Capital Region Curated: November 2-8
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, actor D.B. Woodside and more.
Alan Koslow
30
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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BERNARD TSCHUMI, DOROTHY ROBERTS, D.B. WOODSIDE & A U.S.–CHINA SPACE RACE
What do buildings encourage us to do? How has American law shaped whom we can marry? And are the United States and China entering a new race beyond Earth? This week’s campus programs approach large questions through the work of architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, and former NASA policy adviser Patrick Besha.
There is plenty to hear and see, too: actor D.B. Woodside returns to UAlbany, the Tang brings artists, mapping, ecology, and hands-on workshops together around 500 Dams, and Capital Duo joins the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company. Elsewhere, a novelist explores young lives, a scientist explains how light makes computer chips, and Grease reaches its final weekend.
Bernard Tschumi’s work asks how architecture shapes the encounters, movements, and unexpected experiences that happen inside it.
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🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Bernard Tschumi, Dorothy Roberts, D.B. Woodside and Patrick Besha on a U.S.–China space race.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Architecture, interracial marriage and law, space competition, Beyoncé and teaching, semiconductor manufacturing, Indigenous political thought, and stem cell therapies.
📚 Books, Film & Storytelling — D.B. Woodside’s acting career, Kristen McCallum’s Free Girls, and Skidmore professors on the movies that matter to them.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — The Tang’s 500 Dams artist conversation, mapping and zine workshops, a guided museum visit, and a behind-the-scenes EMPAC tour.
🎭 Theater & Dance — The final weekend of Grease, student choreography at the Tang, and Capital Duo with the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Musicians of Ma’alwyck, EMPAC’s Recess!, Union’s Early Music Ensemble, and the sold-out Skidmania ’76.
🔥 Plan Ahead — NANOvember Family Day, EMPAC’s limited-capacity cognitive science program, and Paul Mauren’s exhibition opening at HVCC.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Robotics and mixed reality at EMPAC.
🎭 Future Theater — Upcoming campus productions through early May.
🖼️ Exhibitions Open This Week — A compact guide to current exhibitions and installations, immediately after Future Theater.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
Where an organizer has not published an ending time, calendar entries use our standard 90-minute duration.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event information is checked during preparation, but schedules can change and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ FOUR TOP PICKS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract — RPI / EMPAC
The architect behind Paris’s Parc de la Villette and Athens’s New Acropolis Museum comes to RPI for the Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. Tschumi has spent his career challenging the idea that architecture is simply a matter of attractive forms: his work considers how buildings organize movement, activity, and encounters. Monday, November 2, at 5 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project — Albany Law School
A family story opens onto a much larger legal history as MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts examines interracial marriage, race, love, and law. The author of Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention, and Torn Apart brings decades of scholarship on institutions and inequality to Albany Law’s annual Katz Lecture. Wednesday, November 4, at 5:30 PM; in person and online.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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D.B. Woodside — University at Albany
Before audiences knew him from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Night Agent, D.B. Woodside was a UAlbany student. He returns for a free conversation about a career spanning television, film, and stage—including work portraying Martin Luther King Jr. and performing Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew. Wednesday, November 4, at 7:30 PM.
See Books, Film & Storytelling below.
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A U.S.–China Space Race? — University at Albany
Patrick Besha brings more than two decades of government experience, including service as a senior NASA policy adviser, to a question that reaches beyond rockets. With both countries pursuing lunar ambitions and operating major satellite and human-spaceflight programs, what kind of competition is developing—and what is at stake? Monday, November 2, from 1:30–3:30 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
Bernard Tschumi · RPI / EMPAC
An architect’s work continues after construction ends: people enter, move through it, gather, perform, and sometimes use it in ways its designers never anticipated. That relationship between space and activity has been central to Bernard Tschumi, whose projects include Parc de la Villette in Paris and the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
Tschumi’s importance also comes from his writing and teaching. He has challenged architecture’s tendency to treat a building as an isolated object, arguing for attention to the events and movements that give a place its life. At La Villette, that thinking produced a landscape of intersecting routes, structures, and activities rather than a conventional park organized around a single central composition.
His lecture, “Abstract,” is this year’s Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. It offers a chance to hear an internationally influential practitioner whose questions apply well beyond the profession: how do designed spaces shape what becomes possible within them?
📅 Monday, November 2 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Concert Hall · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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A U.S.–China Space Race?
Patrick Besha · University at Albany / Emeritus Center
The United States and China operate the world’s largest space programs, with crewed space stations and thousands of satellites in orbit. Both are pursuing ambitious exploration goals, including plans involving the Moon and Mars. The question is how far those parallel ambitions amount to a strategic race.
Patrick Besha, founder of Global Space Group and a faculty member at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, approaches the subject with substantial government experience. During more than two decades in public service, he worked as a senior policy adviser at NASA headquarters and received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.
His background makes this a useful opportunity to consider space exploration as international policy as well as scientific achievement. The Emeritus Center says the presentation will not be recorded, so readers who want to hear it should plan to attend in person.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 1:30–3:30 PM
📍 Emeritus Center, UAB 134 · 1215 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free; in person
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons: Pop Culture, Politics and Pedagogy
Janell Hobson · University at Albany
What can a major popular-cultural work make visible that a conventional classroom discussion might miss? Janell Hobson takes Beyoncé’s _Lemonade_ as a way into questions of race, gender, politics, and teaching, continuing UAlbany’s series on “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Hobson has taught in UAlbany’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies for nearly 25 years. Her books include Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Body as Evidence, and When God Lost Her Tongue. She also writes for Ms. and has edited projects connecting Black feminist scholarship with public history.
That combination of academic research and writing for wider audiences gives the subject more substance than a celebrity discussion. The lecture places a familiar cultural work within the larger question of how teachers help students interpret images, histories, and power.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
💻 Streaming option available
Details and streaming information
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
Robert L. Brainard · University at Albany / NANOvember
Computer chips depend on the ability to create extraordinarily small patterns with remarkable precision. Robert L. Brainard explains how light helps accomplish that task, introducing the science behind a manufacturing process whose products sit inside phones, computers, vehicles, and much of modern infrastructure.
Brainard is a professor in UAlbany’s Department of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. His field connects chemistry with semiconductor fabrication, making him a particularly useful guide to a process that can otherwise sound like an impenetrable collection of technical terms.
This public lecture opens the month’s NANOvember lecture series. For readers curious about what happens inside the region’s semiconductor industry, it offers a concrete starting point: how a physical process becomes a tool for making electronic devices.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 6–7 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Doors open at 5:15 PM · Registration preferred, not required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Dorothy Roberts’s work connects the intimate life of families with the institutions and laws that define racial inequality.
Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts · Albany Law School
Dorothy Roberts has spent decades examining how American institutions reproduce racial inequality, often through decisions presented as private, protective, or scientifically neutral. Her books have addressed reproductive freedom, child welfare, and the persistent tendency to treat race as a biological fact rather than a political and social construction.
In “The Mixed Marriage Project: Lessons from the History of Interracial Marriage on Race, Love, and Law,” Roberts turns toward the relationship between family history and public law. The subject asks readers to consider how legal rules have reached into intimate life—and how marriage has both challenged and exposed racial boundaries.
Roberts is a MacArthur Fellow and the University of Pennsylvania’s George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology. Albany Law’s Katz Lecture, established around family-law concerns including reproductive rights, domestic violence, children, and inequality, provides an apt setting for this conversation. A reception follows the lecture; an online option is also available.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM · Reception follows
📍 Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Register in advance · In person and via Zoom
12th Annual Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
Glen Coulthard · Union College / Philosophy Department Speaker Series
Political ideas change as they move across countries, movements, and historical circumstances. Glen Coulthard’s lecture, “Maoism as Traveling Theory: Understanding Red Power Marxism during Canada’s Long Seventies,” examines that movement of ideas within Indigenous political struggle.
Coulthard, a scholar at the University of British Columbia, works on Indigenous politics and political theory. His appearance brings a specific historical question to Union’s series: how did activists encounter, adapt, or challenge revolutionary theories developed in very different settings?
The lecture’s title gives readers a more precise point of entry than a general discussion of political ideology. It invites attention to the relationship between imported theory and local experience—what travels successfully, what changes, and what cannot simply be transplanted.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30 PM
📍 Everest Lounge · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
Rebekah M. Samsonraj · RPI / Biomedical Engineering
Stem cells hold considerable promise for repairing damaged tissue, but promise alone does not produce a dependable treatment. Rebekah M. Samsonraj’s research addresses the difficult step between encouraging laboratory results and therapies that can be manufactured consistently and used reproducibly.
An assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arkansas, Samsonraj directs the Cellular Therapy and Biomanufacturing Laboratory. Her work includes identifying biomarkers that may help predict the potency of mesenchymal stem cells, studying how mechanical signals influence their behavior, and developing scalable approaches to cell-derived products.
The seminar focuses particularly on skeletal repair. It considers both cell-based treatments and extracellular vesicles—small particles released by cells—as researchers seek safer and more practical ways to translate regenerative science into clinical use.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 2 PM
📍 EMPAC, Studio Beta · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, FILM & STORYTELLING
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D.B. Woodside returns to the university where his acting career began taking shape, bringing experience from television, film, and the stage.
D.B. Woodside: The Burian Lecture
D.B. Woodside · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
For television audiences, D.B. Woodside may be a familiar face from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Single Ladies, The Temptations, or The Night Agent. This week, the 1991 UAlbany graduate returns to campus for a conversation about a career that extends well beyond any single role.
His stage work includes portraying Martin Luther King Jr. in The Conscientious Objector, his New York theater debut. He also received an NAACP Award for Best Lead Male for his performance in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, a play whose Detroit factory setting places work, loyalty, and economic insecurity at its center.
The annual Burian Lecture brings theater scholars and practitioners to UAlbany in recognition of Jarka Burian’s long service to the university. Woodside’s return gives the evening a particularly direct connection between campus training and the professional life that can follow.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
Kristen McCallum · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
Kristen McCallum credits the adventures of her Jamaican family with beginning her fascination with stories. A UAlbany graduate with degrees earned in 2013 and 2025, she returns with her debut novel, Free Girls, published this summer.
Her work beyond fiction also centers on who gets heard. She founded SafeWordSociety, a creative initiative celebrating historically marginalized communities, and has worked in curriculum development, public engagement, and organizational strategy. She is currently director of operations for the New York State Defenders Association.
The Writers Institute presents this appearance under the heading “Heartache and Hope.” It offers a chance to hear a new novelist whose professional and creative work share an interest in community, transformation, and the possibilities of storytelling. Books will be available for purchase, with a signing after the conversation.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center, Multipurpose Room · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Book signing follows
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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MOVIE LOVE: Skidmore Professors GET PERSONAL at the Movies
Skidmore College / Salmagundi
Some films matter to us for reasons that criticism alone cannot fully explain. They become attached to a particular age, a relationship, a discovery, or a way of understanding ourselves. MOVIE LOVE makes that personal connection its starting point.
Presented as a Salmagundi program, the evening brings Skidmore professors together to discuss their relationships with movies. The emphasis on getting personal suggests a welcome shift from treating films only as objects to analyze toward considering what they do in the lives of the people watching them.
The departmental listing has not supplied a full participant or film list, so there is no promised lineup here. The attraction is the format itself: an opportunity to hear familiar or unfamiliar films discussed through experience as well as expertise.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 7:30 PM
📍 Davis Auditorium · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART, VISUAL CULTURE & MAKING
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At Anaya Springs, small stone dams connect artistic practice with the patient work of restoring water, soil, and plant life.
The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Bill Gilbert, Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes and Rachel Seligman · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What can a small structure accomplish when it is built repeatedly, carefully, and in response to a particular landscape? At Anaya Springs in New Mexico, hand-built stone dams have become part of a long effort to slow water, hold soil, and regenerate degraded grasslands.
The Tang’s 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs follows that work through artistic practice, mapping, and environmental research. The exhibition brings together ways of knowing a place that are often separated: observation, data, construction, painting, and the accumulated experience of returning to the same ground.
Bill Gilbert opens the evening with a talk, followed by a conversation with Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes, and curator Rachel Seligman. Friday’s workshops offer opportunities to explore two of the project’s methods more directly.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Charlie Bettigole · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A map can do more than tell us where something is. It can reveal relationships among water, terrain, vegetation, and human intervention—connections that may be difficult to recognize while standing on the ground.
Charlie Bettigole, a Survival Kit Collective member and a Middlebury College lecturer and director of applied GIS, leads this introduction to geographic information systems. His work uses geospatial science to investigate environmental questions, ranging from individual parcels to much larger landscapes.
No previous experience is required. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop, and the museum requests advance registration. The workshop provides a practical complement to 500 Dams, introducing one of the tools used to understand and communicate the project’s landscape.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 11 AM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Register in advance · Bring a laptop if possible
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Flora Zine-Making
Lynn Grimes · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A single sheet of paper can become a small book: folded, copied, exchanged, and carried away. Lynn Grimes leads a workshop in making plant-themed zines, connecting the modest scale of a handmade publication with the close observation of the natural world.
Grimes has lived off the grid in New Mexico’s western Galisteo Basin since 1990. Her work records the surrounding landscape through botanical painting, sketchbooks, nature journals, relief prints, and handmade books. She is also a longtime educator whose work appears in 500 Dams.
