Blog Posts by Westmont

The Westmont Jazz Ensembles, directed by adjunct music professor Ron McCarley, will perform 8 p.m. April 15 in Deane Chapel on Westmont’s lower campus. Admission is free.

Three combos and a big band will treat the audience to a variety of pieces ranging from jazz standards to original compositions. Students Elizabeth Woodruff, Mary Patterson and Ben Banner will perform solos.

The Jazz Ensembles will also play in the courtyard of Restaurant Nu, 1129 State St., 7-10 p.m. April 5.

The Westmont theatre arts department presents unique performance art at the Fringe Festival 8 p.m. April 21 and 22 in Porter Theatre. Tickets are $10 for general admission and $5 for children, students and seniors.

The festival brings together senior students with theatre and dance faculty showcasing original theatre, dance, performance art and film. Fringe festivals usually refer to alternative productions with promises of younger, more adventurous performance art. The event replaces the “New Works Festival” that Westmont hosts each spring.

Westmont’s senior art majors will present their final work as undergraduates in the annual Senior Art Show, April 14 through May 7. An opening reception will be held 4-6 p.m. April 14 in Reynolds Gallery on lower campus. Free and open to the public, the reception will feature a student awards presentation at 5 p.m.

After more than 50 years, Westmont will retire its 16-inch Newtonian telescope from Carroll Observatory and install a 24-inch F/8 Cassegrain with Ritchey-Chrétien optics. The new instrument features more than twice the light-gathering power of the old one and nearly twice the resolving power.

A $300,000 W. M. Keck Foundation grant for the telescope follows a $90,000 award from the James L. Stamps Foundation and a $15,000 gift from another foundation. College officials are working to secure the remaining funds for the $635,000 project.

Professor Dorothy Wang of Northwestern University will speak on Asian American poets at 3:30 pm on Monday, March 21, in Hieronymus Lounge, in Kerrwood Hall on the upper campus.

The lecture, “Reading Asian American Literature,” is the first lecture this semester in the Erasmus Series. It is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett will speak on “What’s Right and What’s Wrong with American Education” at Westmont’s first President’s Breakfast, 7 a.m. April 1 in the Grand Ballroom at Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort. The sold-out event, first scheduled for Feb. 11, was postponed due to complications that arose after Bennett’s knee replacement surgery.