Capital Region Curated: September 28-October 4
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Mutale Nkonde on AI bias, poet Joshua Bennett, Senior Citizens Law Day and more.
Alan Koslow
39
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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AI, POETRY, AGING LAW, ART & MUSIC
A week that moves from artificial intelligence and American poetry to the law of aging, museum reopenings, chamber music, flamenco and a remarkable 54-year musical homecoming.
Joshua Bennett reimagines America through poetry.
📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD
If Capital Region Curated helps you find something worth seeing, hearing or thinking about, please pass it along.
And if you work with a college department, arts organization, campus program, library, museum or community group, sharing the newsletter is one of the easiest ways to help more people discover the remarkable amount of public programming taking place on our local campuses.
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks
Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias · Joshua Bennett’s America in Poetry · Senior Citizens Law Day · Albany Symphony at Opalka
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life
Artificial intelligence and bias · new flood maps and insurance · youth organizing in immigrant communities · psychology at Union · the legal realities of aging
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas
Joshua Bennett at the NYS Writers Institute · Joan Lunden at Skidmore
🎨 Art & Visual Culture
UAlbany’s University Art Museum reopens with three new exhibitions · Homecoming curator tour · an exhibition-packed weekend at the Tang · daily Town Crier performances
🎶 Music
Maria Z Ensemble at HVCC · Filene Scholars at Skidmore · Albany Symphony chamber music at Opalka · Bard celebrates Joan Tower
🌎 Regional Extension
Joan Tower at Bard · Waterwell’s The Ford/Hill Project at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead
A century of American diplomacy · Flaherty Film Seminar · immersive audio at EMPAC · Bard’s Arendt Forum · jazz · UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany · Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
Artificial intelligence may be new technology, but it learns from a decidedly old world. Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI for the People and a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, opens UAlbany’s fall WGSS series by examining what happens when assumptions about race and gender become embedded in the systems increasingly entering classrooms and everyday life.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30 PM
Joshua Bennett’s We (The People of the United States) is not a conventional national history. His book-length poem moves from Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston to the Beach Boys, Sun Ra, experimental physics, the typewriter and life on Mars, using poetry to ask what America has been and what its familiar first-person plural—we—might actually contain.
Full details below in Books, Writers & Ideas.
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
Albany Law School · Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
Estate planning, Medicaid, long-term care, powers of attorney, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparation and financial exploitation converge in one unusually practical free public day at Albany Law. The program is designed not only for older adults but also for people approaching retirement, family members and caregivers.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
Five Albany Symphony musicians perform music by Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Vieuxtemps in the intimate surroundings of Opalka Gallery, followed by a conversation between Music Director David Alan Miller and Ojakangas. It is an unusually close-up introduction to the Symphony’s season before the full orchestra takes the stage at the Palace that evening.
Full details below in Music.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Mutale Nkonde examines bias inside artificial intelligence.
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom
Artificial intelligence arrived in public life with astonishing speed. In classrooms alone, students now use generative systems to research, write, brainstorm and solve problems; instructors are deciding where those tools belong and where they do not; institutions are experimenting with automated systems whose influence may be far less visible than ChatGPT on a laptop.
The speed can make AI seem like a rupture with the past. Mutale Nkonde’s work begins from almost the opposite premise. New technologies are built from human decisions and trained on human-produced material. If that material contains longstanding patterns involving race, gender, class or power, a sophisticated system can reproduce them without ever “believing” anything itself.
Nkonde founded AI for the People, a nonprofit devoted to responsible approaches to artificial-intelligence development, and UAlbany identifies her as a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Her work has placed her at the intersection of technology and public policy rather than within a purely technical conversation about how algorithms work.
At UAlbany, the subject becomes particularly immediate: the classroom. Education is one of the places where society is deciding, in real time, how much authority to give AI. Should a machine evaluate student writing? Recommend educational resources? Help an instructor create assignments? Identify struggling students? What happens when systems that appear objective reproduce patterns inherited from the material on which they were trained?
Nkonde’s lecture launches the fall UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.” The larger series examines how colleges teach contested subjects at a moment when race, gender, academic freedom and higher education itself have become part of national political conflict.
The most consequential questions about AI are no longer simply What can it do? They concern what we ask it to do, whose assumptions it carries with it, and what happens when human judgment is quietly transferred to systems whose decisions may be difficult to interrogate.
📅 Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Public lecture
🔗 Details: UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House
Hudson Valley Community College / FEMA / Rensselaer County
A flood map can look like a technical government document until one of its lines crosses your house.
Rensselaer County residents have a particularly practical reason to pay attention this week. FEMA has released new preliminary Flood Insurance Study information and Flood Insurance Rate Maps, and this open house at Hudson Valley Community College gives residents a chance to compare those preliminary maps with the existing ones and ask what the changes may mean for individual properties and neighborhoods.
This is deliberately not a lecture. There is no formal presentation and no need to arrive at 3 PM. Residents can come at any point during the three-and-a-half-hour window, look at the maps, ask questions about the mapping process and flood insurance, and talk through how a changed designation could affect their property or community.
The distinction matters because flood mapping affects more than whether a particular street has flooded in recent memory. FEMA maps communicate risk, inform floodplain management and help determine where flood-insurance requirements may apply.
The open house should be particularly useful for homeowners who already carry flood insurance, people considering buying or selling property, landlords and anyone whose property sits near a revised flood-zone boundary.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 3–6:30 PM
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center, Rooms 1–3, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free · Drop in at any time
🔗 Details: Rensselaer County Flood Map Information Open House
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Verónica Terriquez explores how young organizers become leaders.
📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities
Verónica Terriquez — ASA Rose Book Speaker Series
Leadership is usually described after someone has acquired it. Verónica Terriquez is interested in the earlier, less tidy process by which people learn that they can lead at all.
Terriquez is a professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Urban Planning at UCLA and director of its Chicano Studies Research Center. Her new book, Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities, examines young people whose education in leadership takes place not primarily in a classroom but through civic engagement, community organizing and collective action.
A teenager who enters an organization because of an immediate concern—immigration, schools, working conditions, housing or discrimination—may have no intention of becoming a “leader.” But organizing requires someone to speak at a meeting, recruit another student, talk to an official, plan an action, resolve disagreements and persuade a group to keep going when progress is slow.
Those experiences can become an informal civic education.
Terriquez examines both the opportunities and obstacles young organizers encounter as they work for social change. Immigrant communities provide a particularly revealing setting because young people may be navigating language, legal status, economic inequality, family responsibilities and institutions in which their communities have limited formal power.
The book’s larger question reaches beyond immigration. Democracies depend on people who know how to participate, yet civic participation is often discussed as though adults simply wake up knowing how to organize a meeting, build a coalition or challenge an institution. Terriquez looks at how those abilities are actually learned.
UAlbany brings her to campus through the ASA Rose Book Speaker Series, with audience questions following the lecture.
📅 Wednesday, September 30 · 2–4 PM
📍 Campus Center West Board Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ RSVP requested
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium
Every generation seems to acquire a new technology that adults suspect may be damaging the young.
Comic books once occupied that position. So did rock music, television, violent movies and video games. Smartphones and social media now sit near the center of the same argument, accompanied by much more serious questions about anxiety, depression, attention, isolation and adolescent development.
Psychologist Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University, has spent much of his career working in the difficult territory where media, technology, psychological research and public anxiety meet. His scholarship has often challenged sweeping claims about harmful media effects and asked whether the evidence supports the certainty with which those claims are sometimes presented.
That does not make the underlying questions trivial. If parents, educators and policymakers are going to make decisions affecting millions of young people, distinguishing a genuine psychological effect from a cultural panic becomes unusually important.
Union’s Psychology Department Speaker Series and Honors Colloquium brings outside scholars from different areas of psychology and neuroscience to campus. Ferguson opens the 2026–27 series, and Union explicitly welcomes members of the local community. Lunch and refreshments are provided.
Union has not yet announced Ferguson’s lecture title or topic, so Capital Region Curated is leaving the subject open rather than attaching an earlier working title to the event.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · 12:45–1:50 PM
📍 Karp 105, Union College, Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Free public lecture · Lunch and refreshments provided
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the lecture.
🔗 Details: Union College Psychology Speaker Series
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
There is a particular cruelty to many legal questions involving aging: families often discover what they needed to know only after they needed to know it.
A parent suddenly requires long-term care. Someone can no longer manage finances independently. A power of attorney that seemed like paperwork becomes essential. Medicaid rules collide with decisions about nursing care. An older relative is targeted by a scam. Family members discover that everyone assumed someone else understood the legal arrangements.
Albany Law School’s annual Senior Citizens Law Day is designed to move some of those conversations earlier.
The free program is intended for seniors, people approaching their senior years, loved ones and caregivers. Albany Law professors, practicing attorneys and other specialists lead workshops covering estate planning, Medicaid and long-term care, powers of attorney, senior living options, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparedness and other legal and practical issues affecting older adults.
The schedule begins at 8:30 AM with opening remarks from Patrick Wildes, director of Albany Law’s Government Law Center, and Greg Olsen, director of the New York State Office for the Aging. Workshops then run through the morning, including sessions on SSI and SSD benefits, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, tenant rights and preparing hospital “go-bags” for emergencies.
A community-resource area broadens the day beyond formal legal education, bringing regional legal, aging, health and social-service organizations into the same building.
The afternoon turns to one of the most troubling subjects in elder law. The Nancy M. Sills ’76 Memorial Lecture on Aging Law and Policy, from noon to 2 PM, examines financial exploitation of older adults. Saratoga County District Attorney Brett R. Eby and Elizabeth Loewy, co-founder and COO of EverSafe, are scheduled for the conversation.
Free 30-minute consultations with attorneys were also offered during the morning, although advance registration for those appointments closed September 25. The workshops, lecture and community resources remain part of the larger program.
Breakfast and lunch are provided, and parking on the Albany Law campus is free. You may arrive because you have one question. The real value may be discovering the questions your family has not yet thought to ask.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
📍 Albany Law School, 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · Free breakfast and lunch · Free campus parking
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the program.
🔗 Details / Registration: Albany Law School
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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Poet and scholar Joshua Bennett.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
The title begins with four words Americans have been repeating for nearly 240 years: We the People of the United States.
Joshua Bennett takes possession of that familiar language for We (The People of the United States), an ambitious new book-length poem about America’s past, present and future. But Bennett does not construct his America as a procession of presidents, wars and constitutional milestones. His map is much stranger, broader and more alive.
The Beach Boys are there. So are Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, Robert Frost and the Jackson 5. Bennett writes about the invention of the typewriter and experimental physics, popular music and literary history, and even life on Mars.
The method makes sense for a poet who has never kept literature sealed away from the rest of American life.
Bennett’s previous books include Being Property Once Myself, a work of criticism revisiting Black presence in the American literary canon; the poetry collection Owed; The Study of Human Life; and Spoken Word: A Cultural History. His work repeatedly crosses boundaries among poetry, scholarship, cultural history and criticism. He now teaches literature at MIT.
That background helps explain why the little word “We” in the new title carries so much weight.
National stories depend on inclusion and exclusion. Who gets to stand inside the pronoun? Which people, art forms, inventions, memories and experiences are treated as central to the American story, and which are placed at its margins?
The Writers Institute is presenting Bennett as part of its America in Poetry programming, cosponsored by UAlbany’s Great Dane Dialogue Series in connection with the country’s 250th anniversary.
Anniversaries tend to produce polished national narratives. Poetry can do something more unruly. It can interrupt the official chronology, recover what has been overlooked and put Robert Frost beside Sun Ra simply because, in the mind of the poem, both belong to the same enormous argument.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 Details: NYS Writers Institute
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
ADVERTISEMENT
📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden
For nearly two decades, Joan Lunden occupied one of the most familiar seats in American television.
As co-host of ABC’s Good Morning America, she helped millions of viewers begin their day at a time when the national morning programs were an unusually powerful mixture of journalism and companionship. Presidents and celebrities passed through. So did major breaking news, health stories, travel, family life and the lighter material that makes morning television different from an evening newscast.
Lunden now comes to Skidmore to look back from the other side of that public career.
The occasion is her newest book, JOAN: Life Beyond the Script. Skidmore describes Sunday morning’s Homecoming program as a special book talk with the award-winning journalist and bestselling author, followed by a signing.
The title is well chosen. Public figures eventually acquire a version of themselves that belongs partly to everybody else. For Lunden, that version is inseparable from Good Morning America. A memoir provides room for everything television could not contain: the private decisions around the career, the life after leaving the daily broadcast, and the experience of moving through middle age and later life after spending years being recognized as the person Americans saw over breakfast.
Her post-GMA work has increasingly touched subjects that become more important with age, including health, caregiving, family and reinvention after a major professional chapter ends.
📅 Sunday, October 4 · 10 AM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free · Book signing follows
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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UAlbany’s Art Museum returns with three exhibitions.Schwartzberg, romney, Frecon & Durand.
🖼️ THE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM REOPENS — WITH THREE NEW EXHIBITIONS
UAlbany’s University Art Museum has been closed for renovations. On Saturday, October 3, the doors reopen—and the museum is not easing back into operation with a single exhibition.
Three exhibitions open simultaneously and remain on view through April 2, 2027, spreading across the first- and second-floor main galleries, the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery and the Collections Study Gallery.
That makes Saturday less an exhibition opening than a complete reset of the museum.
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core
The first-floor Main Gallery belongs to Albany artist Howard Schwartzberg, whose exhibition reaches across approximately three decades of work while introducing a new site-specific commission.
Schwartzberg’s practice makes the physical behavior of materials part of the art. For the new commission, he works with paint and burlap, allowing gravity itself to participate in shaping the installation. Visitors move through the site-specific work while encountering pieces from the past 30 years that reveal the arc of his career.
Volume, surface and core—the three nouns in the title—point toward the physical questions running through the work: where painting ends and object begins, what a surface conceals or reveals, and how materials occupy space rather than merely decorate it.
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress
Upstairs, the second-floor Main Gallery is devoted to mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress.
The architecture creates a useful contrast: Schwartzberg’s long engagement with material and gravity below, romney’s work occupying the museum’s other major gallery above. Rather than treating the reopening as a single curatorial statement, UAlbany gives each artist enough physical territory to establish a distinct world.
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand
The third exhibition is also the most explicitly collaborative.
Painter Suzan Frecon and poet and translator Marcella Durand, Frecon’s daughter, use the latest iteration of The Light Factory to ask what collaboration between painting and poetry can become.
Frecon contributes small-scale brushwork experiments on paper using haematite pigments. Durand responds through ekphrastic poetry that reconstructs the sights, sounds and even smells of the painter’s studio while making connections outward to history and the larger world.
The poems are not captions for paintings, and the paintings are not illustrations for poems. Each medium creates another way of entering the same imaginative space.
Together, the three exhibitions make the reopening unusually rich: a large physical encounter with paint and burlap, romney’s second-floor installation, and the intimate exchange between painter and poet.
🧑🎨 HOMECOMING WEEKEND EXHIBITION TOUR
At noon, Associate Curator Robert R. Shane leads a one-hour tour through all three exhibitions. Visitors can then browse the museum’s Collections Study Space.
A curator-led tour on the first day provides the connective tissue that can be difficult to see on a first walk through unfamiliar work: why these exhibitions are opening together, what decisions shaped each installation and which details reward slower attention.
If you have not been inside the University Art Museum since before the renovation, Saturday is effectively a chance to meet the museum again.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · Museum open 11 AM–4 PM
📍 University Art Museum, Fine Arts Building, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
Homecoming Exhibition Tour:
📅 Noon–1 PM
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Museum | Exhibitions | Tour Details
📅 Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Five exhibitions fill the Tang for Homecoming Weekend.
🖼️ HOMECOMING WEEKEND AT THE TANG
If you have not been to the Tang recently, Homecoming Weekend is unusually well timed.
The museum has assembled exhibitions different enough from one another that walking through the building becomes a tour across contemporary art, American history, environmental science, queer theory, Jewish archival sound and Skidmore’s own collection.
Saturday’s Homecoming and Family Weekend Open House, noon to 4 PM, is the centerpiece, but tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday make this effectively a three-day public invitation.
A Feeling of With
This faculty co-curated exhibition draws from the Tang collection and is actually three explorations of the self in relation, presented across three galleries. Language, nature and mathematics become different ways of considering how people relate to themselves, one another and the world.
The exhibition also makes visible the Tang’s role as a teaching museum. The collection becomes raw material for developing observation, critical thinking, writing, public speaking and inquiry across disciplines.
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Artist Mark Thomas Gibson, who describes himself as an American history painter, gets a solo exhibition in the Wachenheim Gallery.
“History painting” carries an old art-historical grandeur—battles, national myths, heroic episodes—but Gibson’s adoption of the term places contemporary American experience inside that tradition. The title We Are A Constellation suggests history made not from one authoritative narrative but from separate points whose relationships change depending on how they are connected.
📣 TOWN CRIER PERFORMANCE — ONGOING THIS WEEK
There is also a wonderfully odd living element inside Gibson’s exhibition.
At 2 PM Tuesday through Sunday, a Skidmore student assumes the role of a Town Crier inside the Wachenheim Gallery and delivers two announcements: news from that same date 250 years earlier and news from the present day.
The performance is brief, free and open to the public. It connects Gibson’s interest in American history with the country’s 250th anniversary by making past and present literally sound together in the gallery.
No calendar entry needed — simply arrive at the Wachenheim Gallery for 2 PM.
The special Saturday 2 PM Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour remains a separate Homecoming program and continues into a student-led museum tour.
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest
On the State Farm Mezzanine, Sheila Pepe creates an immersive installation drawing on religion, sociology, queer theory, ancient Greece and Rome, and the Silk Road.
Pepe’s work makes space itself part of the encounter. Rather than presenting sculpture as a discrete object surrounded by empty gallery, the installation asks visitors to experience the relationships among material, architecture and their own movement through the room.
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs
500 Dams brings art and science together to document the Survival Kit Collective’s continuing work to regenerate grasslands at Anaya Springs, New Mexico.