Participants will create a one-page plant zine that can be reproduced and folded into multiple pages. The format makes this an accessible entry into publishing your own observations: something small enough to finish, share, and make again.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 2 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · No experience required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Tang Guide Tour
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 leads a tour of the Tang’s current exhibitions as part of its student gallery-guide program. The guided visit offers a starting point for looking closely and asking questions; visitors are invited to stay afterward and explore independently.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Meet in the Tang Atrium · Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
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Inside EMPAC: Public Tour
Francis Grunfeld · RPI / EMPAC
EMPAC’s public tours offer a look behind the performances at a building designed to accommodate a wide range of artistic and technical possibilities. The experience can involve thinking about how a room handles sound, how a stage changes, or how light shapes a space.
Each tour is led by a different member of the EMPAC team. Francis Grunfeld leads the November visit, making this an opportunity to encounter the building through the perspective of someone who works within it.
Tours last about 90 minutes. EMPAC recommends registering ahead and arriving ten minutes early; the meeting point is the main lobby on Level 7, reached from the roundabout.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Meet in the Level 7 Main Lobby · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to all · Advance registration recommended
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & DANCE
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Rydell High’s romances, friendships, and rivalries take the stage for the final weekend of TIS Teens’ production.
Grease — Final Weekend
TIS Teens · Eddie Knight · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
The last weekend of TIS Teens’ Grease returns to Rydell High, where romance and friendship are continually negotiated against the pressure to fit in. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical gives that world its familiar combination of comic bravado, vulnerability, and exuberant songs.
Directed by Eddie Knight, this production places young performers inside a story about young people constructing their identities in public. The school setting may belong to an earlier era, but the questions of reputation, belonging, and changing yourself for someone else remain recognizable.
Three performances remain this week, ending with Sunday’s matinee. For readers who have been meaning to go, this is the production’s final weekend.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 James L. Meader Little Theatre · Russell Sage College, Troy
🎟️ Tickets: $15 · Recommended for ages ten and older
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Sunday, November 8: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Red Light, Green Light
Sophie Shin ’27 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A familiar childhood game supplies the starting point for a short contemporary dance choreographed by Sophie Shin ’27. Its basic tension—movement followed by an abrupt demand to stop—offers an immediately recognizable framework for watching bodies respond to changing instructions.
The student cast includes Matia Adora, Kayla Corsilia, Ella Donnis, Izzy Helayel, Josi Hickey, and Vivi Hukin. The museum setting places their performance within a space where audiences are already accustomed to looking closely at relationships among form, movement, and surroundings.
Two performances give visitors a choice of times. The event is short, free, and open to the public, making it possible to combine with a separate visit to the galleries.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 2:30 PM and 4 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
2:30 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
4 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Capital Duo & the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
Duncan Cumming, Hilary Cumming and Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company · University at Albany
Two long artistic partnerships meet in a program celebrating anniversaries. Pianist Duncan Cumming and violinist Hilary Cumming, performing as Capital Duo, mark 30 years of playing together; choreographer Ellen Sinopoli’s company is completing its 35th year of creating and presenting dance in the region.
The program includes a premiere set to music by Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, a return to a collaboration from 2018, instrumental interludes by Bartók and Smetana, and a medley bringing Gershwin’s music into movement.
The interest lies in the live exchange between musicians and dancers: musical phrasing becomes something visible, while movement gives familiar sounds a different emphasis. This is a substantial local collaboration, bringing UAlbany’s ensemble-in-residence together with an established regional dance company.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 7:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $16 general / $12 seniors and UAlbany staff / $5 students
🎟️ Day of show: $21 / $17 / $10
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Skidmania gives a new generation of musicians room to reinterpret the songs of 1976.
Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore student performers and the Skidmaniacs · Skidmore College
The year 1976 offers an unusually expansive musical playground. Disco, punk, soul, progressive experimentation, country, and big-guitar rock were all finding audiences, sometimes in sharply different corners of the same culture. Skidmania ’76 gives Skidmore performers a chance to explore that range.
Auditioned student acts offer both tributes and creative reinterpretations, with the faculty house band, the Skidmaniacs, participating in the production. The department’s planning materials draw from artists as varied as Stevie Wonder, ABBA, the Ramones, Dolly Parton, Queen, and Philip Glass; those materials describe the possibilities, rather than a guaranteed final set list.
Now in its fifth year, Skidmania combines a substantial campus performance with charitable fundraising. Both performances are sold out. Readers who already hold tickets can use the dates below; any questions about returns or attendance arrangements should go to the Zankel box office.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 8 PM
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $25 · SOLD OUT · Proceeds benefit charity
☎️ Zankel box office: 518-580-5321
Details · Box office information
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
Musicians of Ma’alwyck · SUNY Schenectady / School of Music
Musicians of Ma’alwyck specializes in bringing earlier musical worlds into the present, often using research and historical settings to reconnect compositions with the people who played and heard them. Founded by violinist Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, the ensemble has been part of the region’s musical life since 1999.
A Fashionable Assembly features music by J. C. Bach, Handel, Corri, and Shield. The program’s title evokes a world in which music belonged to social gatherings and intimate rooms as well as public concert halls.
This free lunchtime appearance provides an accessible way to encounter that repertoire without committing to an evening out. SUNY Schenectady’s concert listing identifies Carl B. Taylor Auditorium as the venue for its concerts unless otherwise noted.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Recess!
EMPAC’s free monthly lunchtime series invites visitors to stop in at Evelyn’s Café, hear live music, and take a break from the working day. Arrive during the two-hour program rather than treating noon as a rigid curtain time. Musicians to be announced.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon–2 PM
📍 Evelyn’s Café, Level 5 · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Early Music Ensemble: Charming Music from the Baroque Era
Union College Early Music Ensemble · Union College
Union’s Early Music Ensemble explores music written in Italy, Germany, and France, including works by Locatelli, Telemann, and Boismortier. The program offers a smaller-scale alternative to the week’s amplified concerts and theatrical productions.
Period-style instruments, including harpsichord, help establish a different sound world. They also invite listeners to notice how texture and articulation change when instruments respond differently from their modern counterparts.
The concert is part of Union’s fall ensemble series, which draws performers from across the college. Suggested donations support the ensembles, and a reception follows.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under twelve
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
BEFORE YOU GO
A calendar entry or purchased ticket cannot guarantee that a schedule will remain unchanged. Recheck the organizer’s page before traveling, including any updated attendance or building-entry instructions.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
NOVEMBER 9–29
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Hands-on experiments bring nanotechnology, robotics, and other sciences within reach of young investigators.
NANOvember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day
University at Albany / NANOvember
More than 20 hands-on activities introduce children and families to nanotechnology, engineering, robotics, weather, climate, and cybersecurity. Participants can test robots, build with LEGOs, explore non-Newtonian fluids, and investigate materials that bend light or resist dirt.
The program is aimed particularly at children in grades 2–8 and their families. Register early: capacity is limited, and the previous edition sold out.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · Begins at 9:30 AM
📍 ETEC · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Advance registration required
Details and registration information
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INTERFACE: Cognitive Science
Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and cognitive scientist Brett Fajen explore the connection between perception and bodily action. Fajen studies how people guide movement through complex environments; Latsky brings a creative practice attentive to differences in bodies and neurological experience.
The program includes material from Living in the Grey, a documentary about dancers experiencing non-apparent neurological disabilities. EMPAC’s small studio programs can fill well ahead of their dates. Check with the box office early about advance registration and attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2 · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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Tracing Time: Paul Mauren
Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Sculptor Paul Mauren brings together opposing structures and images in work shaped by experimentation, fabrication, and structural invention. A longtime College of Saint Rose professor, Mauren taught sculpture there from 1978–2018; his work has appeared in museums and galleries throughout the Northeast and beyond.
The opening afternoon offers the opportunity to hear directly from the artist before seeing the exhibition at its reception.
📅 Thursday, November 12
Artist talk: 3–4 PM · Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium
Opening reception: 4–6 PM · Teaching Gallery, Administration Building
Exhibition: November 12–December 12
🎟️ Free and open to the public
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
NOVEMBER 30–FEBRUARY 28
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INTERFACE: Robotics
Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC
Musician and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to consider what happens when machines become instruments, collaborators, or extensions of the body. Their conversation connects technical research with the practical experimentation of making art.
The studio setting makes early attention to attendance arrangements worthwhile. EMPAC’s smaller programs can fill before the event week; check when registration will be available rather than assuming space will remain close to the date.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and immersive-technology specialist Talis Reks discuss ROAM, a project bringing live performance together with shared mixed reality. Their work asks how groups of moving participants can inhabit an imagined world while remaining together in physical space.
The conversation reaches into the practical challenges of tracking, networking, headsets, and storytelling. Check with EMPAC early about registration for this limited-capacity studio program; do not wait until February to investigate attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
NOVEMBER 9, 2026–MAY 9, 2027
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Productions to keep on your radar. Full descriptions will appear as their performance weeks approach.
Rent — Siena University — November 12–21 — Details
A Doll’s House — University at Albany — November 18–22 — Details
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5 — Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10 — Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 — Details
🆕 TITLE ANNOUNCED: Cabaret — University at Albany — March 3–7 — Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 — Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — University at Albany — April 14–17 — Details
🆕 NEW POSTING: Seussical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13; opens within this tracking window — Details
🌎 Regional Extension Theater
Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College / ’62 Center — March 5, 2027 — Details
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🖼️ EXHIBITIONS OPEN THIS WEEK
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Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Tang, Winter Gallery / Skidmore — through January 10, 2027 — Details
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Tang, Wachenheim Gallery / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
A Feeling of With — Tang, Malloy Wing / Skidmore — through July 18, 2027 — Details
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Tang, State Farm Mezzanine Gallery / Skidmore — through September 12, 2027 — Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Tang, Hyde Cabinet / Skidmore — through November 29, 2026 — Details
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang, Museum Elevator / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Tang Atrium / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Art on Campus — Locations across Skidmore College — through October 3, 2027 — Details
Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery / Russell Sage College — through December 5, 2026 — Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center / Union — through November 22, 2026 — Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Schaffer Library, Lally Reading Room / Union — through November 25, 2026 · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium / Union — fall 2026; closing date not posted · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery / Siena University — through December 4, 2026 — Details
Garden — Thomas Lail — Administration Building glass atrium / Hudson Valley Community College — ongoing; no closing date posted · Viewable from outside the building — Details
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Use this quick guide to compare times and build your week. Full descriptions, locations, admission information, and organizer links appear above. Multiple performances are listed separately here so you can choose the date that works for you.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2
1:30–3:30 PM — A U.S.–China Space Race?
UAlbany · Emeritus Center, UAB 134
3–4:30 PM — Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons
UAlbany · Humanities 354; streaming option
5 PM — Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
6–7 PM — How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3
No qualifying timed program is currently listed.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4
Noon — Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
SUNY Schenectady · Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · Free
Noon–2 PM — Recess!
RPI · EMPAC, Evelyn’s Café · Musicians to be announced
5:30 PM — Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Albany Law · Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom; online option · Register
7:30–8:30 PM — D.B. Woodside: Burian Lecture
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Free
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5
2 PM — Rebekah Samsonraj: Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
RPI · EMPAC, Studio Beta · Open to the public
4:30 PM — Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
4:30–5:30 PM — Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
UAlbany · Campus Center Multipurpose Room · Free
6 PM — The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Skidmore · Tang Teaching Museum
7:30 PM — MOVIE LOVE
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6
11 AM — GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free · Register
2 PM — Flora Zine-Making
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7
11 AM–12:30 PM — EMPAC Tour with Francis Grunfeld
RPI · Meet in EMPAC Level 7 Lobby · Free · Registration recommended
2:30 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
4 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
7:30 PM — Capital Duo & Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8
2 PM — Early Music Ensemble
Union · Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29
Skidmore · Tang Atrium · Free
2 PM — Grease — Final Performance
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
CHECK BEFORE TRAVELING
Schedules and attendance arrangements can change after publication. Check the official event page or contact the venue before setting out to confirm that the program is still taking place.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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A guide to Capital Region events, arts and culture, food and music.
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Capital Region Curated — Edited by Alan Koslow
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: November 2-8
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, actor D.B. Woodside and more.
Alan Koslow
30
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
BERNARD TSCHUMI, DOROTHY ROBERTS, D.B. WOODSIDE & A U.S.–CHINA SPACE RACE
What do buildings encourage us to do? How has American law shaped whom we can marry? And are the United States and China entering a new race beyond Earth? This week’s campus programs approach large questions through the work of architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, and former NASA policy adviser Patrick Besha.
There is plenty to hear and see, too: actor D.B. Woodside returns to UAlbany, the Tang brings artists, mapping, ecology, and hands-on workshops together around 500 Dams, and Capital Duo joins the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company. Elsewhere, a novelist explores young lives, a scientist explains how light makes computer chips, and Grease reaches its final weekend.
Bernard Tschumi’s work asks how architecture shapes the encounters, movements, and unexpected experiences that happen inside it.
📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD
It really helps when readers share Capital Region Curated.
If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, organization, campus newsletter or personal newsletter, I’d be grateful if you would share it with people who might want a weekly guide to public events on Capital Region campuses.
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Bernard Tschumi, Dorothy Roberts, D.B. Woodside and Patrick Besha on a U.S.–China space race.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Architecture, interracial marriage and law, space competition, Beyoncé and teaching, semiconductor manufacturing, Indigenous political thought, and stem cell therapies.
