Scott Fife, “Wer Wulf,” 2007 archival cardboard, glue, screws, 25 x 25 x 34 in. Courtesy Scott Fife and Platform Gallery, Seattle, photo: Mark Davison

The Weatherspoon Art Museum's most long-standing annual exhibition is back.

“Art on Paper 2008,” celebrating its 40th anniversary, includes 75 artists' unique works made on, or of, paper. The exhibition runs Oct. 19 through Jan. 25.

“Paper is ever present in our daily lives, taking the form of money and magazines, calendars and coffee cups, lanterns and love letters,” said curator Xandra Eden. “In the hands of artists, its repertoire is dramatically expanded.”

The commitment of xpdex (formerly the Dillard Paper Company) has allowed the Weatherspoon to acquire works from each and every “Art on Paper” exhibition. Today the Dillard Collection of Art on Paper contains close to 550 objects, including work by Louise Bourgeois, Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella and Eva Hesse.

Support for this year's exhibition and catalogue is provided by the F.M. Kirby Foundation and the Royal Netherlands Embassy, New York.

A tour of the exhibition will be held at noon, Tuesday, Dec. 9, as part of the Weatherspoon's Noon at the 'Spoon series.

The 4,500 square foot Urban Studio 02 project, provides a home for five teenage mothers and their children. The families will live in five suites with shared areas for cooking, eating and socializing.

A group of interior architecture students, led by assistant professor Robert Michel Charest, is undertaking a design-build project even more ambitious than the first.

Two years ago, 20 students in Urban Studio 01 designed and built a 1,000-square-foot home for an elderly couple in the Glenwood neighborhood just off campus. This time, in Urban Studio 02, Charest and a new group of students are working on a 4,500-square-foot home for five teenage mothers and their children.

Like its predecessor, Urban Studio 02 combines learning with community service and applies innovative design and construction techniques to a cost-effective project. And like the earlier project, this one makes the most of partnerships on campus and beyond.

Based in part on the success of Urban Studio 01, the project has won more than $500,000 in grants, with the vast majority of that sum coming from the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency. Greensboro's Department of Housing and Community Development is providing the land. Students studying carpentry at Guilford Technical Community College will help build the structure.

An innovative program to support young mothers and their children is being developed by YWCA Greensboro's Susan Cupito and UNCG's departments of Social Work, Human Development and Family Studies, Nutrition, and Communication Sciences and Disorders, as well as the university's Child and Family Research Network.

As many as 12 people will live in the home's five suites, each equipped with a full bathroom. Three of the suites will be for first-time mothers, while two will be for women with two children. The suites will afford privacy to promote bonding between mothers and their children, while shared areas for cooking, eating and socializing will promote the development of a supportive network among the home's residents.

Once the home is completed in the fall of 2009 it will be managed by Youth Focus, a High Point-based non-profit organization that supports children, adolescents and young adults.

A look at the “action,” or inner workings, of a piano

James Keith '08 MM, assistant piano tuner and piano technician at the School of Music, said he's got one of the dirtiest jobs in the music business. During the course of tuning and repairing the more than 50 pianos at the School of Music, Keith has fished out jewelry, pens, keys, melted candy bars and items that he declines to mention in polite company.

“You can find anything or lose things on purpose in a piano,” said Keith, a doctoral student in choral conducting. “We get a lot of ‘this doesn't play” and it's because there's something in the piano.”

Aside from extracting wads of paper from the delicate inner workings of the School of Music's well-used practice pianos, Keith assists Charlie Angel, UNCG's chief piano technician, in executing delicate repairs or tweaking screws that hold together yards of taut piano wire. Every summer, all of the School of Music's pianos and other keyboard instruments such as harpsichords get a full tune-up. There are roughly 10 adjustments to be made per note on a piano, he said.

“You tune a piano the same way you fine-tune an automobile,” said Keith, who holds undergraduate degrees in both choral music and historic automobile restoration. “It's the same principle as fixing a car; it's just a different medium.”

Keith's toolbox includes the usual complement of screwdrivers and wrenches as well as items such as old wool socks and purloined surgical instruments. Many of the tools he uses are improvised; his methods also can be unconventional. For instance, to remove glue, Keith has been known to pour boiling water over “the action”? piano lingo for the mechanical assembly which translates the depression of the piano keys into a felt hammer striking the strings. To keep his skills sharp, he practices repairs on an old upright piano in his house.

Keith said tuning a piano isn't as mysterious as people make it out to be. Along with a tuning fork, he also carries a hand-held digital device loaded with tuning software. Even with digital tuners, Keith must still train his ears to get a piano to sound just right.

“When a pianist tells you ‘this piano plays great’ it's rewarding.”

Novelist John Irving won't be holed up at the Hotel New Hampshire the night of Thursday, Nov. 6. He'll be farther south, reading at UNCG.

The reading begins at 8 p.m. in Aycock Auditorium. The MFA Writing Program is sponsoring the event. Tickets are free by visiting the University Box Office or, for a small fee, by reserving online at boxoffice.uncg.edu.

Irving's “The World According to Garp,” published in 1978 to phenomenal acclaim, established him as one of America's most inventive novelists. During the 1980s he wrote “The Hotel New Hampshire,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany.”

In 2000 he won an Oscar for the screenplay for “The Cider House Rules.”

• “My Husband's Sweethearts,” a novel by Julianna Baggott '94 MFA under the name of Bridget Asher
• “Rigor is NOT a Four-Letter Word,” a book for teachers by Barbara Blackburn '00 PhD
• “This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me: The Legacy of Ernest J. Gaines,” co-authored by Wiley Cash '01 MA
• “Houses Fly Away,” by Leigh Anne Couch '96 MFA
• “Fracture City,” a collection of short stories by Steve Cushman '02 MFA
• “Figure Studies,” a collection of poetry by Claudia Emerson '91 MFA
• “View From an Apple Tree: A Memoir of Courage,” by Anna Sharon Logan '85
• “Hunting the Unicorn,” a biography of the British poet Ruth Pitter by Don W. King '85 PhD
• “What Does Jesus Say About…Christ Speaks To Us Today,” by Cecil R. Price '76
• “Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers,” by George Singleton '86 MFA
• “The Underground Railroad: An Encyclopedia of People, Places and Operations,” by Mary Ellen Snodgrass '66
• “A Game Called Salisbury: The Spinning of a Southern Tragedy and the Myths of Race,” a non-fiction work on the 1906 Lyerly ax murders in Salisbury, N.C., by Susan Barringer Wells '76

Awards

• Dan Albergotti '02 MFA received one of South Carolina Arts Commission's 2008-09 Individual Artist Fellowship Awards for his poetry.