UAB Briefs: Football parade, 50th anniversary, art shows
Welcome to another installment of UAB Briefs.
In this weekly online feature, we keep track of interesting people and events on campus.
This week, the UAB Blazers football team is again in the spotlight after their recent championship season.
And we begin our year-long recognition of the university’s 50th anniversary.
Know people, places and programs on the UAB campus that deserve a mention? Email jchambers@starnespublishing.com.
HONORING ‘BIRMINGHAM’S TEAM’
Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin declared Friday, Jan. 18, to be “UAB Blazers Football Day” in conjunction with a parade to be held on campus to celebrate the team’s recent Conference USA championship and bowl-game victory, according to a news release from the city.
The parade will be held near campus on Friday beginning at 4 p.m., the release states.
The parade will begin outside at the UAB Administration Building at 701 20th St. South and move down University Boulevard, ending at the UAB Football facility at Sixth Avenue and 12th Street South.
“I join UAB in inviting Blazer fans to meet us on University Boulevard to honor the team,” Woodfin said. “Wear your green and gold and let’s show the team and Coach Bill Clark just how proud we are of them.”
The Blazers defeated Middle Tennessee State 27-25 in the Conference USA championship game on Dec. 1, and they pounded Northern Illinois in the Boca Raton Bowl on Dec. 19 by a score of 37-13 — their first-ever bowl win. This was also the team’s first 10-win season.
Clark also won the Eddie Robinson National Coach of the Year Award and was named Coach of the Year for 2018 by the Sporting News.
“This is Birmingham’s team,” Woodfin said. “What these young men accomplished under the leadership of Coach Clark is simply amazing.”
GOING FOR THE GOLDEN
UAB, created in 1969 though the merger of an academic medical center and a university extension center, is celebrating its 50th anniversary throughout 2019.
UAB Briefs will return to this topic throughout the year, but there is already lots of information available online.
Check out the university's 50th anniversary website at uab.edu/50.
The site features an archive with artifacts from UAB’s past, including buildings, athletic accomplishments, campus life and health and medicine.
There is also a timeline featuring key moments from the school’s history.
LANDSCAPE REIMAGINED
A performance by artist Irene Grau is documented in the exhibition “Irene Grau: Incohérent Walk,” on display at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at UAB through March 16.
Grau, who is based in Valencia, Spain, will give a lecture on her exhibition at AEIVA on Friday, Jan. 11, at 5 p.m., and an opening reception — free and open to the public — will be held from 6-8 p.m., according to a UAB news release.
During this performance, the artist, based in Valencia, Spain, walked through the green spaces of Santiago de Compostela dressed in green clothes carrying a green painting.
Grau’s AEIVA exhibition is a conceptual “retelling” of her performance, and uses audio, text, paint, fabric and photography to discuss traditional landscape painting.
In her work, Grau seeks to reevaluate the landscape genre. For example, she experiments with monochrome painting, the use of only one color.
“‘Incohérent Walk’ transforms our thinking and speaks of painting and landscape as a way of seeing,” AEIVA curator John Fields said in the release.
STUDENT SHOW
Twenty-five student artists are showing their work in the 43rd Juried Annual Student Exhibition at UAB, which opened Jan. 7 and will be on display at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts through March 7.
There will be a free opening reception and awards ceremony at AEIVA on Friday, Jan. 11, from 6-8 p.m.
The exhibition was coordinated by the UAB Department of Art and Art History and was open to all students currently enrolled in art classes.
The New Orleans-based collaborative duo of Cristina Molina and Jonathan Traviesa served as the jurors for the show.
Molina is a visual artist who creates video installations and is associate professor of new media and animation at Southeastern Louisiana University. Traviesa is a photographer who teaches at Tulane University.
Both are members of The Front, an artist-run collective and nonprofit gallery in the Crescent City.