📚 Books, Film & Storytelling — D.B. Woodside’s acting career, Kristen McCallum’s Free Girls, and Skidmore professors on the movies that matter to them.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — The Tang’s 500 Dams artist conversation, mapping and zine workshops, a guided museum visit, and a behind-the-scenes EMPAC tour.
🎭 Theater & Dance — The final weekend of Grease, student choreography at the Tang, and Capital Duo with the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Musicians of Ma’alwyck, EMPAC’s Recess!, Union’s Early Music Ensemble, and the sold-out Skidmania ’76.
🔥 Plan Ahead — NANOvember Family Day, EMPAC’s limited-capacity cognitive science program, and Paul Mauren’s exhibition opening at HVCC.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Robotics and mixed reality at EMPAC.
🎭 Future Theater — Upcoming campus productions through early May.
🖼️ Exhibitions Open This Week — A compact guide to current exhibitions and installations, immediately after Future Theater.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
Where an organizer has not published an ending time, calendar entries use our standard 90-minute duration.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event information is checked during preparation, but schedules can change and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ FOUR TOP PICKS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract — RPI / EMPAC
The architect behind Paris’s Parc de la Villette and Athens’s New Acropolis Museum comes to RPI for the Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. Tschumi has spent his career challenging the idea that architecture is simply a matter of attractive forms: his work considers how buildings organize movement, activity, and encounters. Monday, November 2, at 5 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project — Albany Law School
A family story opens onto a much larger legal history as MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts examines interracial marriage, race, love, and law. The author of Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention, and Torn Apart brings decades of scholarship on institutions and inequality to Albany Law’s annual Katz Lecture. Wednesday, November 4, at 5:30 PM; in person and online.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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D.B. Woodside — University at Albany
Before audiences knew him from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Night Agent, D.B. Woodside was a UAlbany student. He returns for a free conversation about a career spanning television, film, and stage—including work portraying Martin Luther King Jr. and performing Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew. Wednesday, November 4, at 7:30 PM.
See Books, Film & Storytelling below.
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A U.S.–China Space Race? — University at Albany
Patrick Besha brings more than two decades of government experience, including service as a senior NASA policy adviser, to a question that reaches beyond rockets. With both countries pursuing lunar ambitions and operating major satellite and human-spaceflight programs, what kind of competition is developing—and what is at stake? Monday, November 2, from 1:30–3:30 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
Bernard Tschumi · RPI / EMPAC
An architect’s work continues after construction ends: people enter, move through it, gather, perform, and sometimes use it in ways its designers never anticipated. That relationship between space and activity has been central to Bernard Tschumi, whose projects include Parc de la Villette in Paris and the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
Tschumi’s importance also comes from his writing and teaching. He has challenged architecture’s tendency to treat a building as an isolated object, arguing for attention to the events and movements that give a place its life. At La Villette, that thinking produced a landscape of intersecting routes, structures, and activities rather than a conventional park organized around a single central composition.
His lecture, “Abstract,” is this year’s Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. It offers a chance to hear an internationally influential practitioner whose questions apply well beyond the profession: how do designed spaces shape what becomes possible within them?
📅 Monday, November 2 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Concert Hall · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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A U.S.–China Space Race?
Patrick Besha · University at Albany / Emeritus Center
The United States and China operate the world’s largest space programs, with crewed space stations and thousands of satellites in orbit. Both are pursuing ambitious exploration goals, including plans involving the Moon and Mars. The question is how far those parallel ambitions amount to a strategic race.
Patrick Besha, founder of Global Space Group and a faculty member at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, approaches the subject with substantial government experience. During more than two decades in public service, he worked as a senior policy adviser at NASA headquarters and received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.
His background makes this a useful opportunity to consider space exploration as international policy as well as scientific achievement. The Emeritus Center says the presentation will not be recorded, so readers who want to hear it should plan to attend in person.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 1:30–3:30 PM
📍 Emeritus Center, UAB 134 · 1215 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free; in person
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons: Pop Culture, Politics and Pedagogy
Janell Hobson · University at Albany
What can a major popular-cultural work make visible that a conventional classroom discussion might miss? Janell Hobson takes Beyoncé’s _Lemonade_ as a way into questions of race, gender, politics, and teaching, continuing UAlbany’s series on “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Hobson has taught in UAlbany’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies for nearly 25 years. Her books include Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Body as Evidence, and When God Lost Her Tongue. She also writes for Ms. and has edited projects connecting Black feminist scholarship with public history.
That combination of academic research and writing for wider audiences gives the subject more substance than a celebrity discussion. The lecture places a familiar cultural work within the larger question of how teachers help students interpret images, histories, and power.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
💻 Streaming option available
Details and streaming information
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
Robert L. Brainard · University at Albany / NANOvember
Computer chips depend on the ability to create extraordinarily small patterns with remarkable precision. Robert L. Brainard explains how light helps accomplish that task, introducing the science behind a manufacturing process whose products sit inside phones, computers, vehicles, and much of modern infrastructure.
Brainard is a professor in UAlbany’s Department of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. His field connects chemistry with semiconductor fabrication, making him a particularly useful guide to a process that can otherwise sound like an impenetrable collection of technical terms.
This public lecture opens the month’s NANOvember lecture series. For readers curious about what happens inside the region’s semiconductor industry, it offers a concrete starting point: how a physical process becomes a tool for making electronic devices.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 6–7 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Doors open at 5:15 PM · Registration preferred, not required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Dorothy Roberts’s work connects the intimate life of families with the institutions and laws that define racial inequality.
Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts · Albany Law School
Dorothy Roberts has spent decades examining how American institutions reproduce racial inequality, often through decisions presented as private, protective, or scientifically neutral. Her books have addressed reproductive freedom, child welfare, and the persistent tendency to treat race as a biological fact rather than a political and social construction.
In “The Mixed Marriage Project: Lessons from the History of Interracial Marriage on Race, Love, and Law,” Roberts turns toward the relationship between family history and public law. The subject asks readers to consider how legal rules have reached into intimate life—and how marriage has both challenged and exposed racial boundaries.
Roberts is a MacArthur Fellow and the University of Pennsylvania’s George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology. Albany Law’s Katz Lecture, established around family-law concerns including reproductive rights, domestic violence, children, and inequality, provides an apt setting for this conversation. A reception follows the lecture; an online option is also available.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM · Reception follows
📍 Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Register in advance · In person and via Zoom
12th Annual Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
Glen Coulthard · Union College / Philosophy Department Speaker Series
Political ideas change as they move across countries, movements, and historical circumstances. Glen Coulthard’s lecture, “Maoism as Traveling Theory: Understanding Red Power Marxism during Canada’s Long Seventies,” examines that movement of ideas within Indigenous political struggle.
Coulthard, a scholar at the University of British Columbia, works on Indigenous politics and political theory. His appearance brings a specific historical question to Union’s series: how did activists encounter, adapt, or challenge revolutionary theories developed in very different settings?
The lecture’s title gives readers a more precise point of entry than a general discussion of political ideology. It invites attention to the relationship between imported theory and local experience—what travels successfully, what changes, and what cannot simply be transplanted.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30 PM
📍 Everest Lounge · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
Rebekah M. Samsonraj · RPI / Biomedical Engineering
Stem cells hold considerable promise for repairing damaged tissue, but promise alone does not produce a dependable treatment. Rebekah M. Samsonraj’s research addresses the difficult step between encouraging laboratory results and therapies that can be manufactured consistently and used reproducibly.
An assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arkansas, Samsonraj directs the Cellular Therapy and Biomanufacturing Laboratory. Her work includes identifying biomarkers that may help predict the potency of mesenchymal stem cells, studying how mechanical signals influence their behavior, and developing scalable approaches to cell-derived products.
The seminar focuses particularly on skeletal repair. It considers both cell-based treatments and extracellular vesicles—small particles released by cells—as researchers seek safer and more practical ways to translate regenerative science into clinical use.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 2 PM
📍 EMPAC, Studio Beta · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, FILM & STORYTELLING
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D.B. Woodside returns to the university where his acting career began taking shape, bringing experience from television, film, and the stage.
D.B. Woodside: The Burian Lecture
D.B. Woodside · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
For television audiences, D.B. Woodside may be a familiar face from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Single Ladies, The Temptations, or The Night Agent. This week, the 1991 UAlbany graduate returns to campus for a conversation about a career that extends well beyond any single role.
His stage work includes portraying Martin Luther King Jr. in The Conscientious Objector, his New York theater debut. He also received an NAACP Award for Best Lead Male for his performance in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, a play whose Detroit factory setting places work, loyalty, and economic insecurity at its center.
The annual Burian Lecture brings theater scholars and practitioners to UAlbany in recognition of Jarka Burian’s long service to the university. Woodside’s return gives the evening a particularly direct connection between campus training and the professional life that can follow.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
Kristen McCallum · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
Kristen McCallum credits the adventures of her Jamaican family with beginning her fascination with stories. A UAlbany graduate with degrees earned in 2013 and 2025, she returns with her debut novel, Free Girls, published this summer.
Her work beyond fiction also centers on who gets heard. She founded SafeWordSociety, a creative initiative celebrating historically marginalized communities, and has worked in curriculum development, public engagement, and organizational strategy. She is currently director of operations for the New York State Defenders Association.
The Writers Institute presents this appearance under the heading “Heartache and Hope.” It offers a chance to hear a new novelist whose professional and creative work share an interest in community, transformation, and the possibilities of storytelling. Books will be available for purchase, with a signing after the conversation.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center, Multipurpose Room · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Book signing follows
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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MOVIE LOVE: Skidmore Professors GET PERSONAL at the Movies
Skidmore College / Salmagundi
Some films matter to us for reasons that criticism alone cannot fully explain. They become attached to a particular age, a relationship, a discovery, or a way of understanding ourselves. MOVIE LOVE makes that personal connection its starting point.
Presented as a Salmagundi program, the evening brings Skidmore professors together to discuss their relationships with movies. The emphasis on getting personal suggests a welcome shift from treating films only as objects to analyze toward considering what they do in the lives of the people watching them.
The departmental listing has not supplied a full participant or film list, so there is no promised lineup here. The attraction is the format itself: an opportunity to hear familiar or unfamiliar films discussed through experience as well as expertise.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 7:30 PM
📍 Davis Auditorium · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART, VISUAL CULTURE & MAKING
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At Anaya Springs, small stone dams connect artistic practice with the patient work of restoring water, soil, and plant life.
The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Bill Gilbert, Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes and Rachel Seligman · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What can a small structure accomplish when it is built repeatedly, carefully, and in response to a particular landscape? At Anaya Springs in New Mexico, hand-built stone dams have become part of a long effort to slow water, hold soil, and regenerate degraded grasslands.
The Tang’s 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs follows that work through artistic practice, mapping, and environmental research. The exhibition brings together ways of knowing a place that are often separated: observation, data, construction, painting, and the accumulated experience of returning to the same ground.
Bill Gilbert opens the evening with a talk, followed by a conversation with Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes, and curator Rachel Seligman. Friday’s workshops offer opportunities to explore two of the project’s methods more directly.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Charlie Bettigole · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A map can do more than tell us where something is. It can reveal relationships among water, terrain, vegetation, and human intervention—connections that may be difficult to recognize while standing on the ground.
Charlie Bettigole, a Survival Kit Collective member and a Middlebury College lecturer and director of applied GIS, leads this introduction to geographic information systems. His work uses geospatial science to investigate environmental questions, ranging from individual parcels to much larger landscapes.
No previous experience is required. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop, and the museum requests advance registration. The workshop provides a practical complement to 500 Dams, introducing one of the tools used to understand and communicate the project’s landscape.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 11 AM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Register in advance · Bring a laptop if possible
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Flora Zine-Making
Lynn Grimes · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A single sheet of paper can become a small book: folded, copied, exchanged, and carried away. Lynn Grimes leads a workshop in making plant-themed zines, connecting the modest scale of a handmade publication with the close observation of the natural world.
Grimes has lived off the grid in New Mexico’s western Galisteo Basin since 1990. Her work records the surrounding landscape through botanical painting, sketchbooks, nature journals, relief prints, and handmade books. She is also a longtime educator whose work appears in 500 Dams.
Participants will create a one-page plant zine that can be reproduced and folded into multiple pages. The format makes this an accessible entry into publishing your own observations: something small enough to finish, share, and make again.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 2 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · No experience required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Tang Guide Tour
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 leads a tour of the Tang’s current exhibitions as part of its student gallery-guide program. The guided visit offers a starting point for looking closely and asking questions; visitors are invited to stay afterward and explore independently.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Meet in the Tang Atrium · Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Inside EMPAC: Public Tour
Francis Grunfeld · RPI / EMPAC
EMPAC’s public tours offer a look behind the performances at a building designed to accommodate a wide range of artistic and technical possibilities. The experience can involve thinking about how a room handles sound, how a stage changes, or how light shapes a space.
Each tour is led by a different member of the EMPAC team. Francis Grunfeld leads the November visit, making this an opportunity to encounter the building through the perspective of someone who works within it.
Tours last about 90 minutes. EMPAC recommends registering ahead and arriving ten minutes early; the meeting point is the main lobby on Level 7, reached from the roundabout.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Meet in the Level 7 Main Lobby · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to all · Advance registration recommended
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & DANCE
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Rydell High’s romances, friendships, and rivalries take the stage for the final weekend of TIS Teens’ production.
