American Paintings from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery: An Institutional History of Pictures runs at the Sheldon through Oct. 28.

Sheldon Docent Training Begins Aug. 27

The Docent Course at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden begins on Aug. 27 and will continue every Monday and Wednesday through September from 9 a.m. to noon. Additional monthly sessions are held as exhibitions change during the school year.

Volunteers who wish to learn about Sheldon and who will provide informational tours are eligible to apply for the course. Docents must have a commitment to education in the visual arts, enthusiasm about working with people of all ages and time to volunteer.

The course teaches participants how to help visitors increase their knowledge of the variety of visual images in Sheldon's collection. The course also provides information and materials for applicants to become proficient in touring skills. No special background or expertise is required.

After the course, the docent program requires a minimum commitment of one morning per week throughout the school year. The primary audience for tours is elementary students from Lincoln Public Schools who visit Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings throughout the school year. Many additional tour groups are scheduled for afternoons and other days.

The Sheldon Docent Program, beginning its 38th year, has an annual enrollment of about 65.

To apply or nominate an applicant, contact Karen Janovy, curator of education at the Sheldon Gallery, University of Nebraska, 12th & R streets, Lincoln, NE 68588-0300. Call 472.2461 or e-mail <kjanovy1@unl.edu>.

University Theatre Plans 101st Season

University Theatre will kick off its 101st season on Oct. 11 with the play God's Country by Steven Dietz. Season ticket packages go on sale beginning Sept. 1, and individual performance tickets will be available Oct. 1.

Directed by Harris Smith, God's Country is a docudrama based on the growing white-supremacist movement in the United States. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 11-13 and 16-19, and at 2 p.m. Oct. 21 in Howell Theatre.

Other season offerings:

• Female Transport by Steve Gooch, directed by Virginia Smith. This drama is based on an account of the political education of six women convicted of petty crimes in 19th-century London. Sentenced to a life of hard labor in the Australian prison colony, the women learn certain truths about society during their six-month voyage. Female Transport will be at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 8-9 and 13-17, and at 2 p.m. Nov. 11 in the Studio Theatre.
• Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, directed by Tice L. Miller. Based on the famous Scopes trial, it paints a portrait of an explosive episode in American culture when the teaching of creationism was pitted against the teaching of the theory of evolution. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 29-30 and Dec. 1 and 4-8 in Howell Theatre.
• Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare, directed by Stan Brown. When the Duke of Vienna decides to take a sabbatical, his deputy's enthusiasm and harshness in carrying out his duties take everyone aback in this dark comedy of power, deception and disguise. Measure for Measure will be at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 14-16 and 19-23 in Howell Theatre.
• The Little Humpback Horse by Virginia Smith, adapted from a Russian tale by Peter Ershoff, with original music by Paul Amandes and lyrics by Virginia Smith and Paul Amandes, is a play intended for all members of the family. Performances are at 7 p.m. March 13-15 and at 2 and 7 p.m. March 16-17. The play will be available to tour area elementary schools March 19-22.
• Anna Karenina by Helen Edmundson, adapted from the novel by Leo Tolstoy and directed by Virginia Smith. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. April 18-20 and 23-27 in the Howell Theatre.

Season ticket "Six-Packs" will be available Sept. 1. The Six-Pack entitles patrons to six admissions in any combination and offers a cost savings over individual admissions. Season Six-Packs are $50 each and are not available for students/youths. Individual prices are $12 for patrons; $10 for faculty, staff and senior citizens; and $8 for the student/youth rate.

For Tickets Season tickets for the 101st season of University Theatre go on sale Sept. 1. Tickets for individual plays go on sale Oct. 1. Season tickets are $50; individual tickets range from $8-$12. Tickets are at Lied Center for Performing Arts Box Office; call 472-4747 or (800) 432-3231.

GP Film Festival Announces Winners

The creators of a dozen films and videos celebrated July 27 at the Great Plains Film Festival 2001 Awards Ceremony as they received a total of $15,000 in prize money.

The Grand Prize went to Split Decision, directed by Marcy Garriott.

The Rainbow Award honoring the film determined to best explicate the Latino/Great Plains ethic heritage went to Hector Galan's Accordion Dreams.

Randy Redroad's The Doe Boy won Best Narrative Feature. The award for Best Documentary Feature was shared by Bradley Beesley's Okie Noddling and Hybrid by Monteith McCollum.

Los Trabajadores (The Workers) by Heather Courtney received the Nebraska Humanities Council Award.

The Perfect Babysitter by Robbin Shahani was declared Best Narrative Short and Eugene McCarthy: I'm Sorry I was Right by Mike Hazard was Best Documentary Short.

Last Stand of the Tallgrass Prairie by John Altman and Aimee Larrabee won the Made for Public Television category.

Three winners were honored in the new Youth Media category: Leadbelly and Irene: Heartbeat of the Musical Frontier by Megan Stewart; Smashing the Myth by Listen Up!, a compilation of young women's work from across the United States; and Taff-E by Robert Yanike and Shawn Gourley.

Final jury members, who selected the winners, included Kate Davis (Southern Comfort), Timothy Linh Bui (Green Dragon), Cinnamon Hunter (Chain Camera), and Douglas Greenfield, director of Dolby Laboratories in Hollywood.

