Brand from Home | March 24, 2022

Concerts at Brand Library in March and April!

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.

Online Music Classes

Skillshare is available free for three months. They have quite a few music classes including Ableton Live, guitar, piano, songwriting, and music technology.

Women's History Month

Join us for a Virtual Author Talk with Betty Reid Soskin, a 100 year-old ranger with the National Park Service, assigned to the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California and Dr. Gary Shaffer, Director of Glendale Library, Arts & Culture as they discuss her tremendous history and experience as an African American Female during World War II. Read her memoir, Sign My Name to Freedom.

In honor of Women’s History Month, come learn more about the life, work and legacy of Dolores Huerta. Learn about her struggles to eliminate pesticides from many of the same crops that end up in your cup of tea. Learn how topics such as intersectionality, gender/ethnic bias, social justice, activism, and advocacy collide in the life-story of this iconic woman and the lives of those she touched. Check out the documentary through our link+ services.

Korean-American performance artist, Jaime Sunwoo, illustrates an American Women’s Suffrage Movement steeped with inequality in her film Equality Tea.

In her film, she shines a light on the dark history of western tea consumption and recognizes the disenfranchisement within the suffrage movement. She acknowledges the many women of color who spoke up for women’s rights, for women’s suffrage and for equality. Complete a survey to participate in our Women’s History Month Teacup Giveaway.

Art Exhibits

Glendale Library, Arts and Culture and ReflectSpace Gallery are proud to present As the Earth Wanes: Considering Climate Change, an exhibition designed to reflect on the effects of global warming and climate change on our planet. To create greater awareness about climate change and generate critical conversations toward a greener and more sustainable future, several artists shed light on the current state of our planet.

Brand Library & Art Center presents Mapping The Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century, opening April 2 – June 11, 2022. LA based artists Lawrence Gipe and Beth Davila Waldman organized this survey of 19 diverse artists that challenge our culture’s entrenched conceptions regarding landscape, critically re-examining the genre as a mediated view of nature and a construction of centuries of aesthetic processing, demarcation and colonial expansion.

Art Online at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood. This exhibition presents approximately 30 images photographer Mary Ellen Mark made throughout her career depicting girls and young women. The images are drawn from an exceptional recent donation of more than 160 photographs by the artist.

Paper Routes—Women to Watch. Explore the possibilities of paper in this exhibition series showcasing the transformation of paper. From delicate and minute to dense and monumental, works reveal the diversity of approaches and inventive paths taken by contemporary women artists.

Graciela Iturbide's Mexico. Explore the online version of the most extensive U.S. exhibition of Graciela Iturbide's work in more than two decades, revealing the photographer's own journey to understand her homeland and the world. Exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Delita Martin: Calling Down the Spirits. The large-scale work of Delita Martin uses symbolism, color, and material to visualize interconnections between generations and the liminal space between the physical and spirit worlds. Portraits explore ideas of spiritual transition.

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

Stone Fruit is Lee Lai’s first graphic novel and it focuses on the breakdown of relationships—both the familial and romantic—that are so essential to our sense of belonging in the world. The central couple is Ray and Bron, who are happiest and most united when they are aunties to Ray’s young niece Nessie. In exuberant panels, the trio are drawn as creatures bounding through a forest, chasing imaginary animals, and making up songs. A phone call from Ray’s sister Amanda halts the adventure, exposing their human forms along with the complicated emotions and prejudices of their family dynamic—Amanda is suspicious of and threatened by Bron and doesn’t want Bron spending time with Nessie. After five years, Ray and Bron break up, and that’s where the graphic novel starts. Parental relationships are fraught, but sisters figure prominently in helping Ray and Bron heal. Ray turns to her sister and Nessie with unexpected results given their recent history. Bron does the same, but reconnecting with her younger sister means making peace with her religious parents who have no interest in her life because she’s trans. It’s a raw and simply drawn narrative of heartbreak and difficulty, but it also provides much needed insight and growth for its characters! I'm definitely rooting for them. -SB

Concertos for Trumpet and Piano Selina Ott trumpet, Maria Radutu piano, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, Dirk Kaftan conducting (Released March 1, 2022). I’ve seen a lot of recent publicity for rising star trumpeter Selina Ott. The idea of concertos with both trumpet and piano as soloists also intrigued me so I gave this a listen. First off the playing of both the soloists and orchestra is as fabulous as you would expect. The album starts off with the Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings which was written in 1933. It’s typical of the accessible music Shostakovich wrote in this period and has many fun twists and turns. It’s a sparkling energetic performance. Polish composer Mieczysław Wienberg’s Trumpet Concerto (1967) only features the trumpet as soloist and is a great showpiece for Ott. The piece is conservative and accessible but also well-constructed. The first movement is wildly virtuosic whereas the other two movements are symphonically serious yet still virtuosic. The Concertino for trumpet, piano, and string orchestra (1948) by French composer Andre Jolivet is a compact work that clocks in at ten minutes total. It’s rhythmic energy makes it a lot of fun to listen to. In both the Shostakovich and Jolivet the trumpet and piano provides a nice contrast to the more homogenous string orchestra. A beautiful trumpet/piano arrangement of Rachmaninov’s song “Oh, never sing to me again!” ends the program. Orfeo/Naxos include the PDF booklet which is useful. -BW

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.