Grease — Final Weekend
TIS Teens · Eddie Knight · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
The last weekend of TIS Teens’ Grease returns to Rydell High, where romance and friendship are continually negotiated against the pressure to fit in. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical gives that world its familiar combination of comic bravado, vulnerability, and exuberant songs.
Directed by Eddie Knight, this production places young performers inside a story about young people constructing their identities in public. The school setting may belong to an earlier era, but the questions of reputation, belonging, and changing yourself for someone else remain recognizable.
Three performances remain this week, ending with Sunday’s matinee. For readers who have been meaning to go, this is the production’s final weekend.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 James L. Meader Little Theatre · Russell Sage College, Troy
🎟️ Tickets: $15 · Recommended for ages ten and older
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Sunday, November 8: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Red Light, Green Light
Sophie Shin ’27 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A familiar childhood game supplies the starting point for a short contemporary dance choreographed by Sophie Shin ’27. Its basic tension—movement followed by an abrupt demand to stop—offers an immediately recognizable framework for watching bodies respond to changing instructions.
The student cast includes Matia Adora, Kayla Corsilia, Ella Donnis, Izzy Helayel, Josi Hickey, and Vivi Hukin. The museum setting places their performance within a space where audiences are already accustomed to looking closely at relationships among form, movement, and surroundings.
Two performances give visitors a choice of times. The event is short, free, and open to the public, making it possible to combine with a separate visit to the galleries.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 2:30 PM and 4 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
2:30 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
4 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Capital Duo & the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
Duncan Cumming, Hilary Cumming and Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company · University at Albany
Two long artistic partnerships meet in a program celebrating anniversaries. Pianist Duncan Cumming and violinist Hilary Cumming, performing as Capital Duo, mark 30 years of playing together; choreographer Ellen Sinopoli’s company is completing its 35th year of creating and presenting dance in the region.
The program includes a premiere set to music by Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, a return to a collaboration from 2018, instrumental interludes by Bartók and Smetana, and a medley bringing Gershwin’s music into movement.
The interest lies in the live exchange between musicians and dancers: musical phrasing becomes something visible, while movement gives familiar sounds a different emphasis. This is a substantial local collaboration, bringing UAlbany’s ensemble-in-residence together with an established regional dance company.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 7:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $16 general / $12 seniors and UAlbany staff / $5 students
🎟️ Day of show: $21 / $17 / $10
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Skidmania gives a new generation of musicians room to reinterpret the songs of 1976.
Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore student performers and the Skidmaniacs · Skidmore College
The year 1976 offers an unusually expansive musical playground. Disco, punk, soul, progressive experimentation, country, and big-guitar rock were all finding audiences, sometimes in sharply different corners of the same culture. Skidmania ’76 gives Skidmore performers a chance to explore that range.
Auditioned student acts offer both tributes and creative reinterpretations, with the faculty house band, the Skidmaniacs, participating in the production. The department’s planning materials draw from artists as varied as Stevie Wonder, ABBA, the Ramones, Dolly Parton, Queen, and Philip Glass; those materials describe the possibilities, rather than a guaranteed final set list.
Now in its fifth year, Skidmania combines a substantial campus performance with charitable fundraising. Both performances are sold out. Readers who already hold tickets can use the dates below; any questions about returns or attendance arrangements should go to the Zankel box office.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 8 PM
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $25 · SOLD OUT · Proceeds benefit charity
☎️ Zankel box office: 518-580-5321
Details · Box office information
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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ADVERTISEMENT
Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
Musicians of Ma’alwyck · SUNY Schenectady / School of Music
Musicians of Ma’alwyck specializes in bringing earlier musical worlds into the present, often using research and historical settings to reconnect compositions with the people who played and heard them. Founded by violinist Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, the ensemble has been part of the region’s musical life since 1999.
A Fashionable Assembly features music by J. C. Bach, Handel, Corri, and Shield. The program’s title evokes a world in which music belonged to social gatherings and intimate rooms as well as public concert halls.
This free lunchtime appearance provides an accessible way to encounter that repertoire without committing to an evening out. SUNY Schenectady’s concert listing identifies Carl B. Taylor Auditorium as the venue for its concerts unless otherwise noted.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Recess!
EMPAC’s free monthly lunchtime series invites visitors to stop in at Evelyn’s Café, hear live music, and take a break from the working day. Arrive during the two-hour program rather than treating noon as a rigid curtain time. Musicians to be announced.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon–2 PM
📍 Evelyn’s Café, Level 5 · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Early Music Ensemble: Charming Music from the Baroque Era
Union College Early Music Ensemble · Union College
Union’s Early Music Ensemble explores music written in Italy, Germany, and France, including works by Locatelli, Telemann, and Boismortier. The program offers a smaller-scale alternative to the week’s amplified concerts and theatrical productions.
Period-style instruments, including harpsichord, help establish a different sound world. They also invite listeners to notice how texture and articulation change when instruments respond differently from their modern counterparts.
The concert is part of Union’s fall ensemble series, which draws performers from across the college. Suggested donations support the ensembles, and a reception follows.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under twelve
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
BEFORE YOU GO
A calendar entry or purchased ticket cannot guarantee that a schedule will remain unchanged. Recheck the organizer’s page before traveling, including any updated attendance or building-entry instructions.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
NOVEMBER 9–29
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Hands-on experiments bring nanotechnology, robotics, and other sciences within reach of young investigators.
NANOvember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day
University at Albany / NANOvember
More than 20 hands-on activities introduce children and families to nanotechnology, engineering, robotics, weather, climate, and cybersecurity. Participants can test robots, build with LEGOs, explore non-Newtonian fluids, and investigate materials that bend light or resist dirt.
The program is aimed particularly at children in grades 2–8 and their families. Register early: capacity is limited, and the previous edition sold out.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · Begins at 9:30 AM
📍 ETEC · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Advance registration required
Details and registration information
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INTERFACE: Cognitive Science
Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and cognitive scientist Brett Fajen explore the connection between perception and bodily action. Fajen studies how people guide movement through complex environments; Latsky brings a creative practice attentive to differences in bodies and neurological experience.
The program includes material from Living in the Grey, a documentary about dancers experiencing non-apparent neurological disabilities. EMPAC’s small studio programs can fill well ahead of their dates. Check with the box office early about advance registration and attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2 · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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Tracing Time: Paul Mauren
Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Sculptor Paul Mauren brings together opposing structures and images in work shaped by experimentation, fabrication, and structural invention. A longtime College of Saint Rose professor, Mauren taught sculpture there from 1978–2018; his work has appeared in museums and galleries throughout the Northeast and beyond.
The opening afternoon offers the opportunity to hear directly from the artist before seeing the exhibition at its reception.
📅 Thursday, November 12
Artist talk: 3–4 PM · Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium
Opening reception: 4–6 PM · Teaching Gallery, Administration Building
Exhibition: November 12–December 12
🎟️ Free and open to the public
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
NOVEMBER 30–FEBRUARY 28
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INTERFACE: Robotics
Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC
Musician and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to consider what happens when machines become instruments, collaborators, or extensions of the body. Their conversation connects technical research with the practical experimentation of making art.
The studio setting makes early attention to attendance arrangements worthwhile. EMPAC’s smaller programs can fill before the event week; check when registration will be available rather than assuming space will remain close to the date.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and immersive-technology specialist Talis Reks discuss ROAM, a project bringing live performance together with shared mixed reality. Their work asks how groups of moving participants can inhabit an imagined world while remaining together in physical space.
The conversation reaches into the practical challenges of tracking, networking, headsets, and storytelling. Check with EMPAC early about registration for this limited-capacity studio program; do not wait until February to investigate attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
NOVEMBER 9, 2026–MAY 9, 2027
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Productions to keep on your radar. Full descriptions will appear as their performance weeks approach.
Rent — Siena University — November 12–21 — Details
A Doll’s House — University at Albany — November 18–22 — Details
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5 — Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10 — Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 — Details
🆕 TITLE ANNOUNCED: Cabaret — University at Albany — March 3–7 — Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 — Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — University at Albany — April 14–17 — Details
🆕 NEW POSTING: Seussical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13; opens within this tracking window — Details
🌎 Regional Extension Theater
Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College / ’62 Center — March 5, 2027 — Details
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🖼️ EXHIBITIONS OPEN THIS WEEK
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Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Tang, Winter Gallery / Skidmore — through January 10, 2027 — Details
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Tang, Wachenheim Gallery / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
A Feeling of With — Tang, Malloy Wing / Skidmore — through July 18, 2027 — Details
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Tang, State Farm Mezzanine Gallery / Skidmore — through September 12, 2027 — Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Tang, Hyde Cabinet / Skidmore — through November 29, 2026 — Details
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang, Museum Elevator / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Tang Atrium / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Art on Campus — Locations across Skidmore College — through October 3, 2027 — Details
Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery / Russell Sage College — through December 5, 2026 — Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center / Union — through November 22, 2026 — Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Schaffer Library, Lally Reading Room / Union — through November 25, 2026 · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium / Union — fall 2026; closing date not posted · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery / Siena University — through December 4, 2026 — Details
Garden — Thomas Lail — Administration Building glass atrium / Hudson Valley Community College — ongoing; no closing date posted · Viewable from outside the building — Details
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Use this quick guide to compare times and build your week. Full descriptions, locations, admission information, and organizer links appear above. Multiple performances are listed separately here so you can choose the date that works for you.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2
1:30–3:30 PM — A U.S.–China Space Race?
UAlbany · Emeritus Center, UAB 134
3–4:30 PM — Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons
UAlbany · Humanities 354; streaming option
5 PM — Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
6–7 PM — How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3
No qualifying timed program is currently listed.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4
Noon — Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
SUNY Schenectady · Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · Free
Noon–2 PM — Recess!
RPI · EMPAC, Evelyn’s Café · Musicians to be announced
5:30 PM — Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Albany Law · Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom; online option · Register
7:30–8:30 PM — D.B. Woodside: Burian Lecture
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Free
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5
2 PM — Rebekah Samsonraj: Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
RPI · EMPAC, Studio Beta · Open to the public
4:30 PM — Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
4:30–5:30 PM — Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
UAlbany · Campus Center Multipurpose Room · Free
6 PM — The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Skidmore · Tang Teaching Museum
7:30 PM — MOVIE LOVE
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6
11 AM — GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free · Register
2 PM — Flora Zine-Making
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7
11 AM–12:30 PM — EMPAC Tour with Francis Grunfeld
RPI · Meet in EMPAC Level 7 Lobby · Free · Registration recommended
2:30 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
4 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
7:30 PM — Capital Duo & Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8
2 PM — Early Music Ensemble
Union · Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29
Skidmore · Tang Atrium · Free
2 PM — Grease — Final Performance
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
CHECK BEFORE TRAVELING
Schedules and attendance arrangements can change after publication. Check the official event page or contact the venue before setting out to confirm that the program is still taking place.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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A guide to Capital Region events, arts and culture, food and music.
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Capital Region Curated — Edited by Alan Koslow
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: November 2-8
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, actor D.B. Woodside and more.
Alan Koslow
30
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
BERNARD TSCHUMI, DOROTHY ROBERTS, D.B. WOODSIDE & A U.S.–CHINA SPACE RACE
What do buildings encourage us to do? How has American law shaped whom we can marry? And are the United States and China entering a new race beyond Earth? This week’s campus programs approach large questions through the work of architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, and former NASA policy adviser Patrick Besha.
There is plenty to hear and see, too: actor D.B. Woodside returns to UAlbany, the Tang brings artists, mapping, ecology, and hands-on workshops together around 500 Dams, and Capital Duo joins the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company. Elsewhere, a novelist explores young lives, a scientist explains how light makes computer chips, and Grease reaches its final weekend.
Bernard Tschumi’s work asks how architecture shapes the encounters, movements, and unexpected experiences that happen inside it.
📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD
It really helps when readers share Capital Region Curated.
If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, organization, campus newsletter or personal newsletter, I’d be grateful if you would share it with people who might want a weekly guide to public events on Capital Region campuses.
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Bernard Tschumi, Dorothy Roberts, D.B. Woodside and Patrick Besha on a U.S.–China space race.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Architecture, interracial marriage and law, space competition, Beyoncé and teaching, semiconductor manufacturing, Indigenous political thought, and stem cell therapies.
📚 Books, Film & Storytelling — D.B. Woodside’s acting career, Kristen McCallum’s Free Girls, and Skidmore professors on the movies that matter to them.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — The Tang’s 500 Dams artist conversation, mapping and zine workshops, a guided museum visit, and a behind-the-scenes EMPAC tour.
🎭 Theater & Dance — The final weekend of Grease, student choreography at the Tang, and Capital Duo with the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Musicians of Ma’alwyck, EMPAC’s Recess!, Union’s Early Music Ensemble, and the sold-out Skidmania ’76.
🔥 Plan Ahead — NANOvember Family Day, EMPAC’s limited-capacity cognitive science program, and Paul Mauren’s exhibition opening at HVCC.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Robotics and mixed reality at EMPAC.
🎭 Future Theater — Upcoming campus productions through early May.