The exhibition is not simply about ecology. It looks at the sustained acts of care, observation and intervention required to repair a damaged landscape—an environmental project becoming an artistic subject without losing its scientific and social dimensions.
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Even the elevator participates.
The 55th installment of the Tang’s long-running Elevator Music series uses newly digitized recordings from the 1950s through the 1980s in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Jewish Labor and Political Archives to create an immersive sound collage.
The tiny elevator becomes an unlikely listening room for cultural memory. Voices and sounds preserved in an archive are released into the ordinary act of moving between floors.
THE WEEKEND SCHEDULE
Friday, October 2 · 4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour
The Homecoming tour takes visitors through current exhibitions, specifically including A Feeling of With and Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, along with additional work on view.
Saturday, October 3 · Noon–4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House
The broadest opportunity of the weekend to explore the museum and all five exhibitions.
Saturday, October 3 · 12:30 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through current exhibitions, again specifically including A Feeling of With and We Are A Constellation.
Saturday, October 3 · 2 PM — Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour
A Skidmore student delivers the day’s two Town Crier announcements inside We Are A Constellation—one from 1776 and one from today—followed by a student-led tour that includes A Feeling of With and other current exhibitions.
Sunday, October 4 · 2 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A guided look at the museum’s current exhibitions, which include A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest, 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The Tang does not specify in advance which exhibitions Sunday’s guide will select, so this is the best choice for visitors who simply want a broad student-led introduction rather than one of the Homecoming tours with specifically named stops.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Tang Calendar | Homecoming Open House
📅 Friday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Open House Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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MUSIC
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🎸 Maria Z Ensemble
Hudson Valley Community College
For guitarist and composer Maria Zemantauski, the nylon-string guitar is a meeting place.
Her playing draws on Spanish classical guitar, flamenco and American fingerstyle traditions, and Thursday’s free lunchtime concert at Hudson Valley Community College expands that sound into a quartet.
Zemantauski is joined by Sten Isachsen, Bob Buckley and Brian Melick. Together they form the Maria Z Ensemble, bringing the rhythmic drive of flamenco and the detail of classical and fingerstyle guitar into an ensemble setting.
The combination promises something broader than a conventional classical-guitar recital. Spanish classical technique brings precision and color; flamenco contributes rhythmic urgency; American fingerstyle opens another vocabulary of picking patterns and independent melodic lines.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: HVCC Cultural Affairs
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert
The Filene Music Scholarship is one of the ways Skidmore identifies exceptional young musicians before they arrive on campus. Friday evening, the scholarship becomes audible.
The 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert brings together winners of the 45th annual Filene Scholarship Competition, current Filene Scholars and Skidmore faculty artists in Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall.
That intergenerational structure makes the program more interesting than a conventional student recital.
The newest scholarship winners represent potential: musicians selected at the beginning of their Skidmore careers because faculty believe they can contribute at an unusually high level. Current scholars show what happens after that potential has spent time inside the college’s music program. Faculty artists add the third layer—the teachers and working musicians around whom that development takes place.
A scholarship competition normally happens out of public view. Applications arrive, auditions take place, judges decide and names are announced. The Celebration Concert reverses the process. Instead of asking an audience to accept that these musicians are exceptional because a committee selected them, Skidmore puts them onstage.
📅 Friday, October 2 · 7 PM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Seating first-come, first-served
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Albany Symphony brings chamber music into Opalka Gallery.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
There is a useful experiment available in Albany on Saturday: hear music at human scale in the afternoon, then imagine what happens when an entire orchestra gets involved that night.
The Albany Symphony begins its 2026–27 chamber series at Opalka Gallery with violinists Christina Bouey and Paula Oakes, violist Sharon Bielik, cellist Grace Ho and cellist Daniel Ketter.
The announced repertoire ranges across Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Henri Vieuxtemps, giving the afternoon considerably more variety than the phrase “chamber concert” might suggest.
Russell Sage also confirms a conversation between Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller and composer Celka Ojakangas, along with the performance by Symphony musicians. That conversational component should make the program especially useful for listeners interested in how a new piece moves from a composer’s imagination into the hands of performers.
In an orchestral hall, dozens of musicians combine into an enormous composite instrument. At Opalka, chamber music strips that scale away. Individual players become visible as collaborators. Musical lines can be followed from one instrument to another. A breath, bow stroke or exchanged glance becomes part of the experience.
The gallery changes the atmosphere as well. Opalka is a contemporary-art space rather than a traditional concert hall, and the smaller room removes much of the ceremony that can surround classical music.
A few hours later, Miller and the full Albany Symphony move into the Palace Theatre for the orchestra’s season-opening concert, which includes Ojakangas’ music. The afternoon therefore becomes a kind of close-up prologue to opening night.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · RSVP requested
🔗 Details / RSVP: Albany Symphony
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — “My Longtime Home”
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
There are composer residencies, faculty appointments and institutional relationships.
Then there is Joan Tower and Bard College.
Tower joined Bard’s composition faculty in 1972. Fifty-four years later, she is still there, now the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music, and Bard is marking the relationship with a concert whose subtitle comes from Tower herself: “My longtime home.”
The length of that association is remarkable enough. More interesting is what 54 years means inside a college music program.
Students arrive, study and leave. Faculty colleagues change. New ensembles form. Buildings open. Entire generations of composers pass from emerging to established. Musical fashions change around them. Tower’s relationship with Bard has endured through all of it.
Saturday’s concert is not built as an outside tribute. The performers come from the musical community Tower has spent decades helping to shape: Bard faculty and students, the Cassatt Quartet and musicians from The Orchestra Now. The concert is presented by the Altalena Artists Collective.
Tower is one of the major figures in contemporary American composition, but the occasion does not ask audiences to encounter her simply as a name in music history. Her work returns to the place where she has taught for more than half a century and is performed by musicians connected to that continuing institutional life.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 4 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: Bard Conservatory of Music
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Two historic Senate hearings meet on one stage.
ADVERTISEMENT
🎭 The Ford/Hill Project
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Some documentary theater begins with interviews conducted for the production. The Ford/Hill Project begins with words millions of Americans already heard.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, describing allegations of sexual harassment. In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the committee during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Both men denied the allegations.
Waterwell returns to those public records rather than inventing a fictional story around them.
An ensemble of four actors performs from verbatim transcripts of the hearings, placing Hill’s and Ford’s testimony side by side even though the original events occurred nearly three decades apart.
The theatrical act is one of juxtaposition.
People who watched the original hearings encountered them inside different political moments, different media environments and different stages of the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. Onstage, the distance collapses. Statements separated by 27 years can answer or echo one another within minutes.
That does not make the two events identical. The interest lies partly in the differences: what had changed between 1991 and 2018, what had not, and how institutions and audiences responded to testimony involving powerful nominees.
Both performances include post-show panel discussions in collaboration with Williams’ Office of Intimate Violence Prevention and Response.
The production contains infrequent strong language and discussion of racial and gender-based violence and is recommended for audiences 16 and older.
📅 Friday, October 2 & Saturday, October 3 · 7:30–9:30 PM
📍 Adams Memorial Theatre, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College, Williamstown · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Recommended 16+
🔗 Details / Tickets: Arts at Williams
📅 Friday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
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🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
UAlbany / International Center of the Capital Region · Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
Diplomacy usually enters the news when something has gone wrong—a war, a hostage crisis, a collapsing alliance or a confrontation between governments.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy approaches it from the opposite direction: through the work diplomats do when the machinery of international relations is functioning.
The International Center of the Capital Region and UAlbany are presenting the evening as part of a nationwide commemoration of American diplomacy. The featured speaker is Tom Selinger, a recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer, whose presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
Rather than giving a chronological lecture on treaties and administrations, Selinger will use individual stories—including those of diplomats from New York—to show what diplomatic work looks like on the ground.
Those stories include diplomats who helped rescue Americans during overseas crises, opened foreign markets for American businesses and agriculture, strengthened security alliances, and worked to advance democratic values and international understanding.
That human scale is what makes the program promising. “Foreign policy” can sound like something created entirely in Washington. Diplomacy is also practiced by people stationed around the world who spend careers negotiating, interpreting cultures, solving practical problems and representing the United States far from home.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
📍 UAlbany Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Map
🎟️ Registration available
🔗 Details / Registration: Engage America
🎬 71st Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Tang Teaching Museum / Skidmore College · October 8–10
The Flaherty Film Seminar has never behaved much like an ordinary film festival.
Rather than assembling a schedule of premieres, celebrity appearances and quick post-screening questions, the Flaherty tradition treats watching and talking as parts of the same activity. Participants see experimental and documentary work and then remain with it—discussing what they have seen rather than immediately moving to the next attraction.
The 71st seminar, Gestures of Refusal, asks what images can do when they resist dominant ways of seeing—particularly histories of empire, erasure and the systems through which images circulate.
In another Flaherty tradition, the individual films are not announced before each program begins. Each screening is followed by moderated discussion.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
Thursday, October 8
🎬 6 PM
Friday, October 9
🎬 6 PM
🎬 8 PM
Saturday, October 10
🎬 1 PM
🎬 3:30 PM
🎬 7 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
🔗 Details: Tang Teaching Museum
Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart
CAPTION: EMPAC turns sound into a three-dimensional environment.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
There are places where a conversation about immersive audio would remain theoretical.
EMPAC is not one of them.
Its studios were designed around the physical behavior of sound, making acoustics, spatial placement and technological experimentation part of the building’s artistic vocabulary. That makes it an unusually appropriate setting for a conversation between Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart about what happens when sound is understood not simply as something entering the ears but as something locating a body inside an environment.
Deufel is a researcher and artist who directs ZiMMT—the Center for Media Art, Music and Technology in Leipzig. Goodheart is an RPI composer and technologist. Their discussion ranges across spatial sound, acoustics and composition.
On Friday, October 9, Deufel leads a workshop on his Grapes 3D audio software. On Saturday, October 10, an installation of his work can be heard through the 39-speaker ambisonic system in EMPAC Studio 1.
That progression—from conversation, to tool, to immersive listening—is exactly the sort of programming EMPAC can do particularly well.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
💬 REGIONAL EXTENSION PICK — THE ARENDT FORUM 2026
Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?
Bard College · October 15–17
Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center is celebrating its 20th anniversary by organizing three days around a deceptively difficult political question.
It is easy to name what people oppose. The harder question is the one in the forum’s title: what are we fighting for?
The 2026 Arendt Forum uses solidarity to approach that problem. Scheduled sessions examine questions including whether solidarity can exist among people who do not share a religion or ideology, how liberal individualism relates to collective obligations, and how democratic societies sustain common purpose amid profound disagreement.
The speaker list includes Carol Gilligan, Patrick Deneen, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, George Packer, Hélène Landemore and Zephyr Teachout.
Conversations, roundtables, smaller lunch sessions, music, art and participatory programming stretch across Thursday and Friday, followed Saturday morning by a smaller debrief and networking session.
📅 Thursday, October 15–Saturday, October 17
📍 Bard College · Map
🎟️ Registration required · $199 for non-members; complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members · registration includes livestream access
🔗 Details / Registration: Hannah Arendt Center
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
The name is almost too modest for the amount of jazz history contained in the band.
The Cookers bring together veteran musicians whose individual careers reach deeply into the modern-jazz tradition. Players with decades of experience develop a kind of collective shorthand—the ability to leave space, redirect a phrase, alter the temperature of a performance and trust that everyone else onstage will understand what just happened.
A Place for Jazz has long used SUNY Schenectady as a home for exactly this kind of serious listening: nationally significant jazz presented in a room where the music, rather than nightclub atmosphere, is the center of attention.
📅 Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
UAlbany · October 19–23
For five days, UAlbany turns research itself into public programming.
Research & Entrepreneurship Week brings together faculty, students, researchers, innovators and outside partners around work that normally remains scattered across departments and laboratories. ETEC—the university’s Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex—provides a natural focal point for a week built around the point where academic research begins crossing into technology, industry and application.
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, falls inside the same week, placing semiconductors, nanotechnology and related research inside a larger conversation about how university discoveries move from laboratory questions toward economic and technological consequences.
For a region whose identity increasingly includes semiconductor research and advanced manufacturing, this is more than an internal academic showcase.
📍 UAlbany · Map
🔗 UAlbany
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LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30
Two-time Grammy Award winner Ernie Watts has spent a career moving with unusual ease among jazz, popular music, studio work and major touring artists. His appearance with his quartet gives the fall A Place for Jazz series another nationally established musician and makes October 30 worth marking now.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
Indiana Jones returns with John Williams performed live.
🎬 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Some film scores support a movie.
John Williams’ score for Raiders of the Lost Ark practically propels it.
For the film’s 45th anniversary, Bard’s The Orchestra Now performs Williams’ Grammy-winning score live while the complete 1981 film plays on a large screen in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. James Bagwell conducts.
Film-with-live-orchestra events are technically demanding in a way the audience should barely notice. The musicians cannot simply perform the score at their preferred pace; the music must remain synchronized with a movie that does not wait for them. A gesture on screen, a cut, a punch line or the arrival of a familiar musical theme has to land where the film expects it.
When that synchronization works, a movie most viewers have known for decades can feel unexpectedly physical. Music that has always emerged from speakers suddenly occupies the room.
The Halloween-weekend timing does not hurt.
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Tickets start at $25
🔗 Details / Tickets: Fisher Center at Bard
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
How does a brain turn perception into movement?
RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies perception and action—how people use sensory information to move through environments and make decisions. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches bodies through dance, performance and the lived experience of people whose bodies do not conform to conventional expectations.
Their EMPAC conversation brings those approaches together.
The program also draws on Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, centered on dancers with non-apparent neurological disabilities that affect movement, sensory input and information processing.
The combination should make this one of the more intriguing entries in the INTERFACE series: laboratory questions about perception encountering artistic knowledge produced by bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 EMPAC
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, November 13
Flute has always occupied an unusual place in jazz—less common than saxophone or trumpet, but capable of an agility and transparency that can completely change an ensemble’s sound.
Ali Ryerson has spent decades making the instrument feel entirely at home there. Her quartet arrives at SUNY Schenectady in November as part of the fall A Place for Jazz season.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
The Orchestra Now uses jazz as the thread connecting five Jewish composers whose lives and music intersected with migration, Europe and the United States.
The program culminates in George Gershwin’s An American in Paris but reaches into much less familiar territory as well, including the U.S. premiere of Ignatz Waghalter’s Violin Concerto and the first New York performance since 1930 of Louis Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite.
That combination—one of the most familiar American concert works beside music audiences may have had virtually no opportunity to hear—is exactly what makes this a Regional Extension item.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Pay-what-you-wish livestream available
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FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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OCTOBER
🎭 The Drunken City — UAlbany — October 21–25
🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — October 23–28
🎭 Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — October 30–November 8
NOVEMBER
🎭 Rent — Siena University — November 12–21
🎭 This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5
DECEMBER
🎭 Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10
REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER
🎭 Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — October 23–25
🎭 Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — November 7
🎭 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — November 19–21
🎭 SPROJ Work-In-Progress Festival — Bard College — November 20–22
⚠️ Needs follow-up: confirm general-public access before newsletter promotion.
LOOKING INTO 2027
🎭 Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3
🎭 UAlbany Spring Musical — title forthcoming — UAlbany — March 3–7
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BY DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY — SEPTEMBER 28
3–4:30 PM — 🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde · UAlbany · Map
TUESDAY — SEPTEMBER 29
3–6:30 PM — 🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
4:30–5:30 PM — ✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett · UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Map
WEDNESDAY — SEPTEMBER 30
2–4 PM — 📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities — Verónica Terriquez · UAlbany · Map
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 1
Noon — 🎸 Maria Z Ensemble — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
12:45–1:50 PM — 🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium — Union College · Map
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 2
4–5 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore / Tang · Map
7 PM — 🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert — Skidmore College · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 3
8:30 AM–2 PM — ⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day — Albany Law School · Map
11 AM–4 PM — 🖼️ University Art Museum reopening and three new exhibitions — UAlbany · Map
Noon–1 PM — 🧑🎨 Homecoming Weekend Exhibition Tour — UAlbany University Art Museum · Map
Noon–4 PM — 🖼️ Tang Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House — Skidmore · Map
12:30 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
1–2:30 PM — 🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation — Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Map
2 PM — 📣 Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
4 PM — 🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — Bard College · Regional Extension · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 4
10 AM — 📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden — Skidmore College · Map
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore College · Map
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
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COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER PARTNERS
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Capital Region Curated is pleased to help connect readers with other independent newsletters and community resources covering life in the Capital Region.
Interested in becoming a community newsletter partner?
Contact alankoslow@gmail.com.
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The colleges and universities around us produce an extraordinary amount of public programming.
The challenge is finding it.
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CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
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Originally published at
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Capital Region Curated: September 28-October 4
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Mutale Nkonde on AI bias, poet Joshua Bennett, Senior Citizens Law Day and more.
Alan Koslow
39
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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.
🤖 📚 ⚖️ 🎨 🎶
AI, POETRY, AGING LAW, ART & MUSIC
A week that moves from artificial intelligence and American poetry to the law of aging, museum reopenings, chamber music, flamenco and a remarkable 54-year musical homecoming.
Joshua Bennett reimagines America through poetry.
📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD
If Capital Region Curated helps you find something worth seeing, hearing or thinking about, please pass it along.
And if you work with a college department, arts organization, campus program, library, museum or community group, sharing the newsletter is one of the easiest ways to help more people discover the remarkable amount of public programming taking place on our local campuses.
