Arts and Culture

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, or in this case art.

Each year Global Arts Studies Program Lecturer Richard Gomez brings students to Yosemite to create an art installation from nothing other than trash found in the park. This project is part of the Yosemite Facelift initiative, an annual effort by the Yosemite Climbing Association to preserve the natural beauty of Yosemite National Park.

It’s a new school year, which also happens to be a new chapter of the UC Merced Writing Project.

The UC Merced Writing Project is a local affiliation of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve writing skills among students as well as the art of teaching writing among educators.

The National Writing Project’s mission is to enhance student achievement by improving the teaching of writing, and therefore learning, in the nation’s schools.

Two simple words, “Leland Legacy,” captured the significance of Wednesday’s opening event for the second phase of the Merced 2020 Project, an event that doubled as a goodbye and thank you to outgoing Chancellor Dorothy Leland.

The message graced a wall of the new Sustainability Research and Engineering Building in large white block letters, a nod to Leland’s tireless effort and motivation to lead the award-winning expansion project.

Parents don’t have to venture to San Francisco to give their children a taste of opera. With UC Merced’s Children’s Opera, little ones can have a unique cultural experience without straying outside city limits.

The Children’s Opera is geared toward children ages 3 and older. Just like the audience members, the performance is mini in size — just 45-minutes long — and features classical music coupled with an engaging story.

Unlike traditional theater productions, there was no red curtain, special lighting, microphone feedback or elaborate stage makeup at Shakespeare in Yosemite.

Instead, squirrels scurried across the stone stage and among the audience members’ feet. Birds cawed in the nearby trees, as the last of the winter leaves fell between the wooden bench seats of Lower River Amphitheater near Yosemite Falls.

It really feels like you’re a world away, but that’s the goal.

In what world are Shakespeare and hip-hop related? Ask Devon Glover.

Glover is The Sonnet Man, a Shakespeare-loving rapper who sets The Bard’s famous sonnets to hip-hop instrumentals. Using iambic pentameter to his advantage, Glover turns 16^th century English writings into 21^st century educational material for students.

William Shakespeare’s plays are meant to be enjoyed by a live, theater audience and there is no better place to experience The Bard than Yosemite National Park.

For the third year, UC Merced is bringing Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom to audiences in a natural setting, similar to the forest that inspired the playwright’s own writings. Yosemite National Park will be transformed into the Forest of Arden where students, faculty, park rangers and community members will perform “As You Like It” -- one of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies -- with a twist.

Some people have the idea that the arts are being shortchanged as UC Merced grows.

The Global Arts, Media and Writing Studies (GAMWS) Program is here to correct that perception with its inaugural Arts Week, set for March 4-9.

“We want to draw people to campus and show them what we are about and what we are doing,” ethnomusicology Professor Jayson Beaster-Jones said.

In some ways UC Merced is still a blank canvas, even 13 years after opening.

But that just gives this year’s artist in residence Otto Rigan more room to dream as he helps devise a master arts plan for the campus.

“I think the campus is beautiful,” Rigan said, “but it’s missing the unexpected…the voice of the arts. If there had been an arts plan in place all along, art could have been integrated as new buildings emerged.”

Shakespeare wrote “the play’s the thing.” Of course, he was referring to using a play to catch a murderer, but in Shakespeare’s day, people believed the theater had the power to elicit deep emotion — even move the guilty to give themselves away.

Bobcats are catching on to the power of theater in Merced.