🖼️ Exhibitions Open This Week — A compact guide to current exhibitions and installations, immediately after Future Theater.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
Where an organizer has not published an ending time, calendar entries use our standard 90-minute duration.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event information is checked during preparation, but schedules can change and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ FOUR TOP PICKS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract — RPI / EMPAC
The architect behind Paris’s Parc de la Villette and Athens’s New Acropolis Museum comes to RPI for the Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. Tschumi has spent his career challenging the idea that architecture is simply a matter of attractive forms: his work considers how buildings organize movement, activity, and encounters. Monday, November 2, at 5 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project — Albany Law School
A family story opens onto a much larger legal history as MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts examines interracial marriage, race, love, and law. The author of Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention, and Torn Apart brings decades of scholarship on institutions and inequality to Albany Law’s annual Katz Lecture. Wednesday, November 4, at 5:30 PM; in person and online.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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D.B. Woodside — University at Albany
Before audiences knew him from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Night Agent, D.B. Woodside was a UAlbany student. He returns for a free conversation about a career spanning television, film, and stage—including work portraying Martin Luther King Jr. and performing Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew. Wednesday, November 4, at 7:30 PM.
See Books, Film & Storytelling below.
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A U.S.–China Space Race? — University at Albany
Patrick Besha brings more than two decades of government experience, including service as a senior NASA policy adviser, to a question that reaches beyond rockets. With both countries pursuing lunar ambitions and operating major satellite and human-spaceflight programs, what kind of competition is developing—and what is at stake? Monday, November 2, from 1:30–3:30 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
Bernard Tschumi · RPI / EMPAC
An architect’s work continues after construction ends: people enter, move through it, gather, perform, and sometimes use it in ways its designers never anticipated. That relationship between space and activity has been central to Bernard Tschumi, whose projects include Parc de la Villette in Paris and the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
Tschumi’s importance also comes from his writing and teaching. He has challenged architecture’s tendency to treat a building as an isolated object, arguing for attention to the events and movements that give a place its life. At La Villette, that thinking produced a landscape of intersecting routes, structures, and activities rather than a conventional park organized around a single central composition.
His lecture, “Abstract,” is this year’s Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. It offers a chance to hear an internationally influential practitioner whose questions apply well beyond the profession: how do designed spaces shape what becomes possible within them?
📅 Monday, November 2 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Concert Hall · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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A U.S.–China Space Race?
Patrick Besha · University at Albany / Emeritus Center
The United States and China operate the world’s largest space programs, with crewed space stations and thousands of satellites in orbit. Both are pursuing ambitious exploration goals, including plans involving the Moon and Mars. The question is how far those parallel ambitions amount to a strategic race.
Patrick Besha, founder of Global Space Group and a faculty member at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, approaches the subject with substantial government experience. During more than two decades in public service, he worked as a senior policy adviser at NASA headquarters and received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.
His background makes this a useful opportunity to consider space exploration as international policy as well as scientific achievement. The Emeritus Center says the presentation will not be recorded, so readers who want to hear it should plan to attend in person.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 1:30–3:30 PM
📍 Emeritus Center, UAB 134 · 1215 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free; in person
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons: Pop Culture, Politics and Pedagogy
Janell Hobson · University at Albany
What can a major popular-cultural work make visible that a conventional classroom discussion might miss? Janell Hobson takes Beyoncé’s _Lemonade_ as a way into questions of race, gender, politics, and teaching, continuing UAlbany’s series on “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Hobson has taught in UAlbany’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies for nearly 25 years. Her books include Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Body as Evidence, and When God Lost Her Tongue. She also writes for Ms. and has edited projects connecting Black feminist scholarship with public history.
That combination of academic research and writing for wider audiences gives the subject more substance than a celebrity discussion. The lecture places a familiar cultural work within the larger question of how teachers help students interpret images, histories, and power.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
💻 Streaming option available
Details and streaming information
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
Robert L. Brainard · University at Albany / NANOvember
Computer chips depend on the ability to create extraordinarily small patterns with remarkable precision. Robert L. Brainard explains how light helps accomplish that task, introducing the science behind a manufacturing process whose products sit inside phones, computers, vehicles, and much of modern infrastructure.
Brainard is a professor in UAlbany’s Department of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. His field connects chemistry with semiconductor fabrication, making him a particularly useful guide to a process that can otherwise sound like an impenetrable collection of technical terms.
This public lecture opens the month’s NANOvember lecture series. For readers curious about what happens inside the region’s semiconductor industry, it offers a concrete starting point: how a physical process becomes a tool for making electronic devices.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 6–7 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Doors open at 5:15 PM · Registration preferred, not required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Dorothy Roberts’s work connects the intimate life of families with the institutions and laws that define racial inequality.
Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts · Albany Law School
Dorothy Roberts has spent decades examining how American institutions reproduce racial inequality, often through decisions presented as private, protective, or scientifically neutral. Her books have addressed reproductive freedom, child welfare, and the persistent tendency to treat race as a biological fact rather than a political and social construction.
In “The Mixed Marriage Project: Lessons from the History of Interracial Marriage on Race, Love, and Law,” Roberts turns toward the relationship between family history and public law. The subject asks readers to consider how legal rules have reached into intimate life—and how marriage has both challenged and exposed racial boundaries.
Roberts is a MacArthur Fellow and the University of Pennsylvania’s George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology. Albany Law’s Katz Lecture, established around family-law concerns including reproductive rights, domestic violence, children, and inequality, provides an apt setting for this conversation. A reception follows the lecture; an online option is also available.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM · Reception follows
📍 Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Register in advance · In person and via Zoom
12th Annual Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
Glen Coulthard · Union College / Philosophy Department Speaker Series
Political ideas change as they move across countries, movements, and historical circumstances. Glen Coulthard’s lecture, “Maoism as Traveling Theory: Understanding Red Power Marxism during Canada’s Long Seventies,” examines that movement of ideas within Indigenous political struggle.
Coulthard, a scholar at the University of British Columbia, works on Indigenous politics and political theory. His appearance brings a specific historical question to Union’s series: how did activists encounter, adapt, or challenge revolutionary theories developed in very different settings?
The lecture’s title gives readers a more precise point of entry than a general discussion of political ideology. It invites attention to the relationship between imported theory and local experience—what travels successfully, what changes, and what cannot simply be transplanted.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30 PM
📍 Everest Lounge · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
Rebekah M. Samsonraj · RPI / Biomedical Engineering
Stem cells hold considerable promise for repairing damaged tissue, but promise alone does not produce a dependable treatment. Rebekah M. Samsonraj’s research addresses the difficult step between encouraging laboratory results and therapies that can be manufactured consistently and used reproducibly.
An assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arkansas, Samsonraj directs the Cellular Therapy and Biomanufacturing Laboratory. Her work includes identifying biomarkers that may help predict the potency of mesenchymal stem cells, studying how mechanical signals influence their behavior, and developing scalable approaches to cell-derived products.
The seminar focuses particularly on skeletal repair. It considers both cell-based treatments and extracellular vesicles—small particles released by cells—as researchers seek safer and more practical ways to translate regenerative science into clinical use.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 2 PM
📍 EMPAC, Studio Beta · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, FILM & STORYTELLING
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D.B. Woodside returns to the university where his acting career began taking shape, bringing experience from television, film, and the stage.
D.B. Woodside: The Burian Lecture
D.B. Woodside · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
For television audiences, D.B. Woodside may be a familiar face from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Single Ladies, The Temptations, or The Night Agent. This week, the 1991 UAlbany graduate returns to campus for a conversation about a career that extends well beyond any single role.
His stage work includes portraying Martin Luther King Jr. in The Conscientious Objector, his New York theater debut. He also received an NAACP Award for Best Lead Male for his performance in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, a play whose Detroit factory setting places work, loyalty, and economic insecurity at its center.
The annual Burian Lecture brings theater scholars and practitioners to UAlbany in recognition of Jarka Burian’s long service to the university. Woodside’s return gives the evening a particularly direct connection between campus training and the professional life that can follow.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
Kristen McCallum · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
Kristen McCallum credits the adventures of her Jamaican family with beginning her fascination with stories. A UAlbany graduate with degrees earned in 2013 and 2025, she returns with her debut novel, Free Girls, published this summer.
Her work beyond fiction also centers on who gets heard. She founded SafeWordSociety, a creative initiative celebrating historically marginalized communities, and has worked in curriculum development, public engagement, and organizational strategy. She is currently director of operations for the New York State Defenders Association.
The Writers Institute presents this appearance under the heading “Heartache and Hope.” It offers a chance to hear a new novelist whose professional and creative work share an interest in community, transformation, and the possibilities of storytelling. Books will be available for purchase, with a signing after the conversation.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center, Multipurpose Room · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Book signing follows
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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MOVIE LOVE: Skidmore Professors GET PERSONAL at the Movies
Skidmore College / Salmagundi
Some films matter to us for reasons that criticism alone cannot fully explain. They become attached to a particular age, a relationship, a discovery, or a way of understanding ourselves. MOVIE LOVE makes that personal connection its starting point.
Presented as a Salmagundi program, the evening brings Skidmore professors together to discuss their relationships with movies. The emphasis on getting personal suggests a welcome shift from treating films only as objects to analyze toward considering what they do in the lives of the people watching them.
The departmental listing has not supplied a full participant or film list, so there is no promised lineup here. The attraction is the format itself: an opportunity to hear familiar or unfamiliar films discussed through experience as well as expertise.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 7:30 PM
📍 Davis Auditorium · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART, VISUAL CULTURE & MAKING
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At Anaya Springs, small stone dams connect artistic practice with the patient work of restoring water, soil, and plant life.
The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Bill Gilbert, Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes and Rachel Seligman · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What can a small structure accomplish when it is built repeatedly, carefully, and in response to a particular landscape? At Anaya Springs in New Mexico, hand-built stone dams have become part of a long effort to slow water, hold soil, and regenerate degraded grasslands.
The Tang’s 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs follows that work through artistic practice, mapping, and environmental research. The exhibition brings together ways of knowing a place that are often separated: observation, data, construction, painting, and the accumulated experience of returning to the same ground.
Bill Gilbert opens the evening with a talk, followed by a conversation with Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes, and curator Rachel Seligman. Friday’s workshops offer opportunities to explore two of the project’s methods more directly.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Charlie Bettigole · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A map can do more than tell us where something is. It can reveal relationships among water, terrain, vegetation, and human intervention—connections that may be difficult to recognize while standing on the ground.
Charlie Bettigole, a Survival Kit Collective member and a Middlebury College lecturer and director of applied GIS, leads this introduction to geographic information systems. His work uses geospatial science to investigate environmental questions, ranging from individual parcels to much larger landscapes.
No previous experience is required. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop, and the museum requests advance registration. The workshop provides a practical complement to 500 Dams, introducing one of the tools used to understand and communicate the project’s landscape.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 11 AM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Register in advance · Bring a laptop if possible
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Flora Zine-Making
Lynn Grimes · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A single sheet of paper can become a small book: folded, copied, exchanged, and carried away. Lynn Grimes leads a workshop in making plant-themed zines, connecting the modest scale of a handmade publication with the close observation of the natural world.
Grimes has lived off the grid in New Mexico’s western Galisteo Basin since 1990. Her work records the surrounding landscape through botanical painting, sketchbooks, nature journals, relief prints, and handmade books. She is also a longtime educator whose work appears in 500 Dams.
Participants will create a one-page plant zine that can be reproduced and folded into multiple pages. The format makes this an accessible entry into publishing your own observations: something small enough to finish, share, and make again.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 2 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · No experience required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Tang Guide Tour
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 leads a tour of the Tang’s current exhibitions as part of its student gallery-guide program. The guided visit offers a starting point for looking closely and asking questions; visitors are invited to stay afterward and explore independently.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Meet in the Tang Atrium · Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Inside EMPAC: Public Tour
Francis Grunfeld · RPI / EMPAC
EMPAC’s public tours offer a look behind the performances at a building designed to accommodate a wide range of artistic and technical possibilities. The experience can involve thinking about how a room handles sound, how a stage changes, or how light shapes a space.
Each tour is led by a different member of the EMPAC team. Francis Grunfeld leads the November visit, making this an opportunity to encounter the building through the perspective of someone who works within it.
Tours last about 90 minutes. EMPAC recommends registering ahead and arriving ten minutes early; the meeting point is the main lobby on Level 7, reached from the roundabout.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Meet in the Level 7 Main Lobby · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to all · Advance registration recommended
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & DANCE
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Rydell High’s romances, friendships, and rivalries take the stage for the final weekend of TIS Teens’ production.
Grease — Final Weekend
TIS Teens · Eddie Knight · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
The last weekend of TIS Teens’ Grease returns to Rydell High, where romance and friendship are continually negotiated against the pressure to fit in. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical gives that world its familiar combination of comic bravado, vulnerability, and exuberant songs.
Directed by Eddie Knight, this production places young performers inside a story about young people constructing their identities in public. The school setting may belong to an earlier era, but the questions of reputation, belonging, and changing yourself for someone else remain recognizable.
Three performances remain this week, ending with Sunday’s matinee. For readers who have been meaning to go, this is the production’s final weekend.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 James L. Meader Little Theatre · Russell Sage College, Troy
🎟️ Tickets: $15 · Recommended for ages ten and older
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Sunday, November 8: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Red Light, Green Light
Sophie Shin ’27 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A familiar childhood game supplies the starting point for a short contemporary dance choreographed by Sophie Shin ’27. Its basic tension—movement followed by an abrupt demand to stop—offers an immediately recognizable framework for watching bodies respond to changing instructions.
The student cast includes Matia Adora, Kayla Corsilia, Ella Donnis, Izzy Helayel, Josi Hickey, and Vivi Hukin. The museum setting places their performance within a space where audiences are already accustomed to looking closely at relationships among form, movement, and surroundings.