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks
Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias · Joshua Bennett’s America in Poetry · Senior Citizens Law Day · Albany Symphony at Opalka
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life
Artificial intelligence and bias · new flood maps and insurance · youth organizing in immigrant communities · psychology at Union · the legal realities of aging
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas
Joshua Bennett at the NYS Writers Institute · Joan Lunden at Skidmore
🎨 Art & Visual Culture
UAlbany’s University Art Museum reopens with three new exhibitions · Homecoming curator tour · an exhibition-packed weekend at the Tang · daily Town Crier performances
🎶 Music
Maria Z Ensemble at HVCC · Filene Scholars at Skidmore · Albany Symphony chamber music at Opalka · Bard celebrates Joan Tower
🌎 Regional Extension
Joan Tower at Bard · Waterwell’s The Ford/Hill Project at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead
A century of American diplomacy · Flaherty Film Seminar · immersive audio at EMPAC · Bard’s Arendt Forum · jazz · UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany · Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
Artificial intelligence may be new technology, but it learns from a decidedly old world. Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI for the People and a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, opens UAlbany’s fall WGSS series by examining what happens when assumptions about race and gender become embedded in the systems increasingly entering classrooms and everyday life.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30 PM
Joshua Bennett’s We (The People of the United States) is not a conventional national history. His book-length poem moves from Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston to the Beach Boys, Sun Ra, experimental physics, the typewriter and life on Mars, using poetry to ask what America has been and what its familiar first-person plural—we—might actually contain.
Full details below in Books, Writers & Ideas.
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
Albany Law School · Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
Estate planning, Medicaid, long-term care, powers of attorney, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparation and financial exploitation converge in one unusually practical free public day at Albany Law. The program is designed not only for older adults but also for people approaching retirement, family members and caregivers.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
Five Albany Symphony musicians perform music by Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Vieuxtemps in the intimate surroundings of Opalka Gallery, followed by a conversation between Music Director David Alan Miller and Ojakangas. It is an unusually close-up introduction to the Symphony’s season before the full orchestra takes the stage at the Palace that evening.
Full details below in Music.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Mutale Nkonde examines bias inside artificial intelligence.
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom
Artificial intelligence arrived in public life with astonishing speed. In classrooms alone, students now use generative systems to research, write, brainstorm and solve problems; instructors are deciding where those tools belong and where they do not; institutions are experimenting with automated systems whose influence may be far less visible than ChatGPT on a laptop.
The speed can make AI seem like a rupture with the past. Mutale Nkonde’s work begins from almost the opposite premise. New technologies are built from human decisions and trained on human-produced material. If that material contains longstanding patterns involving race, gender, class or power, a sophisticated system can reproduce them without ever “believing” anything itself.
Nkonde founded AI for the People, a nonprofit devoted to responsible approaches to artificial-intelligence development, and UAlbany identifies her as a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Her work has placed her at the intersection of technology and public policy rather than within a purely technical conversation about how algorithms work.
At UAlbany, the subject becomes particularly immediate: the classroom. Education is one of the places where society is deciding, in real time, how much authority to give AI. Should a machine evaluate student writing? Recommend educational resources? Help an instructor create assignments? Identify struggling students? What happens when systems that appear objective reproduce patterns inherited from the material on which they were trained?
Nkonde’s lecture launches the fall UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.” The larger series examines how colleges teach contested subjects at a moment when race, gender, academic freedom and higher education itself have become part of national political conflict.
The most consequential questions about AI are no longer simply What can it do? They concern what we ask it to do, whose assumptions it carries with it, and what happens when human judgment is quietly transferred to systems whose decisions may be difficult to interrogate.
📅 Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Public lecture
🔗 Details: UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House
Hudson Valley Community College / FEMA / Rensselaer County
A flood map can look like a technical government document until one of its lines crosses your house.
Rensselaer County residents have a particularly practical reason to pay attention this week. FEMA has released new preliminary Flood Insurance Study information and Flood Insurance Rate Maps, and this open house at Hudson Valley Community College gives residents a chance to compare those preliminary maps with the existing ones and ask what the changes may mean for individual properties and neighborhoods.
This is deliberately not a lecture. There is no formal presentation and no need to arrive at 3 PM. Residents can come at any point during the three-and-a-half-hour window, look at the maps, ask questions about the mapping process and flood insurance, and talk through how a changed designation could affect their property or community.
The distinction matters because flood mapping affects more than whether a particular street has flooded in recent memory. FEMA maps communicate risk, inform floodplain management and help determine where flood-insurance requirements may apply.
The open house should be particularly useful for homeowners who already carry flood insurance, people considering buying or selling property, landlords and anyone whose property sits near a revised flood-zone boundary.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 3–6:30 PM
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center, Rooms 1–3, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free · Drop in at any time
🔗 Details: Rensselaer County Flood Map Information Open House
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Verónica Terriquez explores how young organizers become leaders.
📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities
Verónica Terriquez — ASA Rose Book Speaker Series
Leadership is usually described after someone has acquired it. Verónica Terriquez is interested in the earlier, less tidy process by which people learn that they can lead at all.
Terriquez is a professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Urban Planning at UCLA and director of its Chicano Studies Research Center. Her new book, Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities, examines young people whose education in leadership takes place not primarily in a classroom but through civic engagement, community organizing and collective action.
A teenager who enters an organization because of an immediate concern—immigration, schools, working conditions, housing or discrimination—may have no intention of becoming a “leader.” But organizing requires someone to speak at a meeting, recruit another student, talk to an official, plan an action, resolve disagreements and persuade a group to keep going when progress is slow.
Those experiences can become an informal civic education.
Terriquez examines both the opportunities and obstacles young organizers encounter as they work for social change. Immigrant communities provide a particularly revealing setting because young people may be navigating language, legal status, economic inequality, family responsibilities and institutions in which their communities have limited formal power.
The book’s larger question reaches beyond immigration. Democracies depend on people who know how to participate, yet civic participation is often discussed as though adults simply wake up knowing how to organize a meeting, build a coalition or challenge an institution. Terriquez looks at how those abilities are actually learned.
UAlbany brings her to campus through the ASA Rose Book Speaker Series, with audience questions following the lecture.
📅 Wednesday, September 30 · 2–4 PM
📍 Campus Center West Board Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ RSVP requested
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium
Every generation seems to acquire a new technology that adults suspect may be damaging the young.
Comic books once occupied that position. So did rock music, television, violent movies and video games. Smartphones and social media now sit near the center of the same argument, accompanied by much more serious questions about anxiety, depression, attention, isolation and adolescent development.
Psychologist Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University, has spent much of his career working in the difficult territory where media, technology, psychological research and public anxiety meet. His scholarship has often challenged sweeping claims about harmful media effects and asked whether the evidence supports the certainty with which those claims are sometimes presented.
That does not make the underlying questions trivial. If parents, educators and policymakers are going to make decisions affecting millions of young people, distinguishing a genuine psychological effect from a cultural panic becomes unusually important.
Union’s Psychology Department Speaker Series and Honors Colloquium brings outside scholars from different areas of psychology and neuroscience to campus. Ferguson opens the 2026–27 series, and Union explicitly welcomes members of the local community. Lunch and refreshments are provided.
Union has not yet announced Ferguson’s lecture title or topic, so Capital Region Curated is leaving the subject open rather than attaching an earlier working title to the event.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · 12:45–1:50 PM
📍 Karp 105, Union College, Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Free public lecture · Lunch and refreshments provided
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the lecture.
🔗 Details: Union College Psychology Speaker Series
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
There is a particular cruelty to many legal questions involving aging: families often discover what they needed to know only after they needed to know it.
A parent suddenly requires long-term care. Someone can no longer manage finances independently. A power of attorney that seemed like paperwork becomes essential. Medicaid rules collide with decisions about nursing care. An older relative is targeted by a scam. Family members discover that everyone assumed someone else understood the legal arrangements.
Albany Law School’s annual Senior Citizens Law Day is designed to move some of those conversations earlier.
The free program is intended for seniors, people approaching their senior years, loved ones and caregivers. Albany Law professors, practicing attorneys and other specialists lead workshops covering estate planning, Medicaid and long-term care, powers of attorney, senior living options, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparedness and other legal and practical issues affecting older adults.
The schedule begins at 8:30 AM with opening remarks from Patrick Wildes, director of Albany Law’s Government Law Center, and Greg Olsen, director of the New York State Office for the Aging. Workshops then run through the morning, including sessions on SSI and SSD benefits, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, tenant rights and preparing hospital “go-bags” for emergencies.
A community-resource area broadens the day beyond formal legal education, bringing regional legal, aging, health and social-service organizations into the same building.
The afternoon turns to one of the most troubling subjects in elder law. The Nancy M. Sills ’76 Memorial Lecture on Aging Law and Policy, from noon to 2 PM, examines financial exploitation of older adults. Saratoga County District Attorney Brett R. Eby and Elizabeth Loewy, co-founder and COO of EverSafe, are scheduled for the conversation.
Free 30-minute consultations with attorneys were also offered during the morning, although advance registration for those appointments closed September 25. The workshops, lecture and community resources remain part of the larger program.
Breakfast and lunch are provided, and parking on the Albany Law campus is free. You may arrive because you have one question. The real value may be discovering the questions your family has not yet thought to ask.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
📍 Albany Law School, 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · Free breakfast and lunch · Free campus parking
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the program.
🔗 Details / Registration: Albany Law School
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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Poet and scholar Joshua Bennett.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
The title begins with four words Americans have been repeating for nearly 240 years: We the People of the United States.
Joshua Bennett takes possession of that familiar language for We (The People of the United States), an ambitious new book-length poem about America’s past, present and future. But Bennett does not construct his America as a procession of presidents, wars and constitutional milestones. His map is much stranger, broader and more alive.
The Beach Boys are there. So are Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, Robert Frost and the Jackson 5. Bennett writes about the invention of the typewriter and experimental physics, popular music and literary history, and even life on Mars.
The method makes sense for a poet who has never kept literature sealed away from the rest of American life.
Bennett’s previous books include Being Property Once Myself, a work of criticism revisiting Black presence in the American literary canon; the poetry collection Owed; The Study of Human Life; and Spoken Word: A Cultural History. His work repeatedly crosses boundaries among poetry, scholarship, cultural history and criticism. He now teaches literature at MIT.
That background helps explain why the little word “We” in the new title carries so much weight.
National stories depend on inclusion and exclusion. Who gets to stand inside the pronoun? Which people, art forms, inventions, memories and experiences are treated as central to the American story, and which are placed at its margins?
The Writers Institute is presenting Bennett as part of its America in Poetry programming, cosponsored by UAlbany’s Great Dane Dialogue Series in connection with the country’s 250th anniversary.
Anniversaries tend to produce polished national narratives. Poetry can do something more unruly. It can interrupt the official chronology, recover what has been overlooked and put Robert Frost beside Sun Ra simply because, in the mind of the poem, both belong to the same enormous argument.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 Details: NYS Writers Institute
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden
For nearly two decades, Joan Lunden occupied one of the most familiar seats in American television.
As co-host of ABC’s Good Morning America, she helped millions of viewers begin their day at a time when the national morning programs were an unusually powerful mixture of journalism and companionship. Presidents and celebrities passed through. So did major breaking news, health stories, travel, family life and the lighter material that makes morning television different from an evening newscast.
Lunden now comes to Skidmore to look back from the other side of that public career.
The occasion is her newest book, JOAN: Life Beyond the Script. Skidmore describes Sunday morning’s Homecoming program as a special book talk with the award-winning journalist and bestselling author, followed by a signing.
The title is well chosen. Public figures eventually acquire a version of themselves that belongs partly to everybody else. For Lunden, that version is inseparable from Good Morning America. A memoir provides room for everything television could not contain: the private decisions around the career, the life after leaving the daily broadcast, and the experience of moving through middle age and later life after spending years being recognized as the person Americans saw over breakfast.
Her post-GMA work has increasingly touched subjects that become more important with age, including health, caregiving, family and reinvention after a major professional chapter ends.
📅 Sunday, October 4 · 10 AM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free · Book signing follows
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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UAlbany’s Art Museum returns with three exhibitions.Schwartzberg, romney, Frecon & Durand.
🖼️ THE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM REOPENS — WITH THREE NEW EXHIBITIONS
UAlbany’s University Art Museum has been closed for renovations. On Saturday, October 3, the doors reopen—and the museum is not easing back into operation with a single exhibition.
Three exhibitions open simultaneously and remain on view through April 2, 2027, spreading across the first- and second-floor main galleries, the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery and the Collections Study Gallery.
That makes Saturday less an exhibition opening than a complete reset of the museum.
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core
The first-floor Main Gallery belongs to Albany artist Howard Schwartzberg, whose exhibition reaches across approximately three decades of work while introducing a new site-specific commission.
Schwartzberg’s practice makes the physical behavior of materials part of the art. For the new commission, he works with paint and burlap, allowing gravity itself to participate in shaping the installation. Visitors move through the site-specific work while encountering pieces from the past 30 years that reveal the arc of his career.
Volume, surface and core—the three nouns in the title—point toward the physical questions running through the work: where painting ends and object begins, what a surface conceals or reveals, and how materials occupy space rather than merely decorate it.
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress
Upstairs, the second-floor Main Gallery is devoted to mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress.
The architecture creates a useful contrast: Schwartzberg’s long engagement with material and gravity below, romney’s work occupying the museum’s other major gallery above. Rather than treating the reopening as a single curatorial statement, UAlbany gives each artist enough physical territory to establish a distinct world.
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand
The third exhibition is also the most explicitly collaborative.
Painter Suzan Frecon and poet and translator Marcella Durand, Frecon’s daughter, use the latest iteration of The Light Factory to ask what collaboration between painting and poetry can become.
Frecon contributes small-scale brushwork experiments on paper using haematite pigments. Durand responds through ekphrastic poetry that reconstructs the sights, sounds and even smells of the painter’s studio while making connections outward to history and the larger world.
The poems are not captions for paintings, and the paintings are not illustrations for poems. Each medium creates another way of entering the same imaginative space.
Together, the three exhibitions make the reopening unusually rich: a large physical encounter with paint and burlap, romney’s second-floor installation, and the intimate exchange between painter and poet.
🧑🎨 HOMECOMING WEEKEND EXHIBITION TOUR
At noon, Associate Curator Robert R. Shane leads a one-hour tour through all three exhibitions. Visitors can then browse the museum’s Collections Study Space.
A curator-led tour on the first day provides the connective tissue that can be difficult to see on a first walk through unfamiliar work: why these exhibitions are opening together, what decisions shaped each installation and which details reward slower attention.
If you have not been inside the University Art Museum since before the renovation, Saturday is effectively a chance to meet the museum again.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · Museum open 11 AM–4 PM
📍 University Art Museum, Fine Arts Building, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
Homecoming Exhibition Tour:
📅 Noon–1 PM
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Museum | Exhibitions | Tour Details
📅 Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Five exhibitions fill the Tang for Homecoming Weekend.
🖼️ HOMECOMING WEEKEND AT THE TANG
If you have not been to the Tang recently, Homecoming Weekend is unusually well timed.
The museum has assembled exhibitions different enough from one another that walking through the building becomes a tour across contemporary art, American history, environmental science, queer theory, Jewish archival sound and Skidmore’s own collection.
Saturday’s Homecoming and Family Weekend Open House, noon to 4 PM, is the centerpiece, but tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday make this effectively a three-day public invitation.
A Feeling of With
This faculty co-curated exhibition draws from the Tang collection and is actually three explorations of the self in relation, presented across three galleries. Language, nature and mathematics become different ways of considering how people relate to themselves, one another and the world.
The exhibition also makes visible the Tang’s role as a teaching museum. The collection becomes raw material for developing observation, critical thinking, writing, public speaking and inquiry across disciplines.
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Artist Mark Thomas Gibson, who describes himself as an American history painter, gets a solo exhibition in the Wachenheim Gallery.
“History painting” carries an old art-historical grandeur—battles, national myths, heroic episodes—but Gibson’s adoption of the term places contemporary American experience inside that tradition. The title We Are A Constellation suggests history made not from one authoritative narrative but from separate points whose relationships change depending on how they are connected.
📣 TOWN CRIER PERFORMANCE — ONGOING THIS WEEK
There is also a wonderfully odd living element inside Gibson’s exhibition.
At 2 PM Tuesday through Sunday, a Skidmore student assumes the role of a Town Crier inside the Wachenheim Gallery and delivers two announcements: news from that same date 250 years earlier and news from the present day.
The performance is brief, free and open to the public. It connects Gibson’s interest in American history with the country’s 250th anniversary by making past and present literally sound together in the gallery.
No calendar entry needed — simply arrive at the Wachenheim Gallery for 2 PM.
The special Saturday 2 PM Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour remains a separate Homecoming program and continues into a student-led museum tour.
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest
On the State Farm Mezzanine, Sheila Pepe creates an immersive installation drawing on religion, sociology, queer theory, ancient Greece and Rome, and the Silk Road.
Pepe’s work makes space itself part of the encounter. Rather than presenting sculpture as a discrete object surrounded by empty gallery, the installation asks visitors to experience the relationships among material, architecture and their own movement through the room.
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs
500 Dams brings art and science together to document the Survival Kit Collective’s continuing work to regenerate grasslands at Anaya Springs, New Mexico.
The exhibition is not simply about ecology. It looks at the sustained acts of care, observation and intervention required to repair a damaged landscape—an environmental project becoming an artistic subject without losing its scientific and social dimensions.
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Even the elevator participates.
The 55th installment of the Tang’s long-running Elevator Music series uses newly digitized recordings from the 1950s through the 1980s in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Jewish Labor and Political Archives to create an immersive sound collage.
The tiny elevator becomes an unlikely listening room for cultural memory. Voices and sounds preserved in an archive are released into the ordinary act of moving between floors.
THE WEEKEND SCHEDULE
Friday, October 2 · 4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour
The Homecoming tour takes visitors through current exhibitions, specifically including A Feeling of With and Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, along with additional work on view.
Saturday, October 3 · Noon–4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House
The broadest opportunity of the weekend to explore the museum and all five exhibitions.
Saturday, October 3 · 12:30 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through current exhibitions, again specifically including A Feeling of With and We Are A Constellation.
Saturday, October 3 · 2 PM — Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour
A Skidmore student delivers the day’s two Town Crier announcements inside We Are A Constellation—one from 1776 and one from today—followed by a student-led tour that includes A Feeling of With and other current exhibitions.
