The University of Illinois Marching Illini is the nation's premiere college marching band whose unique performance style on and off the field is derived from time-honored traditions and exciting innovations. This unique ensemble has always been a very select and close-knit organization which annually includes nearly 350 students from virtually every college, discipline and major on the University's diverse Urbana-Champaign campus. With the exception of the years during World War II when female students were allowed to perform with the marching band because of the shortage of male students, women were not permitted to join the Marching Illini until 1971. The University of Illinois became the first Big Ten school music organization, under the leadership of Harry Begian as director of University Bands, to admit women to its marching ranks. Discover some of the stories of the challenges and triumphs that these pioneering students faced as the first ladies of the Marching Orange and Blue.

Martha J. "Martye" Awkerman (1928-2008), cornet soloist with the Women in the Air Force Band (WAF Band), the Long Beach Municipal Band, and the Hormel Girls Band, grew up in Pennsylvania and received trumpet performance degrees from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in the early 1950s, where she studied with Frank Simon and Harold Mitchell. From 1955 to 1961 she played lead cornet and trumpet with the 543rd Air Force Band under the leadership of Captain Marybelle J. Nissley. During her tenure with this ensemble she traveled around the world on USO tours and invitational engagements performing for both military and civilian audiences. Following the deactivation of the WAF Band in 1961 she became the first woman to be accepted into the famed Long Beach Municipal Band, where she played with many former members of the John Phillip Sousa Band until her retirement in 1983. Discover the behind-the-scenes touring life of the members of the Womens Air Force Band through the eyes of the Martha Awkerman.

This exhibition features both photographs and porcelain works produced by the contemporary Chinese artist Huang Yan (b. 1966). Through these works, Huang examines the transnational art market and the perception of "Chineseness" in this environment. Huangs engagement with commercialized culture may be identified with an aspect of Euro-American modernist art. Nonetheless, Huang's photographs and porcelains have intrinsic local and specific meanings, which uncover the mutual implication of Asian modernity and Orientalist fantasies.

This exhibition features the works of seven prominent American photographers selected from the museums extensive collection. All but two of the photographers represented were trained or taught at The New Bauhaus School of Design (descendent of the German Bauhaus design school and known later as the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology), founded by L?szl? Moholy-Nagy in Chicago in 1937. Together, these photographs epitomize the spirit of experimentation?of exploring the kinetic, sensorial, temporal, as well as visual properties of objects?which was the school's pedagogic legacy.

This exhibition brings together ten artists from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States whose works investigate the transnational reach of globalization as a universalizing phenomenon. Their cultural outreach extends beyond the limitations of physical boundaries and is inclusive of transnational exchanges where goods, people, information, and knowledge migrate across diverse territories. These artists explore the various processes involved in identity formation and offer competing and contradictory perspectives about the homogenizing force of globalization.