Two performances give visitors a choice of times. The event is short, free, and open to the public, making it possible to combine with a separate visit to the galleries.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 2:30 PM and 4 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
2:30 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
4 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Capital Duo & the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
Duncan Cumming, Hilary Cumming and Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company · University at Albany
Two long artistic partnerships meet in a program celebrating anniversaries. Pianist Duncan Cumming and violinist Hilary Cumming, performing as Capital Duo, mark 30 years of playing together; choreographer Ellen Sinopoli’s company is completing its 35th year of creating and presenting dance in the region.
The program includes a premiere set to music by Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, a return to a collaboration from 2018, instrumental interludes by Bartók and Smetana, and a medley bringing Gershwin’s music into movement.
The interest lies in the live exchange between musicians and dancers: musical phrasing becomes something visible, while movement gives familiar sounds a different emphasis. This is a substantial local collaboration, bringing UAlbany’s ensemble-in-residence together with an established regional dance company.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 7:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $16 general / $12 seniors and UAlbany staff / $5 students
🎟️ Day of show: $21 / $17 / $10
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Skidmania gives a new generation of musicians room to reinterpret the songs of 1976.
Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore student performers and the Skidmaniacs · Skidmore College
The year 1976 offers an unusually expansive musical playground. Disco, punk, soul, progressive experimentation, country, and big-guitar rock were all finding audiences, sometimes in sharply different corners of the same culture. Skidmania ’76 gives Skidmore performers a chance to explore that range.
Auditioned student acts offer both tributes and creative reinterpretations, with the faculty house band, the Skidmaniacs, participating in the production. The department’s planning materials draw from artists as varied as Stevie Wonder, ABBA, the Ramones, Dolly Parton, Queen, and Philip Glass; those materials describe the possibilities, rather than a guaranteed final set list.
Now in its fifth year, Skidmania combines a substantial campus performance with charitable fundraising. Both performances are sold out. Readers who already hold tickets can use the dates below; any questions about returns or attendance arrangements should go to the Zankel box office.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 8 PM
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $25 · SOLD OUT · Proceeds benefit charity
☎️ Zankel box office: 518-580-5321
Details · Box office information
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
Musicians of Ma’alwyck · SUNY Schenectady / School of Music
Musicians of Ma’alwyck specializes in bringing earlier musical worlds into the present, often using research and historical settings to reconnect compositions with the people who played and heard them. Founded by violinist Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, the ensemble has been part of the region’s musical life since 1999.
A Fashionable Assembly features music by J. C. Bach, Handel, Corri, and Shield. The program’s title evokes a world in which music belonged to social gatherings and intimate rooms as well as public concert halls.
This free lunchtime appearance provides an accessible way to encounter that repertoire without committing to an evening out. SUNY Schenectady’s concert listing identifies Carl B. Taylor Auditorium as the venue for its concerts unless otherwise noted.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Recess!
EMPAC’s free monthly lunchtime series invites visitors to stop in at Evelyn’s Café, hear live music, and take a break from the working day. Arrive during the two-hour program rather than treating noon as a rigid curtain time. Musicians to be announced.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon–2 PM
📍 Evelyn’s Café, Level 5 · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Early Music Ensemble: Charming Music from the Baroque Era
Union College Early Music Ensemble · Union College
Union’s Early Music Ensemble explores music written in Italy, Germany, and France, including works by Locatelli, Telemann, and Boismortier. The program offers a smaller-scale alternative to the week’s amplified concerts and theatrical productions.
Period-style instruments, including harpsichord, help establish a different sound world. They also invite listeners to notice how texture and articulation change when instruments respond differently from their modern counterparts.
The concert is part of Union’s fall ensemble series, which draws performers from across the college. Suggested donations support the ensembles, and a reception follows.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under twelve
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
BEFORE YOU GO
A calendar entry or purchased ticket cannot guarantee that a schedule will remain unchanged. Recheck the organizer’s page before traveling, including any updated attendance or building-entry instructions.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
NOVEMBER 9–29
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Hands-on experiments bring nanotechnology, robotics, and other sciences within reach of young investigators.
NANOvember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day
University at Albany / NANOvember
More than 20 hands-on activities introduce children and families to nanotechnology, engineering, robotics, weather, climate, and cybersecurity. Participants can test robots, build with LEGOs, explore non-Newtonian fluids, and investigate materials that bend light or resist dirt.
The program is aimed particularly at children in grades 2–8 and their families. Register early: capacity is limited, and the previous edition sold out.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · Begins at 9:30 AM
📍 ETEC · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Advance registration required
Details and registration information
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INTERFACE: Cognitive Science
Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and cognitive scientist Brett Fajen explore the connection between perception and bodily action. Fajen studies how people guide movement through complex environments; Latsky brings a creative practice attentive to differences in bodies and neurological experience.
The program includes material from Living in the Grey, a documentary about dancers experiencing non-apparent neurological disabilities. EMPAC’s small studio programs can fill well ahead of their dates. Check with the box office early about advance registration and attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2 · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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Tracing Time: Paul Mauren
Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Sculptor Paul Mauren brings together opposing structures and images in work shaped by experimentation, fabrication, and structural invention. A longtime College of Saint Rose professor, Mauren taught sculpture there from 1978–2018; his work has appeared in museums and galleries throughout the Northeast and beyond.
The opening afternoon offers the opportunity to hear directly from the artist before seeing the exhibition at its reception.
📅 Thursday, November 12
Artist talk: 3–4 PM · Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium
Opening reception: 4–6 PM · Teaching Gallery, Administration Building
Exhibition: November 12–December 12
🎟️ Free and open to the public
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
NOVEMBER 30–FEBRUARY 28
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INTERFACE: Robotics
Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC
Musician and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to consider what happens when machines become instruments, collaborators, or extensions of the body. Their conversation connects technical research with the practical experimentation of making art.
The studio setting makes early attention to attendance arrangements worthwhile. EMPAC’s smaller programs can fill before the event week; check when registration will be available rather than assuming space will remain close to the date.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and immersive-technology specialist Talis Reks discuss ROAM, a project bringing live performance together with shared mixed reality. Their work asks how groups of moving participants can inhabit an imagined world while remaining together in physical space.
The conversation reaches into the practical challenges of tracking, networking, headsets, and storytelling. Check with EMPAC early about registration for this limited-capacity studio program; do not wait until February to investigate attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
NOVEMBER 9, 2026–MAY 9, 2027
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Productions to keep on your radar. Full descriptions will appear as their performance weeks approach.
Rent — Siena University — November 12–21 — Details
A Doll’s House — University at Albany — November 18–22 — Details
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5 — Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10 — Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 — Details
🆕 TITLE ANNOUNCED: Cabaret — University at Albany — March 3–7 — Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 — Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — University at Albany — April 14–17 — Details
🆕 NEW POSTING: Seussical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13; opens within this tracking window — Details
🌎 Regional Extension Theater
Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College / ’62 Center — March 5, 2027 — Details
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🖼️ EXHIBITIONS OPEN THIS WEEK
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Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Tang, Winter Gallery / Skidmore — through January 10, 2027 — Details
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Tang, Wachenheim Gallery / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
A Feeling of With — Tang, Malloy Wing / Skidmore — through July 18, 2027 — Details
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Tang, State Farm Mezzanine Gallery / Skidmore — through September 12, 2027 — Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Tang, Hyde Cabinet / Skidmore — through November 29, 2026 — Details
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang, Museum Elevator / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Tang Atrium / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Art on Campus — Locations across Skidmore College — through October 3, 2027 — Details
Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery / Russell Sage College — through December 5, 2026 — Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center / Union — through November 22, 2026 — Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Schaffer Library, Lally Reading Room / Union — through November 25, 2026 · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium / Union — fall 2026; closing date not posted · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery / Siena University — through December 4, 2026 — Details
Garden — Thomas Lail — Administration Building glass atrium / Hudson Valley Community College — ongoing; no closing date posted · Viewable from outside the building — Details
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Use this quick guide to compare times and build your week. Full descriptions, locations, admission information, and organizer links appear above. Multiple performances are listed separately here so you can choose the date that works for you.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2
1:30–3:30 PM — A U.S.–China Space Race?
UAlbany · Emeritus Center, UAB 134
3–4:30 PM — Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons
UAlbany · Humanities 354; streaming option
5 PM — Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
6–7 PM — How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3
No qualifying timed program is currently listed.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4
Noon — Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
SUNY Schenectady · Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · Free
Noon–2 PM — Recess!
RPI · EMPAC, Evelyn’s Café · Musicians to be announced
5:30 PM — Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Albany Law · Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom; online option · Register
7:30–8:30 PM — D.B. Woodside: Burian Lecture
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Free
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5
2 PM — Rebekah Samsonraj: Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
RPI · EMPAC, Studio Beta · Open to the public
4:30 PM — Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
4:30–5:30 PM — Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
UAlbany · Campus Center Multipurpose Room · Free
6 PM — The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Skidmore · Tang Teaching Museum
7:30 PM — MOVIE LOVE
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6
11 AM — GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free · Register
2 PM — Flora Zine-Making
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7
11 AM–12:30 PM — EMPAC Tour with Francis Grunfeld
RPI · Meet in EMPAC Level 7 Lobby · Free · Registration recommended
2:30 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
4 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
7:30 PM — Capital Duo & Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8
2 PM — Early Music Ensemble
Union · Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29
Skidmore · Tang Atrium · Free
2 PM — Grease — Final Performance
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
CHECK BEFORE TRAVELING
Schedules and attendance arrangements can change after publication. Check the official event page or contact the venue before setting out to confirm that the program is still taking place.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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Capital Region Curated — Edited by Alan Koslow
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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Capital Region Curated: November 2-8
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, actor D.B. Woodside and more.
Alan Koslow
30
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
🏛️ 📚 🎶 🎭 🔬
BERNARD TSCHUMI, DOROTHY ROBERTS, D.B. WOODSIDE & A U.S.–CHINA SPACE RACE
What do buildings encourage us to do? How has American law shaped whom we can marry? And are the United States and China entering a new race beyond Earth? This week’s campus programs approach large questions through the work of architect Bernard Tschumi, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, and former NASA policy adviser Patrick Besha.
There is plenty to hear and see, too: actor D.B. Woodside returns to UAlbany, the Tang brings artists, mapping, ecology, and hands-on workshops together around 500 Dams, and Capital Duo joins the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company. Elsewhere, a novelist explores young lives, a scientist explains how light makes computer chips, and Grease reaches its final weekend.
Bernard Tschumi’s work asks how architecture shapes the encounters, movements, and unexpected experiences that happen inside it.
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It really helps when readers share Capital Region Curated.
If you work with a college department, program, gallery, museum, performing arts office, organization, campus newsletter or personal newsletter, I’d be grateful if you would share it with people who might want a weekly guide to public events on Capital Region campuses.
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks — Bernard Tschumi, Dorothy Roberts, D.B. Woodside and Patrick Besha on a U.S.–China space race.
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life — Architecture, interracial marriage and law, space competition, Beyoncé and teaching, semiconductor manufacturing, Indigenous political thought, and stem cell therapies.
📚 Books, Film & Storytelling — D.B. Woodside’s acting career, Kristen McCallum’s Free Girls, and Skidmore professors on the movies that matter to them.
🎨 Art & Visual Culture — The Tang’s 500 Dams artist conversation, mapping and zine workshops, a guided museum visit, and a behind-the-scenes EMPAC tour.
🎭 Theater & Dance — The final weekend of Grease, student choreography at the Tang, and Capital Duo with the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company.
🎶 Music, Sound & Technology — Musicians of Ma’alwyck, EMPAC’s Recess!, Union’s Early Music Ensemble, and the sold-out Skidmania ’76.
🔥 Plan Ahead — NANOvember Family Day, EMPAC’s limited-capacity cognitive science program, and Paul Mauren’s exhibition opening at HVCC.
🔭 Long-Range Early Warning — Robotics and mixed reality at EMPAC.
🎭 Future Theater — Upcoming campus productions through early May.
🖼️ Exhibitions Open This Week — A compact guide to current exhibitions and installations, immediately after Future Theater.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file lets you add this week’s scheduled events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Individual calendar links beside each listing let you choose just the programs you want to attend. Adding an event to your calendar does not reserve a seat or complete any required registration.
📅 DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
For Google Calendar, download the file and import it through Settings → Import & export. The individual Google Calendar links below open an event ready to save.
Where an organizer has not published an ending time, calendar entries use our standard 90-minute duration.
📍 BEFORE YOU GO
Event information is checked during preparation, but schedules can change and programs may be canceled or moved after publication. Check with the venue before traveling to confirm that the event is still taking place, along with its time, location and attendance requirements.
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, ask campus staff for assistance and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Check event pages for special registration, parking, accessibility or building-entry instructions.
💬 READER FIELD NOTES
Did you attend something listed in Capital Region Curated?
Leave a quick comment: what did you see, and would you recommend it? One sentence is enough.
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⭐ FOUR TOP PICKS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract — RPI / EMPAC
The architect behind Paris’s Parc de la Villette and Athens’s New Acropolis Museum comes to RPI for the Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. Tschumi has spent his career challenging the idea that architecture is simply a matter of attractive forms: his work considers how buildings organize movement, activity, and encounters. Monday, November 2, at 5 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project — Albany Law School
A family story opens onto a much larger legal history as MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts examines interracial marriage, race, love, and law. The author of Killing the Black Body, Fatal Invention, and Torn Apart brings decades of scholarship on institutions and inequality to Albany Law’s annual Katz Lecture. Wednesday, November 4, at 5:30 PM; in person and online.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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D.B. Woodside — University at Albany
Before audiences knew him from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Night Agent, D.B. Woodside was a UAlbany student. He returns for a free conversation about a career spanning television, film, and stage—including work portraying Martin Luther King Jr. and performing Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew. Wednesday, November 4, at 7:30 PM.
