Arts and Culture

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.

Three enterprising Global Arts Studies Program (GASP) students saw the empty UC Merced Art Gallery on campus and, worried the space would be reallocated, wondered why they couldn’t volunteer to run it.

So they started the Young Artist Movement (YAM) — a “guerilla” group that expanded through word of mouth to 17, then bloomed to more than 50 members. YAM was a finalist for the Division of Student Affairs’ Best New Club or Organization award.

A full-length documentary highlighting the relationship between water, food security and, ultimately, global security, features UC Merced researchers and is scheduled to premiere Sept. 14 in downtown Merced.

The works of Shakespeare, perhaps more so than any in the western canon, have been subject to reinterpretation and reappraisal by generations of artists, scholars and laypeople.

Some, like Verdi’s opera “Otello,” are considered masterpieces in their own right. Others, most notably Thomas Bowdler’s much maligned, puritanical expurgation of Shakespeare’s works, have been roundly scorned and derided.

In partnership with the National Park Service and the University of Warwick (U.K.), the University of California

Join renowned artist Dwight Wigley and create your own piece of a community art project.

As part of the annual Merced Art Hop, everyone is invited to paint tiles that will be placed into a structure designed by Wigley to create a collective work of art.

Each contributor will be photographed with his or her artwork for a book to be produced after the event, and when the art piece is dismantled, each tile artist will get his or her tile back, along with a copy of the book.