6 minute read
State of the Art
from University of Washington Magazine - December 2022
by University of Washington Alumni Association / Alumni Relations
Bruce Lee Ascending
A new art installation on the central staircase of Odegaard Undergraduate Library celebrates actor and martial arts legend Bruce Lee. He studied drama and philosophy at the UW in the early 1960s, and left a legacy of spirit, discipline and breaking barriers and stereotypes. In 2020, student Han Eckelberg, ’22, designed the piece as a project for his class in advanced photomedia. The piece, rendered in vinyl, was created with support from the OCA-Asian Pacific Advocates of Greater Seattle and in collaboration with the Bruce Lee Foundation. It was dedicated in September with a ceremony that included a performance by the Mak Fai Kung Fu Dragon & Lion Dance Association. Photo by Ramond Smith
She’s Fly
Sophomore Maxine McCormick dominates the world of fly casting
By Jon Marmor
With flexibility and a dead-eye aim, sophomore Maxine McCormick shows her winning form at the 2022 Fly Casting World Championships in August. She won her first world title at the tender age of 12. Maxine McCormick isn’t your ordinary San Francisco-born, Portland-transplanted, snowboarding, hiking, fishing sophomore who wants to be a pediatrician. The UW biology major is a legend in the world of fly casting. McCormick, 18, won a record four gold medals at the 2022 Fly Casting World Championships in Norway, including casting the first-ever perfect score (by a man or woman) of 80 in Trout Accuracy.
In addition, her Sea Trout Distance cast of 165 feet was the longest ever by a woman. No wonder the youngest fly-casting world champion in history—at age 12—feels no pressure when she faces the world’s best.
“Fly casting is really relaxing, and I have been doing this so long,” says McCormick, who took up the sport from her dad at the age of 9. She will be an odds-on favorite at the 2024 World Championships in Sweden. Nothing fishy about that.
MAXINE MCCORMICK (3)
Tumor Trap
A new tool enables cardiac surgeons to put down their scalpels to remove tumors of the heart
By Jon Marmor
Physicians from the UW Heart Institute were the first to use a special tool delivered through a catheter to remove a benign tumor from a person’s heart, thereby avoiding the need for open-heart surgery. It’s not often tumors appear in a person’s heart. And when they do, there’s only one way to remove them: open-heart surgery. While that invasive procedure does the trick, it requires a patient to spend nearly a week in the hospital followed by a long recovery. But that could become a thing of the past.
Two interventional cardiologists at the UW Heart Institute were the first to use a basket-shaped, catheter-delivered tool to remove a benign tumor from a heart. After first using electrocautery to cut the 1.3-by-1.7cm tumor away from Tim Holland’s right atrium wall, they used the new tool—known as the “endovascular
retrieval system”—to grab, compress and remove it in one piece. Before this tool came along (the device was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in May), surgeons had to crack open a patient’s sternum and place the patient on a heart-lung machine to extract the benign tumor. Dr. James McCabe, one of the two UW clinical
Seniors never had it so good.
professors who performed the procedure, says, “He went home the same day. We didn’t need to put him on a heart-lung machine, and he didn’t spend five days in the hospital. I think we just saved Mr. Holland a lot of money and anxiety.” And isn’t this is what innovation is all about?
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Hip-Hopand Hype
The Graduate School brings Chuck D to Seattle By Hannelore Sudermann
When Daudi Abe, ’04, got a call asking if he would host an “Evening With Chuck D” for the Graduate School’s public lecture series, he said, “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” Abe, the Seattle scholar and historian who wrote “Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle,” jumped at the chance.
He remembers first hearing the music by Public Enemy, the group Chuck D co-founded, as a teen growing up in South Seattle. “It was groundbreaking,” he says. Besides being angry and engaging, the music and lyrics focused on social and political issues, race, power and class. It brought elements of Black experience to the fore with songs like “Fight the Power” and “Don’t Believe the Hype.” In fact, the latter title was adopted by Seattle’s Ingraham High School football team as its theme in 1988, the year it won the state championship.
In the early 1980s, young Black urban males didn’t really have a voice. “Hip-hop came along and expanded the discussion,” says Abe. “The entire world got to hear the perspective of this group that had really been silenced in a number of ways. And then it was put over some funky beats and a sampling of songs people had heard before. It was irresistible.” Hip-hop, rich with substance and talent, could have been fleeting, like disco, which all but vanished after the 1970s. Instead it found a worldwide audience.
Abe hopes to discuss Chuck D’s and Public Enemy’s impact on the Seattle hiphop scene and the history of the early rap record labels. He also wants to explore how Chuck D blended his music and activism, drawing from history and culture, and creating content about racism and oppression. Does Chuck D think artists today are doing similar things?
This special event, which is sponsored by the Graduate School and public radio station KEXP, is at 6:30 p.m., Feb. 9 in KEXP’s studios at the Seattle Center.
MIKA V Ä IS Ä NEN
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