EASTHAMPTON — On Aug. 27, 1972, some 20,000 fans shouldered into the small town of Veneta, Oregon to hear the Grateful Dead put on what many consider one of its best live performances.
Fifty years later, the Valley band Mind Left Body will recreate that show, known as “Sunshine Daydream,” today (Saturday, Aug. 27) at the Blue Room in the city’s Old Town Hall, as a fundraiser to help turn the second floor of the building into a performing arts and community space.
Tickets for the concert, which begins at 7:30 p.m., are $10, and additional donations are encouraged for those who can make them.
The original Dead concert took place after novelist and counterculture figure Ken Kesey asked the band to play in Oregon to help his brother’s financially struggling creamery. The concert was later turned into a live album and a documentary film.
Mind Left Body, which specializes in performing what it calls “thoughtful interpretations” of the Grateful Dead songbook, says the opportunity to restage the Sunshine Daydream show and raise money for Old Town Hall’s restoration “was something that we didn’t want to let pass by.”
AMHERST — Matthew Westgate, associate professor and director of wind studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been appointed the new chair of the university’s Department of Music and Dance.
A Michigan native and a jazz/classical trombonist, Westgate has led the department’s wind ensembles on a concert tour of Ireland and in performances at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and Yale University. In 2016, he was nominated for the UMass “Distinguished Teaching Award,” the only student-driven recognition of teaching on campus.
As a conductor, Westgate has appeared on major concert stages in the U.S., Europe, South America and Asia. He says he’s committed to “redesigning and updating the department’s curricula” to meet the needs of today’s students, and to fostering collaborations within the department and the university.
“I am so proud to be a member of this extraordinary community, and I look forward to serving as Department Chair in the years to come,” he said in a statement.
Westgate replaces Salvatore Macchia, a composer and contrabassist, as department chair; Macchia is returning to teaching and composing in his 44th year at UMass.
AMHERST — The Hitchcock Center for the Environment and the theater ensemble Rainbow Players have teamed up to present the “Home Sweet Home Climate Action Community Festival and Obstacle Course” on Aug. 27 from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m.
This all-ages event includes a range of performances including theater, music, and various workshops and interactive events, including guidance through a “participatory obstacle course,” in which attendees can explore how climate change is affecting our world and what the future might bring.
“Each person (will have) opportunities to contribute thoughts and art as solutions,” according to program notes. The Rainbow Players are part of the larger organization ETTA International (Empowerment Through the Arts).
A range of artists and activists will be on hand, including youth from Sunrise Youth & Climate Action Now; Mothers Out Front; Climate Action Now Western MA; Tom Sullivan of Pollinators Welcome; and Anna Sobel and Talking Hands Theatre.
The event is free but donations for climate groups and indigenous lands are encouraged. More information is available at www.etta-international.org/news.html.
AMHERST — The Augusta Savage Gallery at UMass Amherst opens a new exhibit Sept. 12 that will highlight quilts made by the founders of a group that formed to support a prisoners’ hospice program and incarcerated artists.
“STITCHING TIME: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project” showcases colorful quilts made by the founders of an effort that dates back to 1997, in which inmates from Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as “Angola” after a plantation that once existed there, made that art to raise money to help care for the dying among them.
The work later extended to raising money for supplies for other artists behind bars.
The quilts, according to exhibit notes, address racial injustice in American history and celebrate Black creativity, thought, and political activism. The work has since spread beyond “Angola” prison, and the UMass exhibit includes work by some well-known incarcerated people such as Leonard Peltier.
An opening reception takes place Sept. 12 from 5 to 7 p.m., and an artists’ talk will be held Sept. 13 from 11 a.m to noon.
NORTHAMPTON — Paintings, ceramics, and Japanese pop art will all be on display at Hosmer Gallery in Forbes Library next month, in an exhibit that runs Sept. 2 through 29.
Painter Kimiko Donohoe, a native of Japan, says she’s inspired by “the small details of life” as well as Ukiyo-e, a style of painting and woodblock printing that flourished in Japan from the 17th through 19th centuries. Her pieces integrate pop art with the colors and styles common in Ukiyo-e.
Dale Rogers is a painter and potter who makes art “to honor and cherish ordinary daily life,” as program notes put it, while Maggie Hodges, a former graphic designer, is now a painter who draws inspiration from the outdoors. She is member of the Amherst Plein Air Society.
— Compiled by Steve Pfarrer