University of North Texas 
Fine Arts Series
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Poetry Workshop | 12pm | Union 385
Performance | 7:30pm | UNT Union Lyceum
No tickets required
Andre Bradford, a.k.a. S.C. Says, is an Austin-based slam poet who has been performing slam poetry since 2013. He's toured and performed at venues, universities, and conferences across the country, and his work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Write About Now, The Edge Radio, The Culture Trip, and Blavity. He is a two-time Austin Poetry Slam Champion, the 2022 Texas Grand Slam Champion, and is the author of the poetry collection Golden Brown Skin.
He also one popped a bag of popcorn without burning a single kernel, which is arguably one of his greatest achievements. His poetry covers a gamut of topics ranging from being mixed race, to social justice, to mental health awareness, to never settling in relationships. Slam poetry is an art form he loves due to its raw vulnerability and its ability to cultivate transparency and dialogues into many different walks of life.
Wednesday, October 23 & Thursday, October 24, 2024
10/23 | Artist Conversation | 6pm | Greater Denton Arts Council (GDAC) CANCELLED
10/24 | Gallery Reception | 5-7pm | CVAD Gallery
No tickets required
Ashish is a designer whose eponymous London-based fashion label has been synonymous with glamour, maximalist design and painstaking craftsmanship for over 20 years. Known for working in bold, joyful colors and creating clothes which are hand-embroidered in sequins and beads, he approaches his work with a rainbow palette and a glittering sensibility. Ashish is a pioneering voice in the fashion industry whose work challenges stereotypes and foregrounds equitable representation, exploring the role that clothing can play in the politics of optimism and inclusion. The London-based designer has been a vocal advocate of diversity throughout his career. His designs have been worn by global icons, including Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Sarah Jessica Parker, Katy Perry, Madonna, and Taylor Swift (he has designed the looks for the 'Red' section of her current world tour). Having first shown at London Fashion Week in 2005, Ashish has grown his label from winning the prestigious NewGen aware three times to being exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2023, Ashish was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in London.
Thursday, November 7, 2024
Author Lecture & Book Signing
7pm | University Union Lyceum
Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and Matrix, as well as the celebrated short-story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida, a 2018 National Book Award finalist. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin Madison.
In her lectures, Groff captivates audiences with thoughtful reflections on the writing craft and discussion of the influences and inspiration behind her bestselling works. Fates and Furies was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Amazon's #1 Best Book of the Year in 2015. It is an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception, and has garnered tremendous critical acclaim. Her follow-up book, Florida, was similarly acclaimed and was nominated for the 2018 National Book Award and won the prestigious annual Story Prize. Her latest novel, Matrix, was an instant New York Times bestseller, winner of the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award. She also edited a collection of stories by author Nancy Hale entitled Where the Light Falls, bringing a forgotten master of the short story back into the literary conversation.
Lauren Groff's work has appeared in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic, and in several of the annual The Best American Short Stories anthologies. Groff's fiction has won the Paul Bowles Prize for Fiction, the Medici Book Club Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.
Wednesday, January 29 & Thursday, January 30, 2025
01/29 | Dance Masterclass* | 9-10:20; 11-12:20pm | DATH Building
01/30 | Dance Performance | 1pm & 7pm | University Theater
Tickets available at unt.universitytickets.com
Free for UNT Students | $10 for faculty/staff/alumni | $15 for general public
Black Label Movement is a Twin Cities based movement theater company dedicated to making wildly physical, naturally virtuosic, and intellectually and emotionally engaging art. Led by Carl Flink, BL creates intensely physical contemporary concert dance, seeks collaborations with unexpected partners and develops unique embodied presentations, such as their numerous TED Talks. Challenging themselves and their communities through daring art making, multifaceted research, and unique approaches to collaboration and education, BL maintains a broad-spectrum strategy for engaging stakeholders, who are defined as: company members, traditional performing arts audiences, arts education communities, and diverse populations, like scientists, that rarely access dance or embodied activities but find themselves drawn to the company's work.
