Brand from Home | April 21, 2022

Commemorate Armenian History Month with events, booklists, a giveaway and more.

With a mobile studio in a retrofitted food truck, USC Institute of Armenian Studies is traveling throughout Southern California to encourage and invite people to record their life stories. Individuals wanting to interview and be interviewed will be, given guidelines and questions, and their conversation will be recorded. #MyArmenianStory is a crowd-sourced oral history project that has thus far gathered nearly 100 interviews from around the world. Everyone’s story is relevant, and together, they all make up the Armenian Story.

Join the Glendale Historical Society on Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 7PM for Discovering Eden: Early Armenian Immigration to California. TGHS Board Member Ani Mnatsakanyan shares stories of resilience and community strength as Armenians reconstruct their lives in a foreign land, while attempting to preserve their identity and memories of the homeland they were forced to leave behind.

Music Concerts in April!

The Brand Associates Music Series presents "Music From America," a program by Bokyung Byun performing new pieces from young US composers along with South American composers. She has won many international competitions and awards. Most recently the 2021 Guitar Foundation of America’s International Concert Artist Competition, probably the most prestigious guitar competition in the world. April 30, 2022 at 2:00 PM, Brand Library Recital Hall. Sponsored by the Brand Associates, admission is free and seating is limited.

Join Lernazang Ensemble for a celebration of Armenian dance and culture on Saturday, April 30, 2022 at 4:00PM. The event will feature master musicians from Armenia including folk singer Hasmik Harutunyan, Vardan Baghdasaryan on kamancha, Tigran Zakaryan on pku/zurna, Albert Ordinyan on dhol, and more performing a rich repertoire of azgagrakan songs and dances from Western Armenia.

Music Playlists

Listen to a streaming playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library,Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Music Online from Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.

Here are some new CDs.

Here are some new music books.

Music Online

Oxford Music Online is the online gateway to Grove Music Online with the ability to search The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music. You can login with your library card number. Check out this article on Aram Khachaturian.

Dance at Brand

This series, curated by acclaimed choreographer, teacher and producer Jamie Nichols, presents top dance companies from Southern California performing site-specific work in non-traditional performance spaces around Brand Library. This year performances will be live and in person. The Dance Series also includes an in-person interactive Sunday workshop with an opportunity to meet the artists, ask questions and learn more about dance!

City Ballet of Los Angeles

Workshop: Sunday, May 1, 4PM

Join us for a workshop with City Ballet of Los Angeles to start out our Brand Associates Dance Series. CBLA presents work that is theatrical and cutting edge; from a classical perspective, working with music from J.S. Bach to John Coltrane.

Nickerson-Rossi Dance

Performance: Saturday, May 7, 5PM

Workshop: Sunday, May 8, 4PM

The Nickerson-Rossi Dance Company is an internationally renowned contemporary dance company. The company engages, inspires, and ignites the senses by enriching the lives of artists and enthusiasts alike through quality dance programming, education, and outreach.

Tropicaleiza Dance + Drum Co

Performance: Saturday, May 14, 5PM

Workshop: Sunday, May 15, 4PM

Tropicaleiza Dance and Drum Company founded in 2006 and directed by Julie Simon is a dynamic group of powerful diverse women fully expressing themselves through the joyful acts of dancing and drumming.

JazzAntiqua

Performance: Saturday, May 21, 5PM

Workshop: Sunday, May 22, 4PM

Founded in 1993 by choreographer Pat Taylor, Los Angeles-based JazzAntiqua Dance Ensemble digs deep into the movement in the music – celebrating jazz as a vital thread in the cultural fabric of African American history and heritage and a defining element of the American experience in works that are evocative, graceful with rich, jazzy textures.

Artist Reception & Panel Discussion

On the occasion of Earth Day weekend, LA Weekly arts editor Shana Nys Dambrot will moderate a discussion with artists featured in Mapping the Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century. The 6 panelists have made commitments in their art practices to engage with topics like climate change, the exploitative effects of consumer culture and colonialism on the Earth's delicate ecosystem, and more broadly philosophical notions of the Sublime and the Anthropocene. Saturday, April 23 4PM-8PM

Call for Art

The Associates of Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, California announce the 50th Annual National Juried Exhibition of Works on Paper. This years juror is Shannon Currie Holmes. Shannon has been producing events designed to connect people through the exploration of art through public art projects including Satellite Galleries and Street Box Art. Cash awards total over $4,000 including a Juror’s Award. All accepted artworks will be included in a show at the Brand Gallery and in both printed and online exhibition catalogs. Entry Deadline: Friday May 13, 2022

Arts & Crafts Show

Friends of Rockhaven are holding Art on the Rocks on April 30, 10AM–4PM at St Luke's of the Mountains, 2563 Foothill Blvd, La Crescenta-Montrose. Craftswomen and artists will be displaying and selling to support the arts. Beginning in 1923, Rockhaven Sanitarium provided dignified care for mentally ill women. Owned and operated by women, it was groundbreaking both in women's history and in the history of the treatment of mental illness.

Explore our collections to learn more! Celebrate Poetry Month as well!

Can't find it at the library? Try out Link+ our network of 70 public and academic libraries from across California and Nevada. Just click on the link from the catalog or watch a tutorial to learn more.

Brand Library Staff Reviews

Rose-Lynn Harlan (played by Jessie Buckley) in the film Wild Rose (2018) sings country tunes while swinging her white fringe jacket and stomping the pavement in cowboy boots. She has vocal ability and enough amateur performance experience to convince her, absolutely, that her next move needs to be to Nashville, TN to be discovered. As much as we want to root for her, there are numerous issues with her plan that can’t be ignored—she lives in Glasgow and is the single mother of two, she’s newly released from a year-long stint in prison with no job and an ankle monitor, and even though she has magnetism that makes people want to help her, it’s combined with a terrible volatility that repels nearly everyone. She learns quickly that singing well is one thing but having your own voice is another—and one that is necessary if she wants to have a country music career. Amazingly, even though Jessie Buckley sings, she wasn’t a fan of country music before taking it on for Wild Rose. You’d never know it hearing her sing both covers and original tracks including the final ballad “Glasgow (No Place Like Home)” written by Mary Steenburgen. Rose-Lynn gets advice along the way that’s worth passing on wherever you land musically: “May all your heartbreaks be songs and all your songs be hits!” -SB

Covid-19 Resources

Reliable information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) is available from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the California Department of Public Health, Los Angeles County Public Health Department, City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture department.