See Books, Film & Storytelling below.
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A U.S.–China Space Race? — University at Albany
Patrick Besha brings more than two decades of government experience, including service as a senior NASA policy adviser, to a question that reaches beyond rockets. With both countries pursuing lunar ambitions and operating major satellite and human-spaceflight programs, what kind of competition is developing—and what is at stake? Monday, November 2, from 1:30–3:30 PM.
See Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations below.
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🏛️ IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
Bernard Tschumi · RPI / EMPAC
An architect’s work continues after construction ends: people enter, move through it, gather, perform, and sometimes use it in ways its designers never anticipated. That relationship between space and activity has been central to Bernard Tschumi, whose projects include Parc de la Villette in Paris and the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
Tschumi’s importance also comes from his writing and teaching. He has challenged architecture’s tendency to treat a building as an isolated object, arguing for attention to the events and movements that give a place its life. At La Villette, that thinking produced a landscape of intersecting routes, structures, and activities rather than a conventional park organized around a single central composition.
His lecture, “Abstract,” is this year’s Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture. It offers a chance to hear an internationally influential practitioner whose questions apply well beyond the profession: how do designed spaces shape what becomes possible within them?
📅 Monday, November 2 · 5 PM
📍 EMPAC Concert Hall · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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A U.S.–China Space Race?
Patrick Besha · University at Albany / Emeritus Center
The United States and China operate the world’s largest space programs, with crewed space stations and thousands of satellites in orbit. Both are pursuing ambitious exploration goals, including plans involving the Moon and Mars. The question is how far those parallel ambitions amount to a strategic race.
Patrick Besha, founder of Global Space Group and a faculty member at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, approaches the subject with substantial government experience. During more than two decades in public service, he worked as a senior policy adviser at NASA headquarters and received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.
His background makes this a useful opportunity to consider space exploration as international policy as well as scientific achievement. The Emeritus Center says the presentation will not be recorded, so readers who want to hear it should plan to attend in person.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 1:30–3:30 PM
📍 Emeritus Center, UAB 134 · 1215 Western Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free; in person
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons: Pop Culture, Politics and Pedagogy
Janell Hobson · University at Albany
What can a major popular-cultural work make visible that a conventional classroom discussion might miss? Janell Hobson takes Beyoncé’s _Lemonade_ as a way into questions of race, gender, politics, and teaching, continuing UAlbany’s series on “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.”
Hobson has taught in UAlbany’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies for nearly 25 years. Her books include Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Body as Evidence, and When God Lost Her Tongue. She also writes for Ms. and has edited projects connecting Black feminist scholarship with public history.
That combination of academic research and writing for wider audiences gives the subject more substance than a celebrity discussion. The lecture places a familiar cultural work within the larger question of how teachers help students interpret images, histories, and power.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities Building, Room 354 · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
💻 Streaming option available
Details and streaming information
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
Robert L. Brainard · University at Albany / NANOvember
Computer chips depend on the ability to create extraordinarily small patterns with remarkable precision. Robert L. Brainard explains how light helps accomplish that task, introducing the science behind a manufacturing process whose products sit inside phones, computers, vehicles, and much of modern infrastructure.
Brainard is a professor in UAlbany’s Department of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. His field connects chemistry with semiconductor fabrication, making him a particularly useful guide to a process that can otherwise sound like an impenetrable collection of technical terms.
This public lecture opens the month’s NANOvember lecture series. For readers curious about what happens inside the region’s semiconductor industry, it offers a concrete starting point: how a physical process becomes a tool for making electronic devices.
📅 Monday, November 2 · 6–7 PM
📍 ETEC, Rooms 149/151 · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Doors open at 5:15 PM · Registration preferred, not required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Dorothy Roberts’s work connects the intimate life of families with the institutions and laws that define racial inequality.
Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Dorothy Roberts · Albany Law School
Dorothy Roberts has spent decades examining how American institutions reproduce racial inequality, often through decisions presented as private, protective, or scientifically neutral. Her books have addressed reproductive freedom, child welfare, and the persistent tendency to treat race as a biological fact rather than a political and social construction.
In “The Mixed Marriage Project: Lessons from the History of Interracial Marriage on Race, Love, and Law,” Roberts turns toward the relationship between family history and public law. The subject asks readers to consider how legal rules have reached into intimate life—and how marriage has both challenged and exposed racial boundaries.
Roberts is a MacArthur Fellow and the University of Pennsylvania’s George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology. Albany Law’s Katz Lecture, established around family-law concerns including reproductive rights, domestic violence, children, and inequality, provides an apt setting for this conversation. A reception follows the lecture; an online option is also available.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 5:30 PM · Reception follows
📍 Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom · 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Register in advance · In person and via Zoom
12th Annual Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
Glen Coulthard · Union College / Philosophy Department Speaker Series
Political ideas change as they move across countries, movements, and historical circumstances. Glen Coulthard’s lecture, “Maoism as Traveling Theory: Understanding Red Power Marxism during Canada’s Long Seventies,” examines that movement of ideas within Indigenous political struggle.
Coulthard, a scholar at the University of British Columbia, works on Indigenous politics and political theory. His appearance brings a specific historical question to Union’s series: how did activists encounter, adapt, or challenge revolutionary theories developed in very different settings?
The lecture’s title gives readers a more precise point of entry than a general discussion of political ideology. It invites attention to the relationship between imported theory and local experience—what travels successfully, what changes, and what cannot simply be transplanted.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30 PM
📍 Everest Lounge · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
Rebekah M. Samsonraj · RPI / Biomedical Engineering
Stem cells hold considerable promise for repairing damaged tissue, but promise alone does not produce a dependable treatment. Rebekah M. Samsonraj’s research addresses the difficult step between encouraging laboratory results and therapies that can be manufactured consistently and used reproducibly.
An assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arkansas, Samsonraj directs the Cellular Therapy and Biomanufacturing Laboratory. Her work includes identifying biomarkers that may help predict the potency of mesenchymal stem cells, studying how mechanical signals influence their behavior, and developing scalable approaches to cell-derived products.
The seminar focuses particularly on skeletal repair. It considers both cell-based treatments and extracellular vesicles—small particles released by cells—as researchers seek safer and more practical ways to translate regenerative science into clinical use.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 2 PM
📍 EMPAC, Studio Beta · RPI · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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📚 BOOKS, FILM & STORYTELLING
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D.B. Woodside returns to the university where his acting career began taking shape, bringing experience from television, film, and the stage.
D.B. Woodside: The Burian Lecture
D.B. Woodside · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
For television audiences, D.B. Woodside may be a familiar face from Lucifer, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Single Ladies, The Temptations, or The Night Agent. This week, the 1991 UAlbany graduate returns to campus for a conversation about a career that extends well beyond any single role.
His stage work includes portraying Martin Luther King Jr. in The Conscientious Objector, his New York theater debut. He also received an NAACP Award for Best Lead Male for his performance in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, a play whose Detroit factory setting places work, loyalty, and economic insecurity at its center.
The annual Burian Lecture brings theater scholars and practitioners to UAlbany in recognition of Jarka Burian’s long service to the university. Woodside’s return gives the evening a particularly direct connection between campus training and the professional life that can follow.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · 7:30–8:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
Kristen McCallum · University at Albany / NYS Writers Institute
Kristen McCallum credits the adventures of her Jamaican family with beginning her fascination with stories. A UAlbany graduate with degrees earned in 2013 and 2025, she returns with her debut novel, Free Girls, published this summer.
Her work beyond fiction also centers on who gets heard. She founded SafeWordSociety, a creative initiative celebrating historically marginalized communities, and has worked in curriculum development, public engagement, and organizational strategy. She is currently director of operations for the New York State Defenders Association.
The Writers Institute presents this appearance under the heading “Heartache and Hope.” It offers a chance to hear a new novelist whose professional and creative work share an interest in community, transformation, and the possibilities of storytelling. Books will be available for purchase, with a signing after the conversation.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center, Multipurpose Room · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Book signing follows
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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MOVIE LOVE: Skidmore Professors GET PERSONAL at the Movies
Skidmore College / Salmagundi
Some films matter to us for reasons that criticism alone cannot fully explain. They become attached to a particular age, a relationship, a discovery, or a way of understanding ourselves. MOVIE LOVE makes that personal connection its starting point.
Presented as a Salmagundi program, the evening brings Skidmore professors together to discuss their relationships with movies. The emphasis on getting personal suggests a welcome shift from treating films only as objects to analyze toward considering what they do in the lives of the people watching them.
The departmental listing has not supplied a full participant or film list, so there is no promised lineup here. The attraction is the format itself: an opportunity to hear familiar or unfamiliar films discussed through experience as well as expertise.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 7:30 PM
📍 Davis Auditorium · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎨 ART, VISUAL CULTURE & MAKING
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At Anaya Springs, small stone dams connect artistic practice with the patient work of restoring water, soil, and plant life.
The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Bill Gilbert, Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes and Rachel Seligman · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
What can a small structure accomplish when it is built repeatedly, carefully, and in response to a particular landscape? At Anaya Springs in New Mexico, hand-built stone dams have become part of a long effort to slow water, hold soil, and regenerate degraded grasslands.
The Tang’s 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs follows that work through artistic practice, mapping, and environmental research. The exhibition brings together ways of knowing a place that are often separated: observation, data, construction, painting, and the accumulated experience of returning to the same ground.
Bill Gilbert opens the evening with a talk, followed by a conversation with Charlie Bettigole, Lynn Grimes, and curator Rachel Seligman. Friday’s workshops offer opportunities to explore two of the project’s methods more directly.
📅 Thursday, November 5 · 6 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Charlie Bettigole · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A map can do more than tell us where something is. It can reveal relationships among water, terrain, vegetation, and human intervention—connections that may be difficult to recognize while standing on the ground.
Charlie Bettigole, a Survival Kit Collective member and a Middlebury College lecturer and director of applied GIS, leads this introduction to geographic information systems. His work uses geospatial science to investigate environmental questions, ranging from individual parcels to much larger landscapes.
No previous experience is required. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop, and the museum requests advance registration. The workshop provides a practical complement to 500 Dams, introducing one of the tools used to understand and communicate the project’s landscape.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 11 AM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Register in advance · Bring a laptop if possible
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Flora Zine-Making
Lynn Grimes · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A single sheet of paper can become a small book: folded, copied, exchanged, and carried away. Lynn Grimes leads a workshop in making plant-themed zines, connecting the modest scale of a handmade publication with the close observation of the natural world.
Grimes has lived off the grid in New Mexico’s western Galisteo Basin since 1990. Her work records the surrounding landscape through botanical painting, sketchbooks, nature journals, relief prints, and handmade books. She is also a longtime educator whose work appears in 500 Dams.
Participants will create a one-page plant zine that can be reproduced and folded into multiple pages. The format makes this an accessible entry into publishing your own observations: something small enough to finish, share, and make again.
📅 Friday, November 6 · 2 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public · No experience required
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Tang Guide Tour
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29 leads a tour of the Tang’s current exhibitions as part of its student gallery-guide program. The guided visit offers a starting point for looking closely and asking questions; visitors are invited to stay afterward and explore independently.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Meet in the Tang Atrium · Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Inside EMPAC: Public Tour
Francis Grunfeld · RPI / EMPAC
EMPAC’s public tours offer a look behind the performances at a building designed to accommodate a wide range of artistic and technical possibilities. The experience can involve thinking about how a room handles sound, how a stage changes, or how light shapes a space.
Each tour is led by a different member of the EMPAC team. Francis Grunfeld leads the November visit, making this an opportunity to encounter the building through the perspective of someone who works within it.
Tours last about 90 minutes. EMPAC recommends registering ahead and arriving ten minutes early; the meeting point is the main lobby on Level 7, reached from the roundabout.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 11 AM–12:30 PM
📍 Meet in the Level 7 Main Lobby · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free and open to all · Advance registration recommended
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎭 THEATER & DANCE
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Rydell High’s romances, friendships, and rivalries take the stage for the final weekend of TIS Teens’ production.
Grease — Final Weekend
TIS Teens · Eddie Knight · Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage
The last weekend of TIS Teens’ Grease returns to Rydell High, where romance and friendship are continually negotiated against the pressure to fit in. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical gives that world its familiar combination of comic bravado, vulnerability, and exuberant songs.
Directed by Eddie Knight, this production places young performers inside a story about young people constructing their identities in public. The school setting may belong to an earlier era, but the questions of reputation, belonging, and changing yourself for someone else remain recognizable.
Three performances remain this week, ending with Sunday’s matinee. For readers who have been meaning to go, this is the production’s final weekend.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 James L. Meader Little Theatre · Russell Sage College, Troy
🎟️ Tickets: $15 · Recommended for ages ten and older
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Sunday, November 8: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Red Light, Green Light
Sophie Shin ’27 · Skidmore College / Tang Teaching Museum
A familiar childhood game supplies the starting point for a short contemporary dance choreographed by Sophie Shin ’27. Its basic tension—movement followed by an abrupt demand to stop—offers an immediately recognizable framework for watching bodies respond to changing instructions.