Sunday, October 4 · 2 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A guided look at the museum’s current exhibitions, which include A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest, 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The Tang does not specify in advance which exhibitions Sunday’s guide will select, so this is the best choice for visitors who simply want a broad student-led introduction rather than one of the Homecoming tours with specifically named stops.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Tang Calendar | Homecoming Open House
📅 Friday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Open House Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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MUSIC
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🎸 Maria Z Ensemble
Hudson Valley Community College
For guitarist and composer Maria Zemantauski, the nylon-string guitar is a meeting place.
Her playing draws on Spanish classical guitar, flamenco and American fingerstyle traditions, and Thursday’s free lunchtime concert at Hudson Valley Community College expands that sound into a quartet.
Zemantauski is joined by Sten Isachsen, Bob Buckley and Brian Melick. Together they form the Maria Z Ensemble, bringing the rhythmic drive of flamenco and the detail of classical and fingerstyle guitar into an ensemble setting.
The combination promises something broader than a conventional classical-guitar recital. Spanish classical technique brings precision and color; flamenco contributes rhythmic urgency; American fingerstyle opens another vocabulary of picking patterns and independent melodic lines.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: HVCC Cultural Affairs
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert
The Filene Music Scholarship is one of the ways Skidmore identifies exceptional young musicians before they arrive on campus. Friday evening, the scholarship becomes audible.
The 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert brings together winners of the 45th annual Filene Scholarship Competition, current Filene Scholars and Skidmore faculty artists in Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall.
That intergenerational structure makes the program more interesting than a conventional student recital.
The newest scholarship winners represent potential: musicians selected at the beginning of their Skidmore careers because faculty believe they can contribute at an unusually high level. Current scholars show what happens after that potential has spent time inside the college’s music program. Faculty artists add the third layer—the teachers and working musicians around whom that development takes place.
A scholarship competition normally happens out of public view. Applications arrive, auditions take place, judges decide and names are announced. The Celebration Concert reverses the process. Instead of asking an audience to accept that these musicians are exceptional because a committee selected them, Skidmore puts them onstage.
📅 Friday, October 2 · 7 PM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Seating first-come, first-served
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Albany Symphony brings chamber music into Opalka Gallery.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
There is a useful experiment available in Albany on Saturday: hear music at human scale in the afternoon, then imagine what happens when an entire orchestra gets involved that night.
The Albany Symphony begins its 2026–27 chamber series at Opalka Gallery with violinists Christina Bouey and Paula Oakes, violist Sharon Bielik, cellist Grace Ho and cellist Daniel Ketter.
The announced repertoire ranges across Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Henri Vieuxtemps, giving the afternoon considerably more variety than the phrase “chamber concert” might suggest.
Russell Sage also confirms a conversation between Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller and composer Celka Ojakangas, along with the performance by Symphony musicians. That conversational component should make the program especially useful for listeners interested in how a new piece moves from a composer’s imagination into the hands of performers.
In an orchestral hall, dozens of musicians combine into an enormous composite instrument. At Opalka, chamber music strips that scale away. Individual players become visible as collaborators. Musical lines can be followed from one instrument to another. A breath, bow stroke or exchanged glance becomes part of the experience.
The gallery changes the atmosphere as well. Opalka is a contemporary-art space rather than a traditional concert hall, and the smaller room removes much of the ceremony that can surround classical music.
A few hours later, Miller and the full Albany Symphony move into the Palace Theatre for the orchestra’s season-opening concert, which includes Ojakangas’ music. The afternoon therefore becomes a kind of close-up prologue to opening night.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · RSVP requested
🔗 Details / RSVP: Albany Symphony
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — “My Longtime Home”
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
There are composer residencies, faculty appointments and institutional relationships.
Then there is Joan Tower and Bard College.
Tower joined Bard’s composition faculty in 1972. Fifty-four years later, she is still there, now the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music, and Bard is marking the relationship with a concert whose subtitle comes from Tower herself: “My longtime home.”
The length of that association is remarkable enough. More interesting is what 54 years means inside a college music program.
Students arrive, study and leave. Faculty colleagues change. New ensembles form. Buildings open. Entire generations of composers pass from emerging to established. Musical fashions change around them. Tower’s relationship with Bard has endured through all of it.
Saturday’s concert is not built as an outside tribute. The performers come from the musical community Tower has spent decades helping to shape: Bard faculty and students, the Cassatt Quartet and musicians from The Orchestra Now. The concert is presented by the Altalena Artists Collective.
Tower is one of the major figures in contemporary American composition, but the occasion does not ask audiences to encounter her simply as a name in music history. Her work returns to the place where she has taught for more than half a century and is performed by musicians connected to that continuing institutional life.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 4 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: Bard Conservatory of Music
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Two historic Senate hearings meet on one stage.
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🎭 The Ford/Hill Project
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Some documentary theater begins with interviews conducted for the production. The Ford/Hill Project begins with words millions of Americans already heard.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, describing allegations of sexual harassment. In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the committee during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Both men denied the allegations.
Waterwell returns to those public records rather than inventing a fictional story around them.
An ensemble of four actors performs from verbatim transcripts of the hearings, placing Hill’s and Ford’s testimony side by side even though the original events occurred nearly three decades apart.
The theatrical act is one of juxtaposition.
People who watched the original hearings encountered them inside different political moments, different media environments and different stages of the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. Onstage, the distance collapses. Statements separated by 27 years can answer or echo one another within minutes.
That does not make the two events identical. The interest lies partly in the differences: what had changed between 1991 and 2018, what had not, and how institutions and audiences responded to testimony involving powerful nominees.
Both performances include post-show panel discussions in collaboration with Williams’ Office of Intimate Violence Prevention and Response.
The production contains infrequent strong language and discussion of racial and gender-based violence and is recommended for audiences 16 and older.
📅 Friday, October 2 & Saturday, October 3 · 7:30–9:30 PM
📍 Adams Memorial Theatre, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College, Williamstown · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Recommended 16+
🔗 Details / Tickets: Arts at Williams
📅 Friday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
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🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
UAlbany / International Center of the Capital Region · Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
Diplomacy usually enters the news when something has gone wrong—a war, a hostage crisis, a collapsing alliance or a confrontation between governments.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy approaches it from the opposite direction: through the work diplomats do when the machinery of international relations is functioning.
The International Center of the Capital Region and UAlbany are presenting the evening as part of a nationwide commemoration of American diplomacy. The featured speaker is Tom Selinger, a recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer, whose presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
Rather than giving a chronological lecture on treaties and administrations, Selinger will use individual stories—including those of diplomats from New York—to show what diplomatic work looks like on the ground.
Those stories include diplomats who helped rescue Americans during overseas crises, opened foreign markets for American businesses and agriculture, strengthened security alliances, and worked to advance democratic values and international understanding.
That human scale is what makes the program promising. “Foreign policy” can sound like something created entirely in Washington. Diplomacy is also practiced by people stationed around the world who spend careers negotiating, interpreting cultures, solving practical problems and representing the United States far from home.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
📍 UAlbany Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Map
🎟️ Registration available
🔗 Details / Registration: Engage America
🎬 71st Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Tang Teaching Museum / Skidmore College · October 8–10
The Flaherty Film Seminar has never behaved much like an ordinary film festival.
Rather than assembling a schedule of premieres, celebrity appearances and quick post-screening questions, the Flaherty tradition treats watching and talking as parts of the same activity. Participants see experimental and documentary work and then remain with it—discussing what they have seen rather than immediately moving to the next attraction.
The 71st seminar, Gestures of Refusal, asks what images can do when they resist dominant ways of seeing—particularly histories of empire, erasure and the systems through which images circulate.
In another Flaherty tradition, the individual films are not announced before each program begins. Each screening is followed by moderated discussion.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
Thursday, October 8
🎬 6 PM
Friday, October 9
🎬 6 PM
🎬 8 PM
Saturday, October 10
🎬 1 PM
🎬 3:30 PM
🎬 7 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
🔗 Details: Tang Teaching Museum
Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart
CAPTION: EMPAC turns sound into a three-dimensional environment.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
There are places where a conversation about immersive audio would remain theoretical.
EMPAC is not one of them.
Its studios were designed around the physical behavior of sound, making acoustics, spatial placement and technological experimentation part of the building’s artistic vocabulary. That makes it an unusually appropriate setting for a conversation between Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart about what happens when sound is understood not simply as something entering the ears but as something locating a body inside an environment.
Deufel is a researcher and artist who directs ZiMMT—the Center for Media Art, Music and Technology in Leipzig. Goodheart is an RPI composer and technologist. Their discussion ranges across spatial sound, acoustics and composition.
On Friday, October 9, Deufel leads a workshop on his Grapes 3D audio software. On Saturday, October 10, an installation of his work can be heard through the 39-speaker ambisonic system in EMPAC Studio 1.
That progression—from conversation, to tool, to immersive listening—is exactly the sort of programming EMPAC can do particularly well.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
💬 REGIONAL EXTENSION PICK — THE ARENDT FORUM 2026
Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?
Bard College · October 15–17
Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center is celebrating its 20th anniversary by organizing three days around a deceptively difficult political question.
It is easy to name what people oppose. The harder question is the one in the forum’s title: what are we fighting for?
The 2026 Arendt Forum uses solidarity to approach that problem. Scheduled sessions examine questions including whether solidarity can exist among people who do not share a religion or ideology, how liberal individualism relates to collective obligations, and how democratic societies sustain common purpose amid profound disagreement.
The speaker list includes Carol Gilligan, Patrick Deneen, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, George Packer, Hélène Landemore and Zephyr Teachout.
Conversations, roundtables, smaller lunch sessions, music, art and participatory programming stretch across Thursday and Friday, followed Saturday morning by a smaller debrief and networking session.
📅 Thursday, October 15–Saturday, October 17
📍 Bard College · Map
🎟️ Registration required · $199 for non-members; complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members · registration includes livestream access
🔗 Details / Registration: Hannah Arendt Center
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
The name is almost too modest for the amount of jazz history contained in the band.
The Cookers bring together veteran musicians whose individual careers reach deeply into the modern-jazz tradition. Players with decades of experience develop a kind of collective shorthand—the ability to leave space, redirect a phrase, alter the temperature of a performance and trust that everyone else onstage will understand what just happened.
A Place for Jazz has long used SUNY Schenectady as a home for exactly this kind of serious listening: nationally significant jazz presented in a room where the music, rather than nightclub atmosphere, is the center of attention.
📅 Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
UAlbany · October 19–23
For five days, UAlbany turns research itself into public programming.
Research & Entrepreneurship Week brings together faculty, students, researchers, innovators and outside partners around work that normally remains scattered across departments and laboratories. ETEC—the university’s Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex—provides a natural focal point for a week built around the point where academic research begins crossing into technology, industry and application.
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, falls inside the same week, placing semiconductors, nanotechnology and related research inside a larger conversation about how university discoveries move from laboratory questions toward economic and technological consequences.
For a region whose identity increasingly includes semiconductor research and advanced manufacturing, this is more than an internal academic showcase.
📍 UAlbany · Map
🔗 UAlbany
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LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30
Two-time Grammy Award winner Ernie Watts has spent a career moving with unusual ease among jazz, popular music, studio work and major touring artists. His appearance with his quartet gives the fall A Place for Jazz series another nationally established musician and makes October 30 worth marking now.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
Indiana Jones returns with John Williams performed live.
🎬 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Some film scores support a movie.
John Williams’ score for Raiders of the Lost Ark practically propels it.
For the film’s 45th anniversary, Bard’s The Orchestra Now performs Williams’ Grammy-winning score live while the complete 1981 film plays on a large screen in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. James Bagwell conducts.
Film-with-live-orchestra events are technically demanding in a way the audience should barely notice. The musicians cannot simply perform the score at their preferred pace; the music must remain synchronized with a movie that does not wait for them. A gesture on screen, a cut, a punch line or the arrival of a familiar musical theme has to land where the film expects it.
When that synchronization works, a movie most viewers have known for decades can feel unexpectedly physical. Music that has always emerged from speakers suddenly occupies the room.
The Halloween-weekend timing does not hurt.
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Tickets start at $25
🔗 Details / Tickets: Fisher Center at Bard
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
How does a brain turn perception into movement?
RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies perception and action—how people use sensory information to move through environments and make decisions. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches bodies through dance, performance and the lived experience of people whose bodies do not conform to conventional expectations.
Their EMPAC conversation brings those approaches together.
The program also draws on Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, centered on dancers with non-apparent neurological disabilities that affect movement, sensory input and information processing.
The combination should make this one of the more intriguing entries in the INTERFACE series: laboratory questions about perception encountering artistic knowledge produced by bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 EMPAC
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, November 13
Flute has always occupied an unusual place in jazz—less common than saxophone or trumpet, but capable of an agility and transparency that can completely change an ensemble’s sound.
Ali Ryerson has spent decades making the instrument feel entirely at home there. Her quartet arrives at SUNY Schenectady in November as part of the fall A Place for Jazz season.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
The Orchestra Now uses jazz as the thread connecting five Jewish composers whose lives and music intersected with migration, Europe and the United States.
The program culminates in George Gershwin’s An American in Paris but reaches into much less familiar territory as well, including the U.S. premiere of Ignatz Waghalter’s Violin Concerto and the first New York performance since 1930 of Louis Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite.
That combination—one of the most familiar American concert works beside music audiences may have had virtually no opportunity to hear—is exactly what makes this a Regional Extension item.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Pay-what-you-wish livestream available
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FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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OCTOBER
🎭 The Drunken City — UAlbany — October 21–25
🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — October 23–28
🎭 Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — October 30–November 8
NOVEMBER
🎭 Rent — Siena University — November 12–21
🎭 This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5
DECEMBER
🎭 Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10
REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER
🎭 Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — October 23–25
🎭 Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — November 7
🎭 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — November 19–21
🎭 SPROJ Work-In-Progress Festival — Bard College — November 20–22
⚠️ Needs follow-up: confirm general-public access before newsletter promotion.
LOOKING INTO 2027
🎭 Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3
🎭 UAlbany Spring Musical — title forthcoming — UAlbany — March 3–7
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BY DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY — SEPTEMBER 28
3–4:30 PM — 🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde · UAlbany · Map
TUESDAY — SEPTEMBER 29
3–6:30 PM — 🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
4:30–5:30 PM — ✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett · UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Map
WEDNESDAY — SEPTEMBER 30
2–4 PM — 📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities — Verónica Terriquez · UAlbany · Map
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 1
Noon — 🎸 Maria Z Ensemble — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
12:45–1:50 PM — 🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium — Union College · Map
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 2
4–5 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore / Tang · Map
7 PM — 🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert — Skidmore College · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 3
8:30 AM–2 PM — ⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day — Albany Law School · Map
11 AM–4 PM — 🖼️ University Art Museum reopening and three new exhibitions — UAlbany · Map
Noon–1 PM — 🧑🎨 Homecoming Weekend Exhibition Tour — UAlbany University Art Museum · Map
Noon–4 PM — 🖼️ Tang Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House — Skidmore · Map
12:30 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
1–2:30 PM — 🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation — Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Map
2 PM — 📣 Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
4 PM — 🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — Bard College · Regional Extension · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 4
10 AM — 📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden — Skidmore College · Map
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore College · Map
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
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COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER PARTNERS
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Capital Region Curated is pleased to help connect readers with other independent newsletters and community resources covering life in the Capital Region.
Interested in becoming a community newsletter partner?
Contact alankoslow@gmail.com.
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The colleges and universities around us produce an extraordinary amount of public programming.
The challenge is finding it.
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CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
Subscribe here: Capital Region Curated
Originally published at
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Capital Region Curated: September 28-October 4
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Mutale Nkonde on AI bias, poet Joshua Bennett, Senior Citizens Law Day and more.
Alan Koslow
39
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.
🤖 📚 ⚖️ 🎨 🎶
AI, POETRY, AGING LAW, ART & MUSIC
A week that moves from artificial intelligence and American poetry to the law of aging, museum reopenings, chamber music, flamenco and a remarkable 54-year musical homecoming.
Joshua Bennett reimagines America through poetry.
📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD
If Capital Region Curated helps you find something worth seeing, hearing or thinking about, please pass it along.
And if you work with a college department, arts organization, campus program, library, museum or community group, sharing the newsletter is one of the easiest ways to help more people discover the remarkable amount of public programming taking place on our local campuses.
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks
Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias · Joshua Bennett’s America in Poetry · Senior Citizens Law Day · Albany Symphony at Opalka
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life
Artificial intelligence and bias · new flood maps and insurance · youth organizing in immigrant communities · psychology at Union · the legal realities of aging
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas
Joshua Bennett at the NYS Writers Institute · Joan Lunden at Skidmore
🎨 Art & Visual Culture
UAlbany’s University Art Museum reopens with three new exhibitions · Homecoming curator tour · an exhibition-packed weekend at the Tang · daily Town Crier performances
🎶 Music
Maria Z Ensemble at HVCC · Filene Scholars at Skidmore · Albany Symphony chamber music at Opalka · Bard celebrates Joan Tower
🌎 Regional Extension
Joan Tower at Bard · Waterwell’s The Ford/Hill Project at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead
A century of American diplomacy · Flaherty Film Seminar · immersive audio at EMPAC · Bard’s Arendt Forum · jazz · UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany · Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
Artificial intelligence may be new technology, but it learns from a decidedly old world. Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI for the People and a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, opens UAlbany’s fall WGSS series by examining what happens when assumptions about race and gender become embedded in the systems increasingly entering classrooms and everyday life.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30 PM
Joshua Bennett’s We (The People of the United States) is not a conventional national history. His book-length poem moves from Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston to the Beach Boys, Sun Ra, experimental physics, the typewriter and life on Mars, using poetry to ask what America has been and what its familiar first-person plural—we—might actually contain.
Full details below in Books, Writers & Ideas.
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
Albany Law School · Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
Estate planning, Medicaid, long-term care, powers of attorney, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparation and financial exploitation converge in one unusually practical free public day at Albany Law. The program is designed not only for older adults but also for people approaching retirement, family members and caregivers.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
Five Albany Symphony musicians perform music by Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Vieuxtemps in the intimate surroundings of Opalka Gallery, followed by a conversation between Music Director David Alan Miller and Ojakangas. It is an unusually close-up introduction to the Symphony’s season before the full orchestra takes the stage at the Palace that evening.