BL's team represents a range of cultures, with individuals from various movement backgrounds, including breaking, ballet, modern, and competitive athletics. The diverse range of its community is essential to Black Label's vision for art-making. Black Label Movement is a regional Emmy Award winner, multiple Minneapolis Sage-Award winner, has received "Dance Company of the Year" from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, called City Pages "Artist of the Year", been commissioned twice by American Dance Festival, and toured or offered workshops and residencies in Florida (University of Florida), Washington D.C. (Kennedy Center), Brussels (Belgium), California, Martha's Vineyard, Bangalore (India), Bates Dance Festival, Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis), Duluth (Minnesota), Chicago, Texas (University of North Texas), and New York City.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Music Performance | 7:30pm | UNT Union Syndicate
No Tickets Required
Mali Obomsawin is a Wabanaki bassist, composer, and songwriter who creates music that flies in the face of Western tropes insisting Indigenous cultures are monolithic, trapped in time. Instead, Obomsawin highlights centuries of clever adaptation and resistance that have fueled the art and culture of Wabanaki people. Raised on ancestral land in central Maine and in Québec on the Odanak First Nations Reserve, Mali Obomsawin is used to living between linguistic and political borders, but also recognizes the absurdity of such dichotomies. When studying jazz at Dartmouth College (founded as an Indian school in 1769 to educate Wabanaki people) with cornetist and co-producer Taylor Ho Bynum, Obomsawin came to find that the voices of their actual ancestors languished in the archives of the college: field recordings of Odanak's songs and stories kept locked away. As Obomsawin became a masterful bassist and immersed themselves in the tradition's history, they came to learn that many jazz greats themselves were Native, and indeed many of the core principles of American music, like the four on the floor beat or the swing of the drum, were influences by Indigenous musical ideas. Mali Obomsawin tells stories celebrating the many Indigenous musical artists who came before, who faced an unrelenting system and prevailed by crafting new ideas into new expressions of themselves.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Author Lecture | 7:30pm | UNT Union Lyceum
No tickets required
Sonya Clark is an artist and educator who creates installations and objects rooted in craft's legacy. She employs the language of textiles and politics of hair to celebrate Blackness while interrogating historical imbalances. She's the Winifred Arms Professor of Arts and Humanities at Amherst College in Massachusetts. She's received awards from many organizations including United States Artists, Pollock-Krasner, Art Prize, and Anonymous Was a Woman. Her work has been exhibited in over 500 venues worldwide.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Leslie David Baker | 7:30pm | UNT Union Lyceum
Tickets on sale now! | UNTuniontickets.com
This event includes a lecture and Q&A. Doors will open at 7:00 p.m., and entry will be restricted to 5 minutes after the performance starts.
Mr. Baker starred as Stanley Hudson for nine seasons on the Emmy Award-winning NBC/Universal Television series “The Office.” His other film and television credits include: “The Happytime Murders,” “Wish I Was Here,” “When Duty Calls,” “Road to Redemption,” “Scrubs,” “ Just Shoot Me,” “That 70’s Show”, “Malcolm in the Middle” “The Guardian,” “Puppy Dog Pals,” “Doug Unplugs,” “Tom & Jerry,” “Vivo,” and numerous national commercials.
Born and raised in Chicago, Mr. Baker holds a B.S. in Applied Psychology from Loyola University Chicago and an M.S. in Human Services Administration from Spertus Institute Chicago. He has worked as an administrator for the City of Chicago’s Departments of Health AIDS Programs and Policies and the Office of Cable Communications. He also worked as an Educator for the City of Chicago’s Board of Education. Mr. Baker has worked as a Mental Health Therapist at 3 Psychiatric Hospitals and has served as a Program/Project Consultant for the following:
- The Playwrights Center, Chicago
- U.S. Department of Public Health and Centers for Disease Control
- Academy of Educational Development, Washington D.C.
- Illinois States Attorney’s Office, Health Task Force
- University of Illinois School of Public Health
- Cook County Hospital, Chicago
- American Red Cross
