JANUARY Highlights

Matapat

42nd annual University Folk Festival

Friday, Feb. 1 through Sunday, Feb. 3

The University Folklore Society’s 42nd annual Folk Festival will bring to campus folk musicians performing traditional and ethnic music of North America, Ireland and Scotland. This year’s headline act will be Matapat, presenting vibrant music and dance of Quebec. Concerts will be held each evening of the festival in Mandel Hall, 1135 E. 57th St. Free jam sessions, dancing and workshops will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 2 and Sunday, Feb. 3, in Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St. For a complete concert listing, ticket prices and other information, visit http://www.uofcfolk.org or call (773) 702-9793. For tickets, call (773) 702-7300.

University of Chicago Presents

Andrew Manze, violin, and Richard Egarr, harpsichord

Andrew Manze, violin, and Richard Egarr, harpsichord

8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 25

Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. 702-8068. $29 general, $11 students.

Violinist Andrew Manze will make his Chicago debut with harpsichordist Richard Egarr in a concert of baroque sonatas. Hailed as one of the finest baroque violinists today, Manze has performed around the world. Egarr works regularly as a chamber partner with Manze, playing all types of historical keyboards. This program will explore elements of the “Stylus Phantasticus,” which flourished in the mid-1600s and survived to enhance the more exotic music of the 18th century.

Smart Museum of Art

Mu Xin, Ancient Road at Kuaiji, 1977-79

“The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes”

Thursday, Jan. 24 through Sunday, March 31

Opening reception and gallery talk: 5-8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 24

Public exhibition tour: 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27

10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday; noon-6 p.m. Saturday-Sunday

Smart Museum, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. 702-0200. Free.

This exhibition will explore the work of contemporary Chinese artist Mu Xin, revealing his distinctive personal and artistic responses to tumultuous changes within 20th-century China. Jointly curated by two leading scholars––Alexandra Munroe, Director of the Japan Society Gallery, New York, and Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Art History––this exhibition will feature a suite of 33 landscape paintings created through a unique synthesis of Western and traditional Chinese painting styles as well as 66 pages of Mu Xin’s Prison Notes, written while he was in solitary confinement from 1970 to 1973.

Center for Gender Studies

“Open Wounds: The Melancholia of Illness and Race” by performance artist Tina Takemoto

Tina Takemoto

7 p.m. Thursday, January 24

First Floor Theater, Reynolds Club, 5706 S. University Ave. 702-9936.

Free and open to the public.

The Center for Gender Studies will continue its series “Art and Social Change” with a performance and discussion by performance artist Tina Takemoto. The program will explore what it means to identify and perform across bodies marked by illness, gender and race. Takemoto’s work, done in collaboration with her partner, Angela Ellsworth, includes “Squeaky Clean” and “Her/She Senses Imag(in)ed Malady.”