Full details below in Music.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Mutale Nkonde examines bias inside artificial intelligence.
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom
Artificial intelligence arrived in public life with astonishing speed. In classrooms alone, students now use generative systems to research, write, brainstorm and solve problems; instructors are deciding where those tools belong and where they do not; institutions are experimenting with automated systems whose influence may be far less visible than ChatGPT on a laptop.
The speed can make AI seem like a rupture with the past. Mutale Nkonde’s work begins from almost the opposite premise. New technologies are built from human decisions and trained on human-produced material. If that material contains longstanding patterns involving race, gender, class or power, a sophisticated system can reproduce them without ever “believing” anything itself.
Nkonde founded AI for the People, a nonprofit devoted to responsible approaches to artificial-intelligence development, and UAlbany identifies her as a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Her work has placed her at the intersection of technology and public policy rather than within a purely technical conversation about how algorithms work.
At UAlbany, the subject becomes particularly immediate: the classroom. Education is one of the places where society is deciding, in real time, how much authority to give AI. Should a machine evaluate student writing? Recommend educational resources? Help an instructor create assignments? Identify struggling students? What happens when systems that appear objective reproduce patterns inherited from the material on which they were trained?
Nkonde’s lecture launches the fall UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.” The larger series examines how colleges teach contested subjects at a moment when race, gender, academic freedom and higher education itself have become part of national political conflict.
The most consequential questions about AI are no longer simply What can it do? They concern what we ask it to do, whose assumptions it carries with it, and what happens when human judgment is quietly transferred to systems whose decisions may be difficult to interrogate.
📅 Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Public lecture
🔗 Details: UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House
Hudson Valley Community College / FEMA / Rensselaer County
A flood map can look like a technical government document until one of its lines crosses your house.
Rensselaer County residents have a particularly practical reason to pay attention this week. FEMA has released new preliminary Flood Insurance Study information and Flood Insurance Rate Maps, and this open house at Hudson Valley Community College gives residents a chance to compare those preliminary maps with the existing ones and ask what the changes may mean for individual properties and neighborhoods.
This is deliberately not a lecture. There is no formal presentation and no need to arrive at 3 PM. Residents can come at any point during the three-and-a-half-hour window, look at the maps, ask questions about the mapping process and flood insurance, and talk through how a changed designation could affect their property or community.
The distinction matters because flood mapping affects more than whether a particular street has flooded in recent memory. FEMA maps communicate risk, inform floodplain management and help determine where flood-insurance requirements may apply.
The open house should be particularly useful for homeowners who already carry flood insurance, people considering buying or selling property, landlords and anyone whose property sits near a revised flood-zone boundary.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 3–6:30 PM
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center, Rooms 1–3, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free · Drop in at any time
🔗 Details: Rensselaer County Flood Map Information Open House
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Verónica Terriquez explores how young organizers become leaders.
📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities
Verónica Terriquez — ASA Rose Book Speaker Series
Leadership is usually described after someone has acquired it. Verónica Terriquez is interested in the earlier, less tidy process by which people learn that they can lead at all.
Terriquez is a professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Urban Planning at UCLA and director of its Chicano Studies Research Center. Her new book, Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities, examines young people whose education in leadership takes place not primarily in a classroom but through civic engagement, community organizing and collective action.
A teenager who enters an organization because of an immediate concern—immigration, schools, working conditions, housing or discrimination—may have no intention of becoming a “leader.” But organizing requires someone to speak at a meeting, recruit another student, talk to an official, plan an action, resolve disagreements and persuade a group to keep going when progress is slow.
Those experiences can become an informal civic education.
Terriquez examines both the opportunities and obstacles young organizers encounter as they work for social change. Immigrant communities provide a particularly revealing setting because young people may be navigating language, legal status, economic inequality, family responsibilities and institutions in which their communities have limited formal power.
The book’s larger question reaches beyond immigration. Democracies depend on people who know how to participate, yet civic participation is often discussed as though adults simply wake up knowing how to organize a meeting, build a coalition or challenge an institution. Terriquez looks at how those abilities are actually learned.
UAlbany brings her to campus through the ASA Rose Book Speaker Series, with audience questions following the lecture.
📅 Wednesday, September 30 · 2–4 PM
📍 Campus Center West Board Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ RSVP requested
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium
Every generation seems to acquire a new technology that adults suspect may be damaging the young.
Comic books once occupied that position. So did rock music, television, violent movies and video games. Smartphones and social media now sit near the center of the same argument, accompanied by much more serious questions about anxiety, depression, attention, isolation and adolescent development.
Psychologist Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University, has spent much of his career working in the difficult territory where media, technology, psychological research and public anxiety meet. His scholarship has often challenged sweeping claims about harmful media effects and asked whether the evidence supports the certainty with which those claims are sometimes presented.
That does not make the underlying questions trivial. If parents, educators and policymakers are going to make decisions affecting millions of young people, distinguishing a genuine psychological effect from a cultural panic becomes unusually important.
Union’s Psychology Department Speaker Series and Honors Colloquium brings outside scholars from different areas of psychology and neuroscience to campus. Ferguson opens the 2026–27 series, and Union explicitly welcomes members of the local community. Lunch and refreshments are provided.
Union has not yet announced Ferguson’s lecture title or topic, so Capital Region Curated is leaving the subject open rather than attaching an earlier working title to the event.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · 12:45–1:50 PM
📍 Karp 105, Union College, Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Free public lecture · Lunch and refreshments provided
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the lecture.
🔗 Details: Union College Psychology Speaker Series
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
There is a particular cruelty to many legal questions involving aging: families often discover what they needed to know only after they needed to know it.
A parent suddenly requires long-term care. Someone can no longer manage finances independently. A power of attorney that seemed like paperwork becomes essential. Medicaid rules collide with decisions about nursing care. An older relative is targeted by a scam. Family members discover that everyone assumed someone else understood the legal arrangements.
Albany Law School’s annual Senior Citizens Law Day is designed to move some of those conversations earlier.
The free program is intended for seniors, people approaching their senior years, loved ones and caregivers. Albany Law professors, practicing attorneys and other specialists lead workshops covering estate planning, Medicaid and long-term care, powers of attorney, senior living options, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparedness and other legal and practical issues affecting older adults.
The schedule begins at 8:30 AM with opening remarks from Patrick Wildes, director of Albany Law’s Government Law Center, and Greg Olsen, director of the New York State Office for the Aging. Workshops then run through the morning, including sessions on SSI and SSD benefits, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, tenant rights and preparing hospital “go-bags” for emergencies.
A community-resource area broadens the day beyond formal legal education, bringing regional legal, aging, health and social-service organizations into the same building.
The afternoon turns to one of the most troubling subjects in elder law. The Nancy M. Sills ’76 Memorial Lecture on Aging Law and Policy, from noon to 2 PM, examines financial exploitation of older adults. Saratoga County District Attorney Brett R. Eby and Elizabeth Loewy, co-founder and COO of EverSafe, are scheduled for the conversation.
Free 30-minute consultations with attorneys were also offered during the morning, although advance registration for those appointments closed September 25. The workshops, lecture and community resources remain part of the larger program.
Breakfast and lunch are provided, and parking on the Albany Law campus is free. You may arrive because you have one question. The real value may be discovering the questions your family has not yet thought to ask.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
📍 Albany Law School, 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · Free breakfast and lunch · Free campus parking
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the program.
🔗 Details / Registration: Albany Law School
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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Poet and scholar Joshua Bennett.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
The title begins with four words Americans have been repeating for nearly 240 years: We the People of the United States.
Joshua Bennett takes possession of that familiar language for We (The People of the United States), an ambitious new book-length poem about America’s past, present and future. But Bennett does not construct his America as a procession of presidents, wars and constitutional milestones. His map is much stranger, broader and more alive.
The Beach Boys are there. So are Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, Robert Frost and the Jackson 5. Bennett writes about the invention of the typewriter and experimental physics, popular music and literary history, and even life on Mars.
The method makes sense for a poet who has never kept literature sealed away from the rest of American life.
Bennett’s previous books include Being Property Once Myself, a work of criticism revisiting Black presence in the American literary canon; the poetry collection Owed; The Study of Human Life; and Spoken Word: A Cultural History. His work repeatedly crosses boundaries among poetry, scholarship, cultural history and criticism. He now teaches literature at MIT.
That background helps explain why the little word “We” in the new title carries so much weight.
National stories depend on inclusion and exclusion. Who gets to stand inside the pronoun? Which people, art forms, inventions, memories and experiences are treated as central to the American story, and which are placed at its margins?
The Writers Institute is presenting Bennett as part of its America in Poetry programming, cosponsored by UAlbany’s Great Dane Dialogue Series in connection with the country’s 250th anniversary.
Anniversaries tend to produce polished national narratives. Poetry can do something more unruly. It can interrupt the official chronology, recover what has been overlooked and put Robert Frost beside Sun Ra simply because, in the mind of the poem, both belong to the same enormous argument.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 Details: NYS Writers Institute
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
ADVERTISEMENT
📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden
For nearly two decades, Joan Lunden occupied one of the most familiar seats in American television.
As co-host of ABC’s Good Morning America, she helped millions of viewers begin their day at a time when the national morning programs were an unusually powerful mixture of journalism and companionship. Presidents and celebrities passed through. So did major breaking news, health stories, travel, family life and the lighter material that makes morning television different from an evening newscast.
Lunden now comes to Skidmore to look back from the other side of that public career.
The occasion is her newest book, JOAN: Life Beyond the Script. Skidmore describes Sunday morning’s Homecoming program as a special book talk with the award-winning journalist and bestselling author, followed by a signing.
The title is well chosen. Public figures eventually acquire a version of themselves that belongs partly to everybody else. For Lunden, that version is inseparable from Good Morning America. A memoir provides room for everything television could not contain: the private decisions around the career, the life after leaving the daily broadcast, and the experience of moving through middle age and later life after spending years being recognized as the person Americans saw over breakfast.
Her post-GMA work has increasingly touched subjects that become more important with age, including health, caregiving, family and reinvention after a major professional chapter ends.
📅 Sunday, October 4 · 10 AM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free · Book signing follows
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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UAlbany’s Art Museum returns with three exhibitions.Schwartzberg, romney, Frecon & Durand.
🖼️ THE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM REOPENS — WITH THREE NEW EXHIBITIONS
UAlbany’s University Art Museum has been closed for renovations. On Saturday, October 3, the doors reopen—and the museum is not easing back into operation with a single exhibition.
Three exhibitions open simultaneously and remain on view through April 2, 2027, spreading across the first- and second-floor main galleries, the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery and the Collections Study Gallery.
That makes Saturday less an exhibition opening than a complete reset of the museum.
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core
The first-floor Main Gallery belongs to Albany artist Howard Schwartzberg, whose exhibition reaches across approximately three decades of work while introducing a new site-specific commission.
Schwartzberg’s practice makes the physical behavior of materials part of the art. For the new commission, he works with paint and burlap, allowing gravity itself to participate in shaping the installation. Visitors move through the site-specific work while encountering pieces from the past 30 years that reveal the arc of his career.
Volume, surface and core—the three nouns in the title—point toward the physical questions running through the work: where painting ends and object begins, what a surface conceals or reveals, and how materials occupy space rather than merely decorate it.
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress
Upstairs, the second-floor Main Gallery is devoted to mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress.
The architecture creates a useful contrast: Schwartzberg’s long engagement with material and gravity below, romney’s work occupying the museum’s other major gallery above. Rather than treating the reopening as a single curatorial statement, UAlbany gives each artist enough physical territory to establish a distinct world.
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand
The third exhibition is also the most explicitly collaborative.
Painter Suzan Frecon and poet and translator Marcella Durand, Frecon’s daughter, use the latest iteration of The Light Factory to ask what collaboration between painting and poetry can become.
Frecon contributes small-scale brushwork experiments on paper using haematite pigments. Durand responds through ekphrastic poetry that reconstructs the sights, sounds and even smells of the painter’s studio while making connections outward to history and the larger world.
The poems are not captions for paintings, and the paintings are not illustrations for poems. Each medium creates another way of entering the same imaginative space.
Together, the three exhibitions make the reopening unusually rich: a large physical encounter with paint and burlap, romney’s second-floor installation, and the intimate exchange between painter and poet.
🧑🎨 HOMECOMING WEEKEND EXHIBITION TOUR
At noon, Associate Curator Robert R. Shane leads a one-hour tour through all three exhibitions. Visitors can then browse the museum’s Collections Study Space.
A curator-led tour on the first day provides the connective tissue that can be difficult to see on a first walk through unfamiliar work: why these exhibitions are opening together, what decisions shaped each installation and which details reward slower attention.
If you have not been inside the University Art Museum since before the renovation, Saturday is effectively a chance to meet the museum again.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · Museum open 11 AM–4 PM
📍 University Art Museum, Fine Arts Building, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
Homecoming Exhibition Tour:
📅 Noon–1 PM
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Museum | Exhibitions | Tour Details
📅 Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Five exhibitions fill the Tang for Homecoming Weekend.
🖼️ HOMECOMING WEEKEND AT THE TANG
If you have not been to the Tang recently, Homecoming Weekend is unusually well timed.
The museum has assembled exhibitions different enough from one another that walking through the building becomes a tour across contemporary art, American history, environmental science, queer theory, Jewish archival sound and Skidmore’s own collection.
Saturday’s Homecoming and Family Weekend Open House, noon to 4 PM, is the centerpiece, but tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday make this effectively a three-day public invitation.
A Feeling of With
This faculty co-curated exhibition draws from the Tang collection and is actually three explorations of the self in relation, presented across three galleries. Language, nature and mathematics become different ways of considering how people relate to themselves, one another and the world.
The exhibition also makes visible the Tang’s role as a teaching museum. The collection becomes raw material for developing observation, critical thinking, writing, public speaking and inquiry across disciplines.
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Artist Mark Thomas Gibson, who describes himself as an American history painter, gets a solo exhibition in the Wachenheim Gallery.
“History painting” carries an old art-historical grandeur—battles, national myths, heroic episodes—but Gibson’s adoption of the term places contemporary American experience inside that tradition. The title We Are A Constellation suggests history made not from one authoritative narrative but from separate points whose relationships change depending on how they are connected.
📣 TOWN CRIER PERFORMANCE — ONGOING THIS WEEK
There is also a wonderfully odd living element inside Gibson’s exhibition.
At 2 PM Tuesday through Sunday, a Skidmore student assumes the role of a Town Crier inside the Wachenheim Gallery and delivers two announcements: news from that same date 250 years earlier and news from the present day.
The performance is brief, free and open to the public. It connects Gibson’s interest in American history with the country’s 250th anniversary by making past and present literally sound together in the gallery.
No calendar entry needed — simply arrive at the Wachenheim Gallery for 2 PM.
The special Saturday 2 PM Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour remains a separate Homecoming program and continues into a student-led museum tour.
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest
On the State Farm Mezzanine, Sheila Pepe creates an immersive installation drawing on religion, sociology, queer theory, ancient Greece and Rome, and the Silk Road.
Pepe’s work makes space itself part of the encounter. Rather than presenting sculpture as a discrete object surrounded by empty gallery, the installation asks visitors to experience the relationships among material, architecture and their own movement through the room.
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs
500 Dams brings art and science together to document the Survival Kit Collective’s continuing work to regenerate grasslands at Anaya Springs, New Mexico.
The exhibition is not simply about ecology. It looks at the sustained acts of care, observation and intervention required to repair a damaged landscape—an environmental project becoming an artistic subject without losing its scientific and social dimensions.
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Even the elevator participates.
The 55th installment of the Tang’s long-running Elevator Music series uses newly digitized recordings from the 1950s through the 1980s in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Jewish Labor and Political Archives to create an immersive sound collage.
The tiny elevator becomes an unlikely listening room for cultural memory. Voices and sounds preserved in an archive are released into the ordinary act of moving between floors.
THE WEEKEND SCHEDULE
Friday, October 2 · 4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour
The Homecoming tour takes visitors through current exhibitions, specifically including A Feeling of With and Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, along with additional work on view.
Saturday, October 3 · Noon–4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House
The broadest opportunity of the weekend to explore the museum and all five exhibitions.
Saturday, October 3 · 12:30 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through current exhibitions, again specifically including A Feeling of With and We Are A Constellation.
Saturday, October 3 · 2 PM — Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour
A Skidmore student delivers the day’s two Town Crier announcements inside We Are A Constellation—one from 1776 and one from today—followed by a student-led tour that includes A Feeling of With and other current exhibitions.
Sunday, October 4 · 2 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A guided look at the museum’s current exhibitions, which include A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest, 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The Tang does not specify in advance which exhibitions Sunday’s guide will select, so this is the best choice for visitors who simply want a broad student-led introduction rather than one of the Homecoming tours with specifically named stops.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Tang Calendar | Homecoming Open House
📅 Friday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Open House Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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MUSIC
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🎸 Maria Z Ensemble
Hudson Valley Community College
For guitarist and composer Maria Zemantauski, the nylon-string guitar is a meeting place.
Her playing draws on Spanish classical guitar, flamenco and American fingerstyle traditions, and Thursday’s free lunchtime concert at Hudson Valley Community College expands that sound into a quartet.
Zemantauski is joined by Sten Isachsen, Bob Buckley and Brian Melick. Together they form the Maria Z Ensemble, bringing the rhythmic drive of flamenco and the detail of classical and fingerstyle guitar into an ensemble setting.
The combination promises something broader than a conventional classical-guitar recital. Spanish classical technique brings precision and color; flamenco contributes rhythmic urgency; American fingerstyle opens another vocabulary of picking patterns and independent melodic lines.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: HVCC Cultural Affairs
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert
The Filene Music Scholarship is one of the ways Skidmore identifies exceptional young musicians before they arrive on campus. Friday evening, the scholarship becomes audible.
The 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert brings together winners of the 45th annual Filene Scholarship Competition, current Filene Scholars and Skidmore faculty artists in Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall.
That intergenerational structure makes the program more interesting than a conventional student recital.
The newest scholarship winners represent potential: musicians selected at the beginning of their Skidmore careers because faculty believe they can contribute at an unusually high level. Current scholars show what happens after that potential has spent time inside the college’s music program. Faculty artists add the third layer—the teachers and working musicians around whom that development takes place.
A scholarship competition normally happens out of public view. Applications arrive, auditions take place, judges decide and names are announced. The Celebration Concert reverses the process. Instead of asking an audience to accept that these musicians are exceptional because a committee selected them, Skidmore puts them onstage.
📅 Friday, October 2 · 7 PM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Seating first-come, first-served
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Albany Symphony brings chamber music into Opalka Gallery.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
There is a useful experiment available in Albany on Saturday: hear music at human scale in the afternoon, then imagine what happens when an entire orchestra gets involved that night.
The Albany Symphony begins its 2026–27 chamber series at Opalka Gallery with violinists Christina Bouey and Paula Oakes, violist Sharon Bielik, cellist Grace Ho and cellist Daniel Ketter.
The announced repertoire ranges across Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Henri Vieuxtemps, giving the afternoon considerably more variety than the phrase “chamber concert” might suggest.
Russell Sage also confirms a conversation between Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller and composer Celka Ojakangas, along with the performance by Symphony musicians. That conversational component should make the program especially useful for listeners interested in how a new piece moves from a composer’s imagination into the hands of performers.
In an orchestral hall, dozens of musicians combine into an enormous composite instrument. At Opalka, chamber music strips that scale away. Individual players become visible as collaborators. Musical lines can be followed from one instrument to another. A breath, bow stroke or exchanged glance becomes part of the experience.
The gallery changes the atmosphere as well. Opalka is a contemporary-art space rather than a traditional concert hall, and the smaller room removes much of the ceremony that can surround classical music.
A few hours later, Miller and the full Albany Symphony move into the Palace Theatre for the orchestra’s season-opening concert, which includes Ojakangas’ music. The afternoon therefore becomes a kind of close-up prologue to opening night.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · RSVP requested
🔗 Details / RSVP: Albany Symphony
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — “My Longtime Home”
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
There are composer residencies, faculty appointments and institutional relationships.
Then there is Joan Tower and Bard College.
Tower joined Bard’s composition faculty in 1972. Fifty-four years later, she is still there, now the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music, and Bard is marking the relationship with a concert whose subtitle comes from Tower herself: “My longtime home.”
The length of that association is remarkable enough. More interesting is what 54 years means inside a college music program.
Students arrive, study and leave. Faculty colleagues change. New ensembles form. Buildings open. Entire generations of composers pass from emerging to established. Musical fashions change around them. Tower’s relationship with Bard has endured through all of it.
Saturday’s concert is not built as an outside tribute. The performers come from the musical community Tower has spent decades helping to shape: Bard faculty and students, the Cassatt Quartet and musicians from The Orchestra Now. The concert is presented by the Altalena Artists Collective.
Tower is one of the major figures in contemporary American composition, but the occasion does not ask audiences to encounter her simply as a name in music history. Her work returns to the place where she has taught for more than half a century and is performed by musicians connected to that continuing institutional life.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 4 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: Bard Conservatory of Music
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Two historic Senate hearings meet on one stage.
ADVERTISEMENT
🎭 The Ford/Hill Project
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Some documentary theater begins with interviews conducted for the production. The Ford/Hill Project begins with words millions of Americans already heard.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, describing allegations of sexual harassment. In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the committee during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Both men denied the allegations.
Waterwell returns to those public records rather than inventing a fictional story around them.
An ensemble of four actors performs from verbatim transcripts of the hearings, placing Hill’s and Ford’s testimony side by side even though the original events occurred nearly three decades apart.
The theatrical act is one of juxtaposition.
People who watched the original hearings encountered them inside different political moments, different media environments and different stages of the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. Onstage, the distance collapses. Statements separated by 27 years can answer or echo one another within minutes.
That does not make the two events identical. The interest lies partly in the differences: what had changed between 1991 and 2018, what had not, and how institutions and audiences responded to testimony involving powerful nominees.
Both performances include post-show panel discussions in collaboration with Williams’ Office of Intimate Violence Prevention and Response.
The production contains infrequent strong language and discussion of racial and gender-based violence and is recommended for audiences 16 and older.
📅 Friday, October 2 & Saturday, October 3 · 7:30–9:30 PM
📍 Adams Memorial Theatre, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College, Williamstown · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Recommended 16+
🔗 Details / Tickets: Arts at Williams
📅 Friday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
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🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
UAlbany / International Center of the Capital Region · Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
Diplomacy usually enters the news when something has gone wrong—a war, a hostage crisis, a collapsing alliance or a confrontation between governments.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy approaches it from the opposite direction: through the work diplomats do when the machinery of international relations is functioning.
The International Center of the Capital Region and UAlbany are presenting the evening as part of a nationwide commemoration of American diplomacy. The featured speaker is Tom Selinger, a recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer, whose presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
Rather than giving a chronological lecture on treaties and administrations, Selinger will use individual stories—including those of diplomats from New York—to show what diplomatic work looks like on the ground.
Those stories include diplomats who helped rescue Americans during overseas crises, opened foreign markets for American businesses and agriculture, strengthened security alliances, and worked to advance democratic values and international understanding.
That human scale is what makes the program promising. “Foreign policy” can sound like something created entirely in Washington. Diplomacy is also practiced by people stationed around the world who spend careers negotiating, interpreting cultures, solving practical problems and representing the United States far from home.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
📍 UAlbany Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Map
🎟️ Registration available
🔗 Details / Registration: Engage America
🎬 71st Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Tang Teaching Museum / Skidmore College · October 8–10
The Flaherty Film Seminar has never behaved much like an ordinary film festival.
Rather than assembling a schedule of premieres, celebrity appearances and quick post-screening questions, the Flaherty tradition treats watching and talking as parts of the same activity. Participants see experimental and documentary work and then remain with it—discussing what they have seen rather than immediately moving to the next attraction.
The 71st seminar, Gestures of Refusal, asks what images can do when they resist dominant ways of seeing—particularly histories of empire, erasure and the systems through which images circulate.
In another Flaherty tradition, the individual films are not announced before each program begins. Each screening is followed by moderated discussion.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
Thursday, October 8
🎬 6 PM
Friday, October 9
🎬 6 PM
🎬 8 PM
Saturday, October 10
🎬 1 PM
🎬 3:30 PM
🎬 7 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
🔗 Details: Tang Teaching Museum
Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart
CAPTION: EMPAC turns sound into a three-dimensional environment.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
There are places where a conversation about immersive audio would remain theoretical.
EMPAC is not one of them.
Its studios were designed around the physical behavior of sound, making acoustics, spatial placement and technological experimentation part of the building’s artistic vocabulary. That makes it an unusually appropriate setting for a conversation between Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart about what happens when sound is understood not simply as something entering the ears but as something locating a body inside an environment.
Deufel is a researcher and artist who directs ZiMMT—the Center for Media Art, Music and Technology in Leipzig. Goodheart is an RPI composer and technologist. Their discussion ranges across spatial sound, acoustics and composition.
On Friday, October 9, Deufel leads a workshop on his Grapes 3D audio software. On Saturday, October 10, an installation of his work can be heard through the 39-speaker ambisonic system in EMPAC Studio 1.
That progression—from conversation, to tool, to immersive listening—is exactly the sort of programming EMPAC can do particularly well.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
💬 REGIONAL EXTENSION PICK — THE ARENDT FORUM 2026
Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?
Bard College · October 15–17
Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center is celebrating its 20th anniversary by organizing three days around a deceptively difficult political question.
It is easy to name what people oppose. The harder question is the one in the forum’s title: what are we fighting for?
The 2026 Arendt Forum uses solidarity to approach that problem. Scheduled sessions examine questions including whether solidarity can exist among people who do not share a religion or ideology, how liberal individualism relates to collective obligations, and how democratic societies sustain common purpose amid profound disagreement.
The speaker list includes Carol Gilligan, Patrick Deneen, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, George Packer, Hélène Landemore and Zephyr Teachout.
Conversations, roundtables, smaller lunch sessions, music, art and participatory programming stretch across Thursday and Friday, followed Saturday morning by a smaller debrief and networking session.
📅 Thursday, October 15–Saturday, October 17
📍 Bard College · Map
🎟️ Registration required · $199 for non-members; complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members · registration includes livestream access
🔗 Details / Registration: Hannah Arendt Center
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
The name is almost too modest for the amount of jazz history contained in the band.
The Cookers bring together veteran musicians whose individual careers reach deeply into the modern-jazz tradition. Players with decades of experience develop a kind of collective shorthand—the ability to leave space, redirect a phrase, alter the temperature of a performance and trust that everyone else onstage will understand what just happened.
A Place for Jazz has long used SUNY Schenectady as a home for exactly this kind of serious listening: nationally significant jazz presented in a room where the music, rather than nightclub atmosphere, is the center of attention.
📅 Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
UAlbany · October 19–23
For five days, UAlbany turns research itself into public programming.
Research & Entrepreneurship Week brings together faculty, students, researchers, innovators and outside partners around work that normally remains scattered across departments and laboratories. ETEC—the university’s Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex—provides a natural focal point for a week built around the point where academic research begins crossing into technology, industry and application.
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, falls inside the same week, placing semiconductors, nanotechnology and related research inside a larger conversation about how university discoveries move from laboratory questions toward economic and technological consequences.
For a region whose identity increasingly includes semiconductor research and advanced manufacturing, this is more than an internal academic showcase.
📍 UAlbany · Map
🔗 UAlbany
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LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30
Two-time Grammy Award winner Ernie Watts has spent a career moving with unusual ease among jazz, popular music, studio work and major touring artists. His appearance with his quartet gives the fall A Place for Jazz series another nationally established musician and makes October 30 worth marking now.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
Indiana Jones returns with John Williams performed live.
🎬 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Some film scores support a movie.
John Williams’ score for Raiders of the Lost Ark practically propels it.
For the film’s 45th anniversary, Bard’s The Orchestra Now performs Williams’ Grammy-winning score live while the complete 1981 film plays on a large screen in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. James Bagwell conducts.
Film-with-live-orchestra events are technically demanding in a way the audience should barely notice. The musicians cannot simply perform the score at their preferred pace; the music must remain synchronized with a movie that does not wait for them. A gesture on screen, a cut, a punch line or the arrival of a familiar musical theme has to land where the film expects it.
When that synchronization works, a movie most viewers have known for decades can feel unexpectedly physical. Music that has always emerged from speakers suddenly occupies the room.
The Halloween-weekend timing does not hurt.
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Tickets start at $25
🔗 Details / Tickets: Fisher Center at Bard
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
How does a brain turn perception into movement?
RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies perception and action—how people use sensory information to move through environments and make decisions. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches bodies through dance, performance and the lived experience of people whose bodies do not conform to conventional expectations.
Their EMPAC conversation brings those approaches together.
The program also draws on Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, centered on dancers with non-apparent neurological disabilities that affect movement, sensory input and information processing.
The combination should make this one of the more intriguing entries in the INTERFACE series: laboratory questions about perception encountering artistic knowledge produced by bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 EMPAC
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, November 13
Flute has always occupied an unusual place in jazz—less common than saxophone or trumpet, but capable of an agility and transparency that can completely change an ensemble’s sound.
Ali Ryerson has spent decades making the instrument feel entirely at home there. Her quartet arrives at SUNY Schenectady in November as part of the fall A Place for Jazz season.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
The Orchestra Now uses jazz as the thread connecting five Jewish composers whose lives and music intersected with migration, Europe and the United States.
The program culminates in George Gershwin’s An American in Paris but reaches into much less familiar territory as well, including the U.S. premiere of Ignatz Waghalter’s Violin Concerto and the first New York performance since 1930 of Louis Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite.
That combination—one of the most familiar American concert works beside music audiences may have had virtually no opportunity to hear—is exactly what makes this a Regional Extension item.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Pay-what-you-wish livestream available
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FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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OCTOBER
🎭 The Drunken City — UAlbany — October 21–25
🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — October 23–28
🎭 Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — October 30–November 8
NOVEMBER
🎭 Rent — Siena University — November 12–21
🎭 This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5
DECEMBER
🎭 Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10
REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER
🎭 Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — October 23–25
🎭 Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — November 7
🎭 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — November 19–21
🎭 SPROJ Work-In-Progress Festival — Bard College — November 20–22
⚠️ Needs follow-up: confirm general-public access before newsletter promotion.
LOOKING INTO 2027
🎭 Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3
🎭 UAlbany Spring Musical — title forthcoming — UAlbany — March 3–7
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BY DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY — SEPTEMBER 28
3–4:30 PM — 🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde · UAlbany · Map
TUESDAY — SEPTEMBER 29
3–6:30 PM — 🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
4:30–5:30 PM — ✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett · UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Map
WEDNESDAY — SEPTEMBER 30
2–4 PM — 📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities — Verónica Terriquez · UAlbany · Map
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 1
Noon — 🎸 Maria Z Ensemble — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
12:45–1:50 PM — 🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium — Union College · Map
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 2
4–5 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore / Tang · Map
7 PM — 🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert — Skidmore College · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 3
8:30 AM–2 PM — ⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day — Albany Law School · Map
11 AM–4 PM — 🖼️ University Art Museum reopening and three new exhibitions — UAlbany · Map
Noon–1 PM — 🧑🎨 Homecoming Weekend Exhibition Tour — UAlbany University Art Museum · Map
Noon–4 PM — 🖼️ Tang Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House — Skidmore · Map
12:30 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
1–2:30 PM — 🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation — Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Map
2 PM — 📣 Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
4 PM — 🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — Bard College · Regional Extension · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 4
10 AM — 📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden — Skidmore College · Map
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore College · Map
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
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COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER PARTNERS
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Capital Region Curated is pleased to help connect readers with other independent newsletters and community resources covering life in the Capital Region.
Interested in becoming a community newsletter partner?
Contact alankoslow@gmail.com.
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CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
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Capital Region Curated: September 28-October 4
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Mutale Nkonde on AI bias, poet Joshua Bennett, Senior Citizens Law Day and more.
Alan Koslow
39
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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.
🤖 📚 ⚖️ 🎨 🎶
AI, POETRY, AGING LAW, ART & MUSIC
A week that moves from artificial intelligence and American poetry to the law of aging, museum reopenings, chamber music, flamenco and a remarkable 54-year musical homecoming.
Joshua Bennett reimagines America through poetry.
📣 HELP SPREAD THE WORD
If Capital Region Curated helps you find something worth seeing, hearing or thinking about, please pass it along.
And if you work with a college department, arts organization, campus program, library, museum or community group, sharing the newsletter is one of the easiest ways to help more people discover the remarkable amount of public programming taking place on our local campuses.
🧭 START HERE: WHAT’S INSIDE THIS WEEK
⭐ Top Picks
Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias · Joshua Bennett’s America in Poetry · Senior Citizens Law Day · Albany Symphony at Opalka
🏛️ Ideas & Public Life
Artificial intelligence and bias · new flood maps and insurance · youth organizing in immigrant communities · psychology at Union · the legal realities of aging
📚 Books, Writers & Ideas
Joshua Bennett at the NYS Writers Institute · Joan Lunden at Skidmore
🎨 Art & Visual Culture
UAlbany’s University Art Museum reopens with three new exhibitions · Homecoming curator tour · an exhibition-packed weekend at the Tang · daily Town Crier performances
🎶 Music
Maria Z Ensemble at HVCC · Filene Scholars at Skidmore · Albany Symphony chamber music at Opalka · Bard celebrates Joan Tower
🌎 Regional Extension
Joan Tower at Bard · Waterwell’s The Ford/Hill Project at Williams
🔥 Plan Ahead
A century of American diplomacy · Flaherty Film Seminar · immersive audio at EMPAC · Bard’s Arendt Forum · jazz · UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK
One calendar file adds this week’s timed events to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.
📅 ADD THE COMPLETE WEEK — GOOGLE · APPLE · OUTLOOK
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
⭐ TOP PICKS
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany · Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
Artificial intelligence may be new technology, but it learns from a decidedly old world. Mutale Nkonde, founder of AI for the People and a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, opens UAlbany’s fall WGSS series by examining what happens when assumptions about race and gender become embedded in the systems increasingly entering classrooms and everyday life.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30 PM
Joshua Bennett’s We (The People of the United States) is not a conventional national history. His book-length poem moves from Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston to the Beach Boys, Sun Ra, experimental physics, the typewriter and life on Mars, using poetry to ask what America has been and what its familiar first-person plural—we—might actually contain.
Full details below in Books, Writers & Ideas.
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
Albany Law School · Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
Estate planning, Medicaid, long-term care, powers of attorney, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparation and financial exploitation converge in one unusually practical free public day at Albany Law. The program is designed not only for older adults but also for people approaching retirement, family members and caregivers.
Full details below in Ideas, Public Life & Campus Conversations.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
Five Albany Symphony musicians perform music by Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Vieuxtemps in the intimate surroundings of Opalka Gallery, followed by a conversation between Music Director David Alan Miller and Ojakangas. It is an unusually close-up introduction to the Symphony’s season before the full orchestra takes the stage at the Palace that evening.
Full details below in Music.
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IDEAS, PUBLIC LIFE & CAMPUS CONVERSATIONS
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Mutale Nkonde examines bias inside artificial intelligence.
🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom
Artificial intelligence arrived in public life with astonishing speed. In classrooms alone, students now use generative systems to research, write, brainstorm and solve problems; instructors are deciding where those tools belong and where they do not; institutions are experimenting with automated systems whose influence may be far less visible than ChatGPT on a laptop.
The speed can make AI seem like a rupture with the past. Mutale Nkonde’s work begins from almost the opposite premise. New technologies are built from human decisions and trained on human-produced material. If that material contains longstanding patterns involving race, gender, class or power, a sophisticated system can reproduce them without ever “believing” anything itself.
Nkonde founded AI for the People, a nonprofit devoted to responsible approaches to artificial-intelligence development, and UAlbany identifies her as a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Her work has placed her at the intersection of technology and public policy rather than within a purely technical conversation about how algorithms work.
At UAlbany, the subject becomes particularly immediate: the classroom. Education is one of the places where society is deciding, in real time, how much authority to give AI. Should a machine evaluate student writing? Recommend educational resources? Help an instructor create assignments? Identify struggling students? What happens when systems that appear objective reproduce patterns inherited from the material on which they were trained?
Nkonde’s lecture launches the fall UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series “Teaching Gender, Race, and Feminism in Troubled Times.” The larger series examines how colleges teach contested subjects at a moment when race, gender, academic freedom and higher education itself have become part of national political conflict.
The most consequential questions about AI are no longer simply What can it do? They concern what we ask it to do, whose assumptions it carries with it, and what happens when human judgment is quietly transferred to systems whose decisions may be difficult to interrogate.
📅 Monday, September 28 · 3–4:30 PM
📍 Humanities 354, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Public lecture
🔗 Details: UAlbany Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House
Hudson Valley Community College / FEMA / Rensselaer County
A flood map can look like a technical government document until one of its lines crosses your house.
Rensselaer County residents have a particularly practical reason to pay attention this week. FEMA has released new preliminary Flood Insurance Study information and Flood Insurance Rate Maps, and this open house at Hudson Valley Community College gives residents a chance to compare those preliminary maps with the existing ones and ask what the changes may mean for individual properties and neighborhoods.
This is deliberately not a lecture. There is no formal presentation and no need to arrive at 3 PM. Residents can come at any point during the three-and-a-half-hour window, look at the maps, ask questions about the mapping process and flood insurance, and talk through how a changed designation could affect their property or community.
The distinction matters because flood mapping affects more than whether a particular street has flooded in recent memory. FEMA maps communicate risk, inform floodplain management and help determine where flood-insurance requirements may apply.
The open house should be particularly useful for homeowners who already carry flood insurance, people considering buying or selling property, landlords and anyone whose property sits near a revised flood-zone boundary.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 3–6:30 PM
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center, Rooms 1–3, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free · Drop in at any time
🔗 Details: Rensselaer County Flood Map Information Open House
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Verónica Terriquez explores how young organizers become leaders.
📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities
Verónica Terriquez — ASA Rose Book Speaker Series
Leadership is usually described after someone has acquired it. Verónica Terriquez is interested in the earlier, less tidy process by which people learn that they can lead at all.
Terriquez is a professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Urban Planning at UCLA and director of its Chicano Studies Research Center. Her new book, Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities, examines young people whose education in leadership takes place not primarily in a classroom but through civic engagement, community organizing and collective action.
A teenager who enters an organization because of an immediate concern—immigration, schools, working conditions, housing or discrimination—may have no intention of becoming a “leader.” But organizing requires someone to speak at a meeting, recruit another student, talk to an official, plan an action, resolve disagreements and persuade a group to keep going when progress is slow.
Those experiences can become an informal civic education.
Terriquez examines both the opportunities and obstacles young organizers encounter as they work for social change. Immigrant communities provide a particularly revealing setting because young people may be navigating language, legal status, economic inequality, family responsibilities and institutions in which their communities have limited formal power.
The book’s larger question reaches beyond immigration. Democracies depend on people who know how to participate, yet civic participation is often discussed as though adults simply wake up knowing how to organize a meeting, build a coalition or challenge an institution. Terriquez looks at how those abilities are actually learned.
UAlbany brings her to campus through the ASA Rose Book Speaker Series, with audience questions following the lecture.
📅 Wednesday, September 30 · 2–4 PM
📍 Campus Center West Board Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ RSVP requested
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium
Every generation seems to acquire a new technology that adults suspect may be damaging the young.
Comic books once occupied that position. So did rock music, television, violent movies and video games. Smartphones and social media now sit near the center of the same argument, accompanied by much more serious questions about anxiety, depression, attention, isolation and adolescent development.
Psychologist Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University, has spent much of his career working in the difficult territory where media, technology, psychological research and public anxiety meet. His scholarship has often challenged sweeping claims about harmful media effects and asked whether the evidence supports the certainty with which those claims are sometimes presented.
That does not make the underlying questions trivial. If parents, educators and policymakers are going to make decisions affecting millions of young people, distinguishing a genuine psychological effect from a cultural panic becomes unusually important.
Union’s Psychology Department Speaker Series and Honors Colloquium brings outside scholars from different areas of psychology and neuroscience to campus. Ferguson opens the 2026–27 series, and Union explicitly welcomes members of the local community. Lunch and refreshments are provided.
Union has not yet announced Ferguson’s lecture title or topic, so Capital Region Curated is leaving the subject open rather than attaching an earlier working title to the event.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · 12:45–1:50 PM
📍 Karp 105, Union College, Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Free public lecture · Lunch and refreshments provided
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the lecture.
🔗 Details: Union College Psychology Speaker Series
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day
There is a particular cruelty to many legal questions involving aging: families often discover what they needed to know only after they needed to know it.
A parent suddenly requires long-term care. Someone can no longer manage finances independently. A power of attorney that seemed like paperwork becomes essential. Medicaid rules collide with decisions about nursing care. An older relative is targeted by a scam. Family members discover that everyone assumed someone else understood the legal arrangements.
Albany Law School’s annual Senior Citizens Law Day is designed to move some of those conversations earlier.
The free program is intended for seniors, people approaching their senior years, loved ones and caregivers. Albany Law professors, practicing attorneys and other specialists lead workshops covering estate planning, Medicaid and long-term care, powers of attorney, senior living options, government benefits, tenant rights, emergency preparedness and other legal and practical issues affecting older adults.
The schedule begins at 8:30 AM with opening remarks from Patrick Wildes, director of Albany Law’s Government Law Center, and Greg Olsen, director of the New York State Office for the Aging. Workshops then run through the morning, including sessions on SSI and SSD benefits, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, tenant rights and preparing hospital “go-bags” for emergencies.
A community-resource area broadens the day beyond formal legal education, bringing regional legal, aging, health and social-service organizations into the same building.
The afternoon turns to one of the most troubling subjects in elder law. The Nancy M. Sills ’76 Memorial Lecture on Aging Law and Policy, from noon to 2 PM, examines financial exploitation of older adults. Saratoga County District Attorney Brett R. Eby and Elizabeth Loewy, co-founder and COO of EverSafe, are scheduled for the conversation.
Free 30-minute consultations with attorneys were also offered during the morning, although advance registration for those appointments closed September 25. The workshops, lecture and community resources remain part of the larger program.
Breakfast and lunch are provided, and parking on the Albany Law campus is free. You may arrive because you have one question. The real value may be discovering the questions your family has not yet thought to ask.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 8:30 AM–2 PM
📍 Albany Law School, 80 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · Free breakfast and lunch · Free campus parking
🔐 Campus access: If the building is locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor attending the program.
🔗 Details / Registration: Albany Law School
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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BOOKS, WRITERS & IDEAS
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Poet and scholar Joshua Bennett.
✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
The title begins with four words Americans have been repeating for nearly 240 years: We the People of the United States.
Joshua Bennett takes possession of that familiar language for We (The People of the United States), an ambitious new book-length poem about America’s past, present and future. But Bennett does not construct his America as a procession of presidents, wars and constitutional milestones. His map is much stranger, broader and more alive.
The Beach Boys are there. So are Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, Robert Frost and the Jackson 5. Bennett writes about the invention of the typewriter and experimental physics, popular music and literary history, and even life on Mars.
The method makes sense for a poet who has never kept literature sealed away from the rest of American life.
Bennett’s previous books include Being Property Once Myself, a work of criticism revisiting Black presence in the American literary canon; the poetry collection Owed; The Study of Human Life; and Spoken Word: A Cultural History. His work repeatedly crosses boundaries among poetry, scholarship, cultural history and criticism. He now teaches literature at MIT.
That background helps explain why the little word “We” in the new title carries so much weight.
National stories depend on inclusion and exclusion. Who gets to stand inside the pronoun? Which people, art forms, inventions, memories and experiences are treated as central to the American story, and which are placed at its margins?
The Writers Institute is presenting Bennett as part of its America in Poetry programming, cosponsored by UAlbany’s Great Dane Dialogue Series in connection with the country’s 250th anniversary.
Anniversaries tend to produce polished national narratives. Poetry can do something more unruly. It can interrupt the official chronology, recover what has been overlooked and put Robert Frost beside Sun Ra simply because, in the mind of the poem, both belong to the same enormous argument.
📅 Tuesday, September 29 · 4:30–5:30 PM
📍 Campus Center Multipurpose Room, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 Details: NYS Writers Institute
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden
For nearly two decades, Joan Lunden occupied one of the most familiar seats in American television.
As co-host of ABC’s Good Morning America, she helped millions of viewers begin their day at a time when the national morning programs were an unusually powerful mixture of journalism and companionship. Presidents and celebrities passed through. So did major breaking news, health stories, travel, family life and the lighter material that makes morning television different from an evening newscast.
Lunden now comes to Skidmore to look back from the other side of that public career.
The occasion is her newest book, JOAN: Life Beyond the Script. Skidmore describes Sunday morning’s Homecoming program as a special book talk with the award-winning journalist and bestselling author, followed by a signing.
The title is well chosen. Public figures eventually acquire a version of themselves that belongs partly to everybody else. For Lunden, that version is inseparable from Good Morning America. A memoir provides room for everything television could not contain: the private decisions around the career, the life after leaving the daily broadcast, and the experience of moving through middle age and later life after spending years being recognized as the person Americans saw over breakfast.
Her post-GMA work has increasingly touched subjects that become more important with age, including health, caregiving, family and reinvention after a major professional chapter ends.
📅 Sunday, October 4 · 10 AM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free · Book signing follows
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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ART & VISUAL CULTURE
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UAlbany’s Art Museum returns with three exhibitions.Schwartzberg, romney, Frecon & Durand.
🖼️ THE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM REOPENS — WITH THREE NEW EXHIBITIONS
UAlbany’s University Art Museum has been closed for renovations. On Saturday, October 3, the doors reopen—and the museum is not easing back into operation with a single exhibition.
Three exhibitions open simultaneously and remain on view through April 2, 2027, spreading across the first- and second-floor main galleries, the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery and the Collections Study Gallery.
That makes Saturday less an exhibition opening than a complete reset of the museum.
Howard Schwartzberg: Volume, Surface, Core
The first-floor Main Gallery belongs to Albany artist Howard Schwartzberg, whose exhibition reaches across approximately three decades of work while introducing a new site-specific commission.
Schwartzberg’s practice makes the physical behavior of materials part of the art. For the new commission, he works with paint and burlap, allowing gravity itself to participate in shaping the installation. Visitors move through the site-specific work while encountering pieces from the past 30 years that reveal the arc of his career.
Volume, surface and core—the three nouns in the title—point toward the physical questions running through the work: where painting ends and object begins, what a surface conceals or reveals, and how materials occupy space rather than merely decorate it.
mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress
Upstairs, the second-floor Main Gallery is devoted to mosie romney: ash, whistle & redress.
The architecture creates a useful contrast: Schwartzberg’s long engagement with material and gravity below, romney’s work occupying the museum’s other major gallery above. Rather than treating the reopening as a single curatorial statement, UAlbany gives each artist enough physical territory to establish a distinct world.
Invitation to the Light Factory | Suzan Frecon & Marcella Durand
The third exhibition is also the most explicitly collaborative.
Painter Suzan Frecon and poet and translator Marcella Durand, Frecon’s daughter, use the latest iteration of The Light Factory to ask what collaboration between painting and poetry can become.
Frecon contributes small-scale brushwork experiments on paper using haematite pigments. Durand responds through ekphrastic poetry that reconstructs the sights, sounds and even smells of the painter’s studio while making connections outward to history and the larger world.
The poems are not captions for paintings, and the paintings are not illustrations for poems. Each medium creates another way of entering the same imaginative space.
Together, the three exhibitions make the reopening unusually rich: a large physical encounter with paint and burlap, romney’s second-floor installation, and the intimate exchange between painter and poet.
🧑🎨 HOMECOMING WEEKEND EXHIBITION TOUR
At noon, Associate Curator Robert R. Shane leads a one-hour tour through all three exhibitions. Visitors can then browse the museum’s Collections Study Space.
A curator-led tour on the first day provides the connective tissue that can be difficult to see on a first walk through unfamiliar work: why these exhibitions are opening together, what decisions shaped each installation and which details reward slower attention.
If you have not been inside the University Art Museum since before the renovation, Saturday is effectively a chance to meet the museum again.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · Museum open 11 AM–4 PM
📍 University Art Museum, Fine Arts Building, UAlbany · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
Homecoming Exhibition Tour:
📅 Noon–1 PM
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Museum | Exhibitions | Tour Details
📅 Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Five exhibitions fill the Tang for Homecoming Weekend.
🖼️ HOMECOMING WEEKEND AT THE TANG
If you have not been to the Tang recently, Homecoming Weekend is unusually well timed.
The museum has assembled exhibitions different enough from one another that walking through the building becomes a tour across contemporary art, American history, environmental science, queer theory, Jewish archival sound and Skidmore’s own collection.
Saturday’s Homecoming and Family Weekend Open House, noon to 4 PM, is the centerpiece, but tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday make this effectively a three-day public invitation.
A Feeling of With
This faculty co-curated exhibition draws from the Tang collection and is actually three explorations of the self in relation, presented across three galleries. Language, nature and mathematics become different ways of considering how people relate to themselves, one another and the world.
The exhibition also makes visible the Tang’s role as a teaching museum. The collection becomes raw material for developing observation, critical thinking, writing, public speaking and inquiry across disciplines.
Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation
Artist Mark Thomas Gibson, who describes himself as an American history painter, gets a solo exhibition in the Wachenheim Gallery.
“History painting” carries an old art-historical grandeur—battles, national myths, heroic episodes—but Gibson’s adoption of the term places contemporary American experience inside that tradition. The title We Are A Constellation suggests history made not from one authoritative narrative but from separate points whose relationships change depending on how they are connected.
📣 TOWN CRIER PERFORMANCE — ONGOING THIS WEEK
There is also a wonderfully odd living element inside Gibson’s exhibition.
At 2 PM Tuesday through Sunday, a Skidmore student assumes the role of a Town Crier inside the Wachenheim Gallery and delivers two announcements: news from that same date 250 years earlier and news from the present day.
The performance is brief, free and open to the public. It connects Gibson’s interest in American history with the country’s 250th anniversary by making past and present literally sound together in the gallery.
No calendar entry needed — simply arrive at the Wachenheim Gallery for 2 PM.
The special Saturday 2 PM Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour remains a separate Homecoming program and continues into a student-led museum tour.
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest
On the State Farm Mezzanine, Sheila Pepe creates an immersive installation drawing on religion, sociology, queer theory, ancient Greece and Rome, and the Silk Road.
Pepe’s work makes space itself part of the encounter. Rather than presenting sculpture as a discrete object surrounded by empty gallery, the installation asks visitors to experience the relationships among material, architecture and their own movement through the room.
500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs
500 Dams brings art and science together to document the Survival Kit Collective’s continuing work to regenerate grasslands at Anaya Springs, New Mexico.
The exhibition is not simply about ecology. It looks at the sustained acts of care, observation and intervention required to repair a damaged landscape—an environmental project becoming an artistic subject without losing its scientific and social dimensions.
Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Even the elevator participates.
The 55th installment of the Tang’s long-running Elevator Music series uses newly digitized recordings from the 1950s through the 1980s in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Jewish Labor and Political Archives to create an immersive sound collage.
The tiny elevator becomes an unlikely listening room for cultural memory. Voices and sounds preserved in an archive are released into the ordinary act of moving between floors.
THE WEEKEND SCHEDULE
Friday, October 2 · 4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour
The Homecoming tour takes visitors through current exhibitions, specifically including A Feeling of With and Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, along with additional work on view.
Saturday, October 3 · Noon–4 PM — Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House
The broadest opportunity of the weekend to explore the museum and all five exhibitions.
Saturday, October 3 · 12:30 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A student Tang Guide leads visitors through current exhibitions, again specifically including A Feeling of With and We Are A Constellation.
Saturday, October 3 · 2 PM — Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour
A Skidmore student delivers the day’s two Town Crier announcements inside We Are A Constellation—one from 1776 and one from today—followed by a student-led tour that includes A Feeling of With and other current exhibitions.
Sunday, October 4 · 2 PM — Tang Guide Tour
A guided look at the museum’s current exhibitions, which include A Feeling of With, Mark Thomas Gibson: We Are A Constellation, Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest, 500 Dams: Art, Ecology, and Radical Care at Anaya Springs and Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
The Tang does not specify in advance which exhibitions Sunday’s guide will select, so this is the best choice for visitors who simply want a broad student-led introduction rather than one of the Homecoming tours with specifically named stops.
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Tang Calendar | Homecoming Open House
📅 Friday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Open House Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Sunday Tour Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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MUSIC
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🎸 Maria Z Ensemble
Hudson Valley Community College
For guitarist and composer Maria Zemantauski, the nylon-string guitar is a meeting place.
Her playing draws on Spanish classical guitar, flamenco and American fingerstyle traditions, and Thursday’s free lunchtime concert at Hudson Valley Community College expands that sound into a quartet.
Zemantauski is joined by Sten Isachsen, Bob Buckley and Brian Melick. Together they form the Maria Z Ensemble, bringing the rhythmic drive of flamenco and the detail of classical and fingerstyle guitar into an ensemble setting.
The combination promises something broader than a conventional classical-guitar recital. Spanish classical technique brings precision and color; flamenco contributes rhythmic urgency; American fingerstyle opens another vocabulary of picking patterns and independent melodic lines.
📅 Thursday, October 1 · Noon
📍 Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, Hudson Valley Community College, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: HVCC Cultural Affairs
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert
The Filene Music Scholarship is one of the ways Skidmore identifies exceptional young musicians before they arrive on campus. Friday evening, the scholarship becomes audible.