The student cast includes Matia Adora, Kayla Corsilia, Ella Donnis, Izzy Helayel, Josi Hickey, and Vivi Hukin. The museum setting places their performance within a space where audiences are already accustomed to looking closely at relationships among form, movement, and surroundings.
Two performances give visitors a choice of times. The event is short, free, and open to the public, making it possible to combine with a separate visit to the galleries.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 2:30 PM and 4 PM
📍 Payne Room · Tang Teaching Museum · Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Free and open to the public
2:30 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
4 PM performance: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Capital Duo & the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
Duncan Cumming, Hilary Cumming and Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company · University at Albany
Two long artistic partnerships meet in a program celebrating anniversaries. Pianist Duncan Cumming and violinist Hilary Cumming, performing as Capital Duo, mark 30 years of playing together; choreographer Ellen Sinopoli’s company is completing its 35th year of creating and presenting dance in the region.
The program includes a premiere set to music by Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, a return to a collaboration from 2018, instrumental interludes by Bartók and Smetana, and a medley bringing Gershwin’s music into movement.
The interest lies in the live exchange between musicians and dancers: musical phrasing becomes something visible, while movement gives familiar sounds a different emphasis. This is a substantial local collaboration, bringing UAlbany’s ensemble-in-residence together with an established regional dance company.
📅 Saturday, November 7 · 7:30 PM
📍 Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre · 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Advance: $16 general / $12 seniors and UAlbany staff / $5 students
🎟️ Day of show: $21 / $17 / $10
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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🎶 MUSIC, SOUND & TECHNOLOGY
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Skidmania gives a new generation of musicians room to reinterpret the songs of 1976.
Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore student performers and the Skidmaniacs · Skidmore College
The year 1976 offers an unusually expansive musical playground. Disco, punk, soul, progressive experimentation, country, and big-guitar rock were all finding audiences, sometimes in sharply different corners of the same culture. Skidmania ’76 gives Skidmore performers a chance to explore that range.
Auditioned student acts offer both tributes and creative reinterpretations, with the faculty house band, the Skidmaniacs, participating in the production. The department’s planning materials draw from artists as varied as Stevie Wonder, ABBA, the Ramones, Dolly Parton, Queen, and Philip Glass; those materials describe the possibilities, rather than a guaranteed final set list.
Now in its fifth year, Skidmania combines a substantial campus performance with charitable fundraising. Both performances are sold out. Readers who already hold tickets can use the dates below; any questions about returns or attendance arrangements should go to the Zankel box office.
📅 Friday–Saturday, November 6–7 · 8 PM
📍 Arthur Zankel Music Center · 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ $25 · SOLD OUT · Proceeds benefit charity
☎️ Zankel box office: 518-580-5321
Details · Box office information
Friday, November 6: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
Saturday, November 7: Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
Musicians of Ma’alwyck · SUNY Schenectady / School of Music
Musicians of Ma’alwyck specializes in bringing earlier musical worlds into the present, often using research and historical settings to reconnect compositions with the people who played and heard them. Founded by violinist Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, the ensemble has been part of the region’s musical life since 1999.
A Fashionable Assembly features music by J. C. Bach, Handel, Corri, and Shield. The program’s title evokes a world in which music belonged to social gatherings and intimate rooms as well as public concert halls.
This free lunchtime appearance provides an accessible way to encounter that repertoire without committing to an evening out. SUNY Schenectady’s concert listing identifies Carl B. Taylor Auditorium as the venue for its concerts unless otherwise noted.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon
📍 Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · 78 Washington Avenue, Schenectady
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Recess!
EMPAC’s free monthly lunchtime series invites visitors to stop in at Evelyn’s Café, hear live music, and take a break from the working day. Arrive during the two-hour program rather than treating noon as a rigid curtain time. Musicians to be announced.
📅 Wednesday, November 4 · Noon–2 PM
📍 Evelyn’s Café, Level 5 · EMPAC · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
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Early Music Ensemble: Charming Music from the Baroque Era
Union College Early Music Ensemble · Union College
Union’s Early Music Ensemble explores music written in Italy, Germany, and France, including works by Locatelli, Telemann, and Boismortier. The program offers a smaller-scale alternative to the week’s amplified concerts and theatrical productions.
Period-style instruments, including harpsichord, help establish a different sound world. They also invite listeners to notice how texture and articulation change when instruments respond differently from their modern counterparts.
The concert is part of Union’s fall ensemble series, which draws performers from across the college. Suggested donations support the ensembles, and a reception follows.
📅 Sunday, November 8 · 2 PM
📍 Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center · Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Suggested donations: $15 general / $10 Union faculty, staff and alumni / $5 students, seniors and children under twelve
📅 Google Calendar · Apple/Outlook
BEFORE YOU GO
A calendar entry or purchased ticket cannot guarantee that a schedule will remain unchanged. Recheck the organizer’s page before traveling, including any updated attendance or building-entry instructions.
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
NOVEMBER 9–29
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Hands-on experiments bring nanotechnology, robotics, and other sciences within reach of young investigators.
NANOvember: STEM and Nanotechnology Family Day
University at Albany / NANOvember
More than 20 hands-on activities introduce children and families to nanotechnology, engineering, robotics, weather, climate, and cybersecurity. Participants can test robots, build with LEGOs, explore non-Newtonian fluids, and investigate materials that bend light or resist dirt.
The program is aimed particularly at children in grades 2–8 and their families. Register early: capacity is limited, and the previous edition sold out.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · Begins at 9:30 AM
📍 ETEC · 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany
🎟️ Free · Advance registration required
Details and registration information
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INTERFACE: Cognitive Science
Brett Fajen and Heidi Latsky · RPI / EMPAC
Choreographer Heidi Latsky and cognitive scientist Brett Fajen explore the connection between perception and bodily action. Fajen studies how people guide movement through complex environments; Latsky brings a creative practice attentive to differences in bodies and neurological experience.
The program includes material from Living in the Grey, a documentary about dancers experiencing non-apparent neurological disabilities. EMPAC’s small studio programs can fill well ahead of their dates. Check with the box office early about advance registration and attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2 · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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Tracing Time: Paul Mauren
Paul Mauren · Hudson Valley Community College / Teaching Gallery
Sculptor Paul Mauren brings together opposing structures and images in work shaped by experimentation, fabrication, and structural invention. A longtime College of Saint Rose professor, Mauren taught sculpture there from 1978–2018; his work has appeared in museums and galleries throughout the Northeast and beyond.
The opening afternoon offers the opportunity to hear directly from the artist before seeing the exhibition at its reception.
📅 Thursday, November 12
Artist talk: 3–4 PM · Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium
Opening reception: 4–6 PM · Teaching Gallery, Administration Building
Exhibition: November 12–December 12
🎟️ Free and open to the public
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🔭 LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
NOVEMBER 30–FEBRUARY 28
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INTERFACE: Robotics
Qiujiang Levi Lu and John Wen · RPI / EMPAC
Musician and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins robotics researcher John Wen to consider what happens when machines become instruments, collaborators, or extensions of the body. Their conversation connects technical research with the practical experimentation of making art.
The studio setting makes early attention to attendance arrangements worthwhile. EMPAC’s smaller programs can fill before the event week; check when registration will be available rather than assuming space will remain close to the date.
📅 Thursday, January 14, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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INTERFACE: Mixed Reality
Lars Jan and Talis Reks · RPI / EMPAC
Artist Lars Jan and immersive-technology specialist Talis Reks discuss ROAM, a project bringing live performance together with shared mixed reality. Their work asks how groups of moving participants can inhabit an imagined world while remaining together in physical space.
The conversation reaches into the practical challenges of tracking, networking, headsets, and storytelling. Check with EMPAC early about registration for this limited-capacity studio program; do not wait until February to investigate attendance arrangements.
📅 Thursday, February 11, 2027 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman · 50 Eighth Street, Troy
🎟️ Free; check with EMPAC about advance registration
☎️ EMPAC box office: 518-276-3921
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🎭 FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
NOVEMBER 9, 2026–MAY 9, 2027
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Productions to keep on your radar. Full descriptions will appear as their performance weeks approach.
Rent — Siena University — November 12–21 — Details
A Doll’s House — University at Albany — November 18–22 — Details
This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5 — Details
Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10 — Details
Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3 — Details
🆕 TITLE ANNOUNCED: Cabaret — University at Albany — March 3–7 — Details
The Country Wife — Siena University — April 8–17 — Details
FRESH ACTS: A Festival of New Plays — University at Albany — April 14–17 — Details
🆕 NEW POSTING: Seussical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — May 5–13; opens within this tracking window — Details
🌎 Regional Extension Theater
Nature Theatre of Oklahoma: Victory Over the Sun — Williams College / ’62 Center — March 5, 2027 — Details
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🖼️ EXHIBITIONS OPEN THIS WEEK
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Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand — University Art Museum / UAlbany — through April 2, 2027 — Details
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs — Tang, Winter Gallery / Skidmore — through January 10, 2027 — Details
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation — Tang, Wachenheim Gallery / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
A Feeling of With — Tang, Malloy Wing / Skidmore — through July 18, 2027 — Details
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest — Tang, State Farm Mezzanine Gallery / Skidmore — through September 12, 2027 — Details
Hyde Cabinet #32: Happy 2B?! — Tang, Hyde Cabinet / Skidmore — through November 29, 2026 — Details
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang, Museum Elevator / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Julian LaVerdiere & Duke Riley — Tang Atrium / Skidmore — through January 3, 2027 — Details
Art on Campus — Locations across Skidmore College — through October 3, 2027 — Details
Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery / Russell Sage College — through December 5, 2026 — Details
Practices: The Visual Arts Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition — Crowell and West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center / Union — through November 22, 2026 — Details
American Horror Stories: Audubon’s Morbid Curiosities — Schaffer Library, Lally Reading Room / Union — through November 25, 2026 · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Conservation: Art & Science in the Archives — Schaffer Library, Beuth Atrium / Union — fall 2026; closing date not posted · Visitor appointment required — Details · Arrange a visit
Mid-Semester Student Exhibition — Foy Hall Gallery / Siena University — through December 4, 2026 — Details
Garden — Thomas Lail — Administration Building glass atrium / Hudson Valley Community College — ongoing; no closing date posted · Viewable from outside the building — Details
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📅 BY DAY CALENDAR
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Use this quick guide to compare times and build your week. Full descriptions, locations, admission information, and organizer links appear above. Multiple performances are listed separately here so you can choose the date that works for you.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2
1:30–3:30 PM — A U.S.–China Space Race?
UAlbany · Emeritus Center, UAB 134
3–4:30 PM — Beyoncé’s Lemonade Lessons
UAlbany · Humanities 354; streaming option
5 PM — Bernard Tschumi: Abstract
6–7 PM — How Light Is Used to Make Computer Chips
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3
No qualifying timed program is currently listed.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4
Noon — Musicians of Ma’alwyck: A Fashionable Assembly
SUNY Schenectady · Carl B. Taylor Auditorium · Free
Noon–2 PM — Recess!
RPI · EMPAC, Evelyn’s Café · Musicians to be announced
5:30 PM — Dorothy Roberts: The Mixed Marriage Project
Albany Law · Dean Alexander Moot Courtroom; online option · Register
7:30–8:30 PM — D.B. Woodside: Burian Lecture
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Free
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5
2 PM — Rebekah Samsonraj: Engineering Better Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapies
RPI · EMPAC, Studio Beta · Open to the public
4:30 PM — Glen Coulthard: Maoism as Traveling Theory
4:30–5:30 PM — Kristen McCallum: Free Girls
UAlbany · Campus Center Multipurpose Room · Free
6 PM — The Survival Kit Collective and 500 Dams: Artists Talk
Skidmore · Tang Teaching Museum
7:30 PM — MOVIE LOVE
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6
11 AM — GIS Cartography Workshop for Beginners
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free · Register
2 PM — Flora Zine-Making
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7
11 AM–12:30 PM — EMPAC Tour with Francis Grunfeld
RPI · Meet in EMPAC Level 7 Lobby · Free · Registration recommended
2:30 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
4 PM — Red Light, Green Light
Skidmore · Tang, Payne Room · Free
7 PM — Grease
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
7:30 PM — Capital Duo & Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company
UAlbany · Performing Arts Center, Main Theatre
8 PM — Skidmania ’76 — SOLD OUT
Skidmore · Zankel Music Center
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8
2 PM — Early Music Ensemble
Union · Emerson Auditorium, Taylor Music Center
2 PM — Tang Guide Tour with Jocelyn Crespo Hernandez ’29
Skidmore · Tang Atrium · Free
2 PM — Grease — Final Performance
Russell Sage · James L. Meader Little Theatre
CHECK BEFORE TRAVELING
Schedules and attendance arrangements can change after publication. Check the official event page or contact the venue before setting out to confirm that the program is still taking place.
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HELP SHAPE CAPITAL REGION CURATED
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What would you like to see more of—music, science, history, literature, visual art or public affairs? Have you attended something that deserves a reader’s recommendation?
Send suggestions, corrections and field notes to Alan Koslow. If you organize a substantial public campus event, please include its official event page, date, time, location and attendance requirements.
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A local source for Jewish community news, culture, events and stories.
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The 518 Newsletter
A guide to Capital Region events, arts and culture, food and music.
Learn About The 518 Newsletter
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What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
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© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios