Arts and Culture

During December, the Give to UC Merced 2020 initiative tripled the campus’s goal of raising $50,000. The final tally: $163,000 raised for a variety of campus initiatives and programs.

The fundraising initiative has traditionally been held on a single day, but in 2020 it was expanded to one month with an online focus and social media-driven effort because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the 1960s, Ernest Lowe took his camera into the rural towns of California’s Central Valley, documenting the lives and struggles of farm-working communities. Sixty years later, these photos are available to the public through UC Merced, showing the raw reality of farm laborers and their families during these tumultuous times.

“Songs that Never End,” Professor Yehuda Sharim’s intimate film about a family transitioning from Iran to life in Texas, is a finalist contender in the International Documentary Film Festival Vienna and will stream on the festival’s site for one week starting Thursday.

Arturo Arias, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation professor in the Humanities at UC Merced, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his ground-breaking study of contemporary indigenous novels from Guatemala and Mexico.

Arias was one of 173 American and Canadian fellows announced Wednesday by the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Antonio Sanchez broke new ground for musical storytelling with his award-winning soundtrack for “Birdman.” He’s earned multiple Grammys for his work with guitar master Pat Metheny. Now, Sanchez, one of the most acclaimed drummers and composers in jazz today, is heading to Merced for a one-night performance.

A collaboration among the city of Merced, community members and the University of California Merced is bringing a little night music back to the Merced Open Air Theater.

Friday evening concerts will begin at the outdoor half-shell, in Applegate Park, starting in summer 2020.

At a time of dramatic political division in our society, the role of universities — as places where people can connect with others and explore ideas — is more important than ever, according to Maria Echaveste, the featured guest for a conversation with interim Chancellor Nathan Brostrom.

Brostrom welcomed the former senior White House official before a capacity crowd of campus and community members at the UC Merced Arts & Computational Sciences Building on Nov. 5.

As a child, Kevin Dawson traveled from California to visit his grandmother in Harlem, where he recalls playing in Jackie Robinson Park. Dawson, an avid swimmer and surfer, would peer through a fence with his cousins to check out the park’s large swimming pool.

“I remember thinking how fun it’d be to go in the pool. But there was never any water,” he said. “It was a disadvantaged and underfunded community.”

Death is a part of life, a loss surrounded typically by mourning and grief. But what if the passing of a loved one were also a transition to be celebrated?