The 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert brings together winners of the 45th annual Filene Scholarship Competition, current Filene Scholars and Skidmore faculty artists in Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall.
That intergenerational structure makes the program more interesting than a conventional student recital.
The newest scholarship winners represent potential: musicians selected at the beginning of their Skidmore careers because faculty believe they can contribute at an unusually high level. Current scholars show what happens after that potential has spent time inside the college’s music program. Faculty artists add the third layer—the teachers and working musicians around whom that development takes place.
A scholarship competition normally happens out of public view. Applications arrive, auditions take place, judges decide and names are announced. The Celebration Concert reverses the process. Instead of asking an audience to accept that these musicians are exceptional because a committee selected them, Skidmore puts them onstage.
📅 Friday, October 2 · 7 PM
📍 Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Seating first-come, first-served
🔗 Details: Skidmore Celebration Weekend
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Albany Symphony brings chamber music into Opalka Gallery.
🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation
There is a useful experiment available in Albany on Saturday: hear music at human scale in the afternoon, then imagine what happens when an entire orchestra gets involved that night.
The Albany Symphony begins its 2026–27 chamber series at Opalka Gallery with violinists Christina Bouey and Paula Oakes, violist Sharon Bielik, cellist Grace Ho and cellist Daniel Ketter.
The announced repertoire ranges across Rossini, Celka Ojakangas, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Henri Vieuxtemps, giving the afternoon considerably more variety than the phrase “chamber concert” might suggest.
Russell Sage also confirms a conversation between Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller and composer Celka Ojakangas, along with the performance by Symphony musicians. That conversational component should make the program especially useful for listeners interested in how a new piece moves from a composer’s imagination into the hands of performers.
In an orchestral hall, dozens of musicians combine into an enormous composite instrument. At Opalka, chamber music strips that scale away. Individual players become visible as collaborators. Musical lines can be followed from one instrument to another. A breath, bow stroke or exchanged glance becomes part of the experience.
The gallery changes the atmosphere as well. Opalka is a contemporary-art space rather than a traditional concert hall, and the smaller room removes much of the ceremony that can surround classical music.
A few hours later, Miller and the full Albany Symphony move into the Palace Theatre for the orchestra’s season-opening concert, which includes Ojakangas’ music. The afternoon therefore becomes a kind of close-up prologue to opening night.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 1–2:30 PM
📍 Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany · Map
🎟️ Free · RSVP requested
🔗 Details / RSVP: Albany Symphony
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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REGIONAL EXTENSION PICKS
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🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — “My Longtime Home”
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College
There are composer residencies, faculty appointments and institutional relationships.
Then there is Joan Tower and Bard College.
Tower joined Bard’s composition faculty in 1972. Fifty-four years later, she is still there, now the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music, and Bard is marking the relationship with a concert whose subtitle comes from Tower herself: “My longtime home.”
The length of that association is remarkable enough. More interesting is what 54 years means inside a college music program.
Students arrive, study and leave. Faculty colleagues change. New ensembles form. Buildings open. Entire generations of composers pass from emerging to established. Musical fashions change around them. Tower’s relationship with Bard has endured through all of it.
Saturday’s concert is not built as an outside tribute. The performers come from the musical community Tower has spent decades helping to shape: Bard faculty and students, the Cassatt Quartet and musicians from The Orchestra Now. The concert is presented by the Altalena Artists Collective.
Tower is one of the major figures in contemporary American composition, but the occasion does not ask audiences to encounter her simply as a name in music history. Her work returns to the place where she has taught for more than half a century and is performed by musicians connected to that continuing institutional life.
📅 Saturday, October 3 · 4 PM
📍 Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public
🔗 Details: Bard Conservatory of Music
📅 Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
Two historic Senate hearings meet on one stage.
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🎭 The Ford/Hill Project
Regional Extension Pick — Williams College
Some documentary theater begins with interviews conducted for the production. The Ford/Hill Project begins with words millions of Americans already heard.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, describing allegations of sexual harassment. In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the committee during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Both men denied the allegations.
Waterwell returns to those public records rather than inventing a fictional story around them.
An ensemble of four actors performs from verbatim transcripts of the hearings, placing Hill’s and Ford’s testimony side by side even though the original events occurred nearly three decades apart.
The theatrical act is one of juxtaposition.
People who watched the original hearings encountered them inside different political moments, different media environments and different stages of the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. Onstage, the distance collapses. Statements separated by 27 years can answer or echo one another within minutes.
That does not make the two events identical. The interest lies partly in the differences: what had changed between 1991 and 2018, what had not, and how institutions and audiences responded to testimony involving powerful nominees.
Both performances include post-show panel discussions in collaboration with Williams’ Office of Intimate Violence Prevention and Response.
The production contains infrequent strong language and discussion of racial and gender-based violence and is recommended for audiences 16 and older.
📅 Friday, October 2 & Saturday, October 3 · 7:30–9:30 PM
📍 Adams Memorial Theatre, ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, Williams College, Williamstown · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Recommended 16+
🔗 Details / Tickets: Arts at Williams
📅 Friday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
📅 Saturday Calendar: Google | Apple/Outlook
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🔥 3-WEEK PLAN AHEAD
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🌍 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
UAlbany / International Center of the Capital Region · Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
Diplomacy usually enters the news when something has gone wrong—a war, a hostage crisis, a collapsing alliance or a confrontation between governments.
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy approaches it from the opposite direction: through the work diplomats do when the machinery of international relations is functioning.
The International Center of the Capital Region and UAlbany are presenting the evening as part of a nationwide commemoration of American diplomacy. The featured speaker is Tom Selinger, a recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer, whose presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, draws on oral histories preserved by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
Rather than giving a chronological lecture on treaties and administrations, Selinger will use individual stories—including those of diplomats from New York—to show what diplomatic work looks like on the ground.
Those stories include diplomats who helped rescue Americans during overseas crises, opened foreign markets for American businesses and agriculture, strengthened security alliances, and worked to advance democratic values and international understanding.
That human scale is what makes the program promising. “Foreign policy” can sound like something created entirely in Washington. Diplomacy is also practiced by people stationed around the world who spend careers negotiating, interpreting cultures, solving practical problems and representing the United States far from home.
📅 Tuesday, October 6 · 7 PM
📍 UAlbany Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall · Map
🎟️ Registration available
🔗 Details / Registration: Engage America
🎬 71st Flaherty Film Seminar — Gestures of Refusal
Tang Teaching Museum / Skidmore College · October 8–10
The Flaherty Film Seminar has never behaved much like an ordinary film festival.
Rather than assembling a schedule of premieres, celebrity appearances and quick post-screening questions, the Flaherty tradition treats watching and talking as parts of the same activity. Participants see experimental and documentary work and then remain with it—discussing what they have seen rather than immediately moving to the next attraction.
The 71st seminar, Gestures of Refusal, asks what images can do when they resist dominant ways of seeing—particularly histories of empire, erasure and the systems through which images circulate.
In another Flaherty tradition, the individual films are not announced before each program begins. Each screening is followed by moderated discussion.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
Thursday, October 8
🎬 6 PM
Friday, October 9
🎬 6 PM
🎬 8 PM
Saturday, October 10
🎬 1 PM
🎬 3:30 PM
🎬 7 PM
📍 Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College · Map
🎟️ Free and open to the public · Registration requested
🔗 Details: Tang Teaching Museum
Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart
CAPTION: EMPAC turns sound into a three-dimensional environment.
🎧 INTERFACE: Immersive Audio
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
There are places where a conversation about immersive audio would remain theoretical.
EMPAC is not one of them.
Its studios were designed around the physical behavior of sound, making acoustics, spatial placement and technological experimentation part of the building’s artistic vocabulary. That makes it an unusually appropriate setting for a conversation between Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart about what happens when sound is understood not simply as something entering the ears but as something locating a body inside an environment.
Deufel is a researcher and artist who directs ZiMMT—the Center for Media Art, Music and Technology in Leipzig. Goodheart is an RPI composer and technologist. Their discussion ranges across spatial sound, acoustics and composition.
On Friday, October 9, Deufel leads a workshop on his Grapes 3D audio software. On Saturday, October 10, an installation of his work can be heard through the 39-speaker ambisonic system in EMPAC Studio 1.
That progression—from conversation, to tool, to immersive listening—is exactly the sort of programming EMPAC can do particularly well.
📅 Thursday, October 8 · 6–7 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
💬 REGIONAL EXTENSION PICK — THE ARENDT FORUM 2026
Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?
Bard College · October 15–17
Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center is celebrating its 20th anniversary by organizing three days around a deceptively difficult political question.
It is easy to name what people oppose. The harder question is the one in the forum’s title: what are we fighting for?
The 2026 Arendt Forum uses solidarity to approach that problem. Scheduled sessions examine questions including whether solidarity can exist among people who do not share a religion or ideology, how liberal individualism relates to collective obligations, and how democratic societies sustain common purpose amid profound disagreement.
The speaker list includes Carol Gilligan, Patrick Deneen, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, George Packer, Hélène Landemore and Zephyr Teachout.
Conversations, roundtables, smaller lunch sessions, music, art and participatory programming stretch across Thursday and Friday, followed Saturday morning by a smaller debrief and networking session.
📅 Thursday, October 15–Saturday, October 17
📍 Bard College · Map
🎟️ Registration required · $199 for non-members; complimentary for Hannah Arendt Center members · registration includes livestream access
🔗 Details / Registration: Hannah Arendt Center
🎷 The Cookers
A Place for Jazz / SUNY Schenectady · Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
The name is almost too modest for the amount of jazz history contained in the band.
The Cookers bring together veteran musicians whose individual careers reach deeply into the modern-jazz tradition. Players with decades of experience develop a kind of collective shorthand—the ability to leave space, redirect a phrase, alter the temperature of a performance and trust that everyone else onstage will understand what just happened.
A Place for Jazz has long used SUNY Schenectady as a home for exactly this kind of serious listening: nationally significant jazz presented in a room where the music, rather than nightclub atmosphere, is the center of attention.
📅 Friday, October 16 · 7 PM
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🔬 UAlbany Research & Entrepreneurship Week
UAlbany · October 19–23
For five days, UAlbany turns research itself into public programming.
Research & Entrepreneurship Week brings together faculty, students, researchers, innovators and outside partners around work that normally remains scattered across departments and laboratories. ETEC—the university’s Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex—provides a natural focal point for a week built around the point where academic research begins crossing into technology, industry and application.
The Albany Nanotechnology Symposium, October 22–23, falls inside the same week, placing semiconductors, nanotechnology and related research inside a larger conversation about how university discoveries move from laboratory questions toward economic and technological consequences.
For a region whose identity increasingly includes semiconductor research and advanced manufacturing, this is more than an internal academic showcase.
📍 UAlbany · Map
🔗 UAlbany
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LONG-RANGE EARLY WARNING
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🎷 Ernie Watts Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, October 30
Two-time Grammy Award winner Ernie Watts has spent a career moving with unusual ease among jazz, popular music, studio work and major touring artists. His appearance with his quartet gives the fall A Place for Jazz series another nationally established musician and makes October 30 worth marking now.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
Indiana Jones returns with John Williams performed live.
🎬 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in Concert
Regional Extension Pick — Bard College · October 31–November 1
Some film scores support a movie.
John Williams’ score for Raiders of the Lost Ark practically propels it.
For the film’s 45th anniversary, Bard’s The Orchestra Now performs Williams’ Grammy-winning score live while the complete 1981 film plays on a large screen in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. James Bagwell conducts.
Film-with-live-orchestra events are technically demanding in a way the audience should barely notice. The musicians cannot simply perform the score at their preferred pace; the music must remain synchronized with a movie that does not wait for them. A gesture on screen, a cut, a punch line or the arrival of a familiar musical theme has to land where the film expects it.
When that synchronization works, a movie most viewers have known for decades can feel unexpectedly physical. Music that has always emerged from speakers suddenly occupies the room.
The Halloween-weekend timing does not hurt.
📅 Saturday, October 31 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 1 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Tickets start at $25
🔗 Details / Tickets: Fisher Center at Bard
🧠 INTERFACE: Cognitive Science — Brett Fajen & Heidi Latsky
RPI / EMPAC · Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
How does a brain turn perception into movement?
RPI cognitive scientist Brett Fajen studies perception and action—how people use sensory information to move through environments and make decisions. Choreographer Heidi Latsky approaches bodies through dance, performance and the lived experience of people whose bodies do not conform to conventional expectations.
Their EMPAC conversation brings those approaches together.
The program also draws on Latsky’s documentary Living in the Grey, centered on dancers with non-apparent neurological disabilities that affect movement, sensory input and information processing.
The combination should make this one of the more intriguing entries in the INTERFACE series: laboratory questions about perception encountering artistic knowledge produced by bodies in motion.
📅 Thursday, November 12 · 6 PM
📍 EMPAC Studio 2, Troy · Map
🎟️ Free
🔗 EMPAC
🎷 Ali Ryerson Quartet
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz · Friday, November 13
Flute has always occupied an unusual place in jazz—less common than saxophone or trumpet, but capable of an agility and transparency that can completely change an ensemble’s sound.
Ali Ryerson has spent decades making the instrument feel entirely at home there. Her quartet arrives at SUNY Schenectady in November as part of the fall A Place for Jazz season.
📍 SUNY Schenectady · Map
🎟️ Ticketed
🔗 Details / Tickets: A Place for Jazz
🎼 Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés
Regional Extension Watch — Bard College · November 14–15
The Orchestra Now uses jazz as the thread connecting five Jewish composers whose lives and music intersected with migration, Europe and the United States.
The program culminates in George Gershwin’s An American in Paris but reaches into much less familiar territory as well, including the U.S. premiere of Ignatz Waghalter’s Violin Concerto and the first New York performance since 1930 of Louis Gruenberg’s Jazz Suite.
That combination—one of the most familiar American concert works beside music audiences may have had virtually no opportunity to hear—is exactly what makes this a Regional Extension item.
📅 Saturday, November 14 · 7 PM
📅 Sunday, November 15 · 2 PM
📍 Fisher Center, Bard College · Map
🎟️ Ticketed · Pay-what-you-wish livestream available
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FUTURE THEATER ON CAMPUS
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OCTOBER
🎭 The Drunken City — UAlbany — October 21–25
🎭 BECKETT: Nothing Is Certain — Skidmore College — October 23–28
🎭 Grease — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — October 30–November 8
NOVEMBER
🎭 Rent — Siena University — November 12–21
🎭 This Emancipation Thing — Skidmore College — November 20–December 5
DECEMBER
🎭 Little Women: The Musical — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — December 2–10
REGIONAL EXTENSION THEATER
🎭 Rossum’s Universal Robots — Bard College — October 23–25
🎭 Wakka Wakka: Dead as a Dodo — Williams College — November 7
🎭 Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play — Williams College — November 19–21
🎭 SPROJ Work-In-Progress Festival — Bard College — November 20–22
⚠️ Needs follow-up: confirm general-public access before newsletter promotion.
LOOKING INTO 2027
🎭 Clue — Russell Sage College / Theatre Institute at Sage — February 24–March 3
🎭 UAlbany Spring Musical — title forthcoming — UAlbany — March 3–7
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BY DAY CALENDAR
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MONDAY — SEPTEMBER 28
3–4:30 PM — 🤖 New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde · UAlbany · Map
TUESDAY — SEPTEMBER 29
3–6:30 PM — 🌊 Flood Risk & Insurance Open House — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
4:30–5:30 PM — ✍️ America in Poetry — Joshua Bennett · UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute · Map
WEDNESDAY — SEPTEMBER 30
2–4 PM — 📖 Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities — Verónica Terriquez · UAlbany · Map
THURSDAY — OCTOBER 1
Noon — 🎸 Maria Z Ensemble — Hudson Valley Community College · Map
12:45–1:50 PM — 🧠 Christopher Ferguson — Psychology Speaker Series & Honors Colloquium — Union College · Map
FRIDAY — OCTOBER 2
4–5 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore / Tang · Map
7 PM — 🎹 2026 Filene Scholar Celebration Concert — Skidmore College · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SATURDAY — OCTOBER 3
8:30 AM–2 PM — ⚖️ Senior Citizens Law Day — Albany Law School · Map
11 AM–4 PM — 🖼️ University Art Museum reopening and three new exhibitions — UAlbany · Map
Noon–1 PM — 🧑🎨 Homecoming Weekend Exhibition Tour — UAlbany University Art Museum · Map
Noon–4 PM — 🖼️ Tang Homecoming & Family Weekend Open House — Skidmore · Map
12:30 PM — 🖼️ Homecoming & Family Weekend Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
1–2:30 PM — 🎶 Albany Symphony Chamber Concert + Conversation — Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery · Map
2 PM — 📣 Town Crier Performance + Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore · Map
4 PM — 🎼 Celebration: A Concert Honoring Joan Tower’s 54th Year at Bard — Bard College · Regional Extension · Map
7:30–9:30 PM — 🎭 The Ford/Hill Project — Williams College · Regional Extension · Map
SUNDAY — OCTOBER 4
10 AM — 📚 Good Morning, Skidmore! — Joan Lunden — Skidmore College · Map
2 PM — 🖼️ Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore College · Map
🔐 VISITING A CAMPUS EVENT?
Some campus buildings now have controlled or ID-card access, particularly during the day. If you’re attending a public event and find the doors locked, just ask someone for help and explain that you’re a visitor coming for the lecture or program. Arriving a few minutes early for smaller daytime events is a good idea.
Evening events are generally held in buildings that are open and accessible for the program.
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COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER PARTNERS
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Capital Region Curated is pleased to help connect readers with other independent newsletters and community resources covering life in the Capital Region.
Interested in becoming a community newsletter partner?
Contact alankoslow@gmail.com.
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The colleges and universities around us produce an extraordinary amount of public programming.
The challenge is finding it.
If this issue helped you discover something worth attending, forward it to someone who would enjoy it too.
CAPITAL REGION CURATED
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
Edited by Alan Koslow
Subscribe here: Capital Region Curated
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
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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