Trista Baker and Brenton Bellamy perform in "Darcie" from the 2009 Festival of Ten-Minute Plays. "Darcie" was written by Richard Taylor Campbell and directed by Mel Christian. Photo by Richard Taylor Campbell.
In playwright Lee Shackleford’s world, the script comes first. Before the actors audition or the props are selected, the script must be conceived, written, polished, and perfected.
Shackleford is the UAB Department of Theatre’s playwright-in-residence, and he teaches several scriptwriting classes at UAB. He also is the founder and director of UAB’s edgy, creative, and tremendously popular Festival of Ten-Minute Plays, now in its seventh year.
Each year the process begins in the spring semester, when Shackleford’s students learn the art and craft of writing super-short comedies and dramas. A 10-minute play, he explains, is not a skit or a scene; it must have everything that a longer play has—without the luxury of time.
Christina Cooley has always enjoyed the visual and tactile pleasures of painting. So when it came time to pursue a career, the young artist naturally chose . . . surgery. “My artistic side influenced my decision,” says the third-year student in the School of Medicine at UAB. “I love working with my hands and looking at things meticulously.” In turn, Cooley adds, immersion in the world of health care is influencing her art. “It has given me new themes—passion, life, and death—and mediums I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.”
Cooley isn’t alone in mixing medicine with the muse. In the slideshow below, meet the winners of the 2009 School of Medicine Art Show. And don’t forget to view part 1 of this story, an exploration of the possible origins of creativity.
For nearly 90 years, Sloss Furnaces helped fuel Birmingham’s booming growth, drawing hundreds of families to live and work in the shadow of the massive iron plant. Today Sloss curator—and UAB history instructor—Karen Utz is learning about this vanished way of life and sharing it with her students. In the process, she is shedding new light on a key, but often overlooked, era in the city’s past.
In this slideshow, Utz describes how she uses oral histories and even recipes to preserve the stories of Birmingham ironworkers.
John Powers creates art that won’t sit still. It rises and falls, sways, types, clicks, clacks, and rolls like waves. An assistant professor of sculpture in UAB’s Department of Art and Art History, Powers designs intricate kinetic pieces inspired by natural history, architecture, technology, and the passage of time. It can take up to a year to plan and build one sculpture, each one a blend of carpentry, mechanics, symbolism, and sound.
In this video, Powers invites you into his studio as he constructs “Remember,” a large-scale piece that gives new life—and new meaning—to old typewriters.
In the face of 500 years of change, one face has remained the same. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the Angel for the “Madonna of the Rocks” still looks as youthful and fresh as the day she was sketched, her alluring gaze free of crease or blemish.
The angel owes her clear complexion to progress in preservation, a specialty that blends art and science in a manner that would impress Leonardo himself. And while preservation was once the province of curators and archivists alone, today it is a crucial facet of many fields, including research, health care, and information management. An increasingly digitized society requires that agelessness extend to patient records, spreadsheets, and family photos, along with humankind’s greatest masterworks.
