLA's Department of Italian, the Italian American Studies Association, Istituto Italiano di Cultura(IIC) in Los Angeles, Patrons of Italian Culture at IIC, the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities at UCLA, the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles and the Italian Consulate General in Los Angeles.

View conference program  http://www.italian.ucla.edu/images/stories/ca%20italians%20program%20draft.pdf