John Beasley, a Chicago/Minneapolis-based stage, film and television actor who lives in Omaha, received the Mary Riepma Ross Award, along with Norman Geske, who began the film exhibition program at UNL in the early 1960s soon after the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery opened.

Widow Plays at the Ross

The Widow of Saint-Pierre, a romantic epic starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, shows at 7 and 9:15 p.m. Aug. 23-24 and 1, 3:15, 7 and 9:15 p.m. Aug. 25-26 at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.

Several of the sculptures on display at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.

Sculpture Is Focal Point for Sheldon Permanent Galleries

The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden has completed a major reinstallation of the permanent collection galleries. This reinstallation presents sculpture as an important and dynamic aesthetic medium in the history and development of 19th- and 20th-century American art.

The galleries celebrate sculpture through six separate but related exhibitions:

• Neo-Classicism and Romanticism;
• Folk Art;
• Modernism;
• Expressionism;
• Minimalism;
• Conceptualism.

The reinstallation also celebrates the stylistic diversity of American Sculpture.

Among the nearly 50 artists represented are Alexander Calder, Howard Finster, Barbara Hepworth, David Ireland, Paul Manship, Elie Nadelman and Louise Nevelson.

This reinstallation directs attention to two important characteristics of sculpture and how artists have explored and exploited them to achieve powerful aesthetic statements. First, a work of sculpture is an object, occupying space along with other objects, from everyday "non art" objects to human beings. This differs dramatically from painting and photography, which to varying degrees separates itself from the world of common objects through its display on a wall.

The artists represented have sought, by various means, to keep sculpture separate and sacred from other objects, and those who have retained this tension by making sculpture that appears indistinguishable from other objects.

Second, sculpture is a public medium. All cultures utilize both monumental architecture and sculpture to construct and maintain community by affirming commonly held beliefs. Whether adorning a state building or animating a college campus, sculpture continues to retain this public significance and function. In addition, remnants of this public dimension are brought into art museum and gallery spaces.

These galleries feature work that participates with the powerful ideology of the museum space to assert the universal values of art and culture, whether by affirming the civic and aesthetic virtues of the "good, true, and beautiful," or through the glorification of the artist's expression as an embodiment of these values. But these galleries also feature work that undermines those values and virtues by calling into question the very legitimacy of sculpture as a carrier of meaning, either public or private.

Whether it is intended to represent or express public or private meaning or to revel in its own status as an object, sculpture has been and continues to be an important language for artists. How they have used this language and what they say with it is the subject of this reinstallation.

To See Sculptures reinstalled as part of the Sheldon's permanent collection can be viewed at the gallery, 12th and R streets, during regular hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and 2-9 p.m. Sundays. For information, call 472-2461.

Faulkner Organ Recital Aug. 30

The School of Music presents Quentin Faulkner in a faculty recital at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 30 on the Miskell Memorial Organ in Kimball Recital Hall.

The performance will explore new opportunities for understanding the organ music of Johann Sebastian Bach that have arisen as a consequence of the fall of the wall and the unification of East and West Germany. Faulkner will perform several brief hymn settings from Bach's Little Organ Book, as well as the Piéce d'Orgue (Fantasy in G Major).

The recital is free and open to the public.

Reception For Decades Exhibition Is Aug. 24

A closing reception for the exhibition The Decades: 1940-1980 UNL Studio Art Alumni will occur from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Aug. 24 in the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery in Richards Hall.

The Decades: 1940-1980 UNL Studio Art Alumni features the work of selected artists from the Department of Art and Art History studio program 1940-1980, with a special display of three works by Aaron Douglas, bachelor of fine arts, 1922. The works of Douglas are on loan from the collection of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Nebraska Art Association collection and the Museum of Nebraska Art.

Book-Signing Sept. 22

UNL master's graduate Sean Doolittle will read from and discuss his new book, Dirt, at a book-signing at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 22 at Lee Booksellers in the Edgewood Shopping Center, 56th Street and Highway 2.

Doolittle has published short fiction in various small press and mass-market publications for the past 10 years. Dirt (Uglytown, paperback) is his first novel. Doolittle is at work on a second novel, due out sometime next year. The author now lives in Omaha.

Dirt features the hapless Quince Bishop and his introduction to shenanigans in the big business of funerals.

Big Red Wrap-Up Returns to Nebraska ETV, NETV2

With a pre-season ranking of fourth nationally for the Nebraska Cornhuskers and an early season start against Texas Christian University in the Pigskin Classic on Aug. 25, Big Red football fever has again hit the state.

And as Nebraska football returns, so does the ever-popular Big Red Wrap-Up series. The state's only live television call-in Husker football show airs as part of NETV Sports at 7 p.m. Tuesdays beginning Aug. 28 on the Nebraska ETV Network. Big Red Wrap-Up repeats on NETV2 at 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on Thursdays beginning Aug. 30.

Big Red Wrap-Up provides a combination of highlights from the previous Saturday's Nebraska football game as well as coverage of the coaches' weekly press conferences and analysis with Nebraska sportswriters and sportscasters. Viewers from Nebraska and across the country can also call in or e-mail questions about Husker football to guests who join series host Kevin Kugler.