La Jolla News Nuggets: Stuart Collection, cheer championship, Soil Health Center, ‘Pancho Rabbit’

San Diego hotels launch artist program with UCSD’s Stuart Collection

Hoping to inspire up-and-coming artists and promote downtown San Diego as a central hub, a local hotel group has launched a residency program that will partner with UC San Diego’s Stuart Collection of public art in La Jolla.

The downtown Granger and Guild hotels, both refurbished historic boutique properties developed by San Diego-based Oram Hotels, will effectively become homes away from home for visiting artists while they research and create artworks in connection with the Stuart Collection Emerging Artists Program.

The initiative was launched with Los Angeles-based sculptor Max Hooper Schneider, who will live and work in the 96-room Granger Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter as he develops a major new artwork for the UCSD campus.

The Stuart Collection, established in 1981, recently got a financial boost to its Emerging Artists Program when local philanthropist Irwin Jacobs donated $500,000. Art collectors Jill and Peter Kraus of New York also contributed $500,000.

La Jolla High wins cheer championship

The La Jolla High School cheer team took first place in the CIF San Diego Section Cheer Championship on Dec. 13 as it competed against other schools at Carlsbad High.

“This victory means so much because of the incredible amount of effort, dedication and heart these girls put in,” La Jolla Cheer stated in a social media post. “From long practices to pushing through tough moments, they’ve shown what true teamwork and resilience looks like.”

Scripps Oceanography creates Soil Health Center

A new center at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla is a cross-disciplinary effort in which scientists are digging — sometimes literally — into research focused on building and maintaining soil health.

The Soil Health Center aims to mitigate climate change, strengthen food security and improve societal resilience to a warming planet. It taps the expertise of microbiologists, plant and soil biologists, ecologists, biochemists, growers and community historians to shape the future of soil health and drive innovations in sustainable technology.

More than a century of industrial farming practices and use of synthetic fertilizer has depleted carbon in the soil and degraded overall soil health, leaving agricultural systems increasingly vulnerable to drought, rising temperatures, extreme flooding and other climate-related impacts, according to SIO.

“The center is poised to have an enormous impact on advancing food security,” said Sarah Allard, executive director of the Soil Health Center. “We are developing new technologies that can be deployed not just locally but nationally and internationally, and at the same time we’re working with larger organizations to be part of the policy conversation for how to bring these new technologies into the world.”

Bilingual chamber opera nears world premiere

La Jolla-based Bodhi Tree Concerts early next year will present the world premiere of a bilingual Spanish/English chamber opera composed by Pulitzer Prize-winning UC San Diego music professor Anthony Davis.

“Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote,” based on the book of the same name by Mexican American author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh, is slated to premiere Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 17-18, at the Southwestern College Performing Arts Center in Chula Vista before playing in Tijuana on Saturday, Jan. 31. The opera has Spanish text by Laura Fuentes, and UCSD professor and playwright Allan Havis is contributing the libretto.

According to a statement from Bodhi Tree Concerts, the production is “the most ambitious undertaking” in its 14-year history.

The story brings to light the struggles facing families who seek to make better lives by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Tickets for the Chula Vista performances of “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote” range from $40 to $75, with a 20% discount available for military members and college students and free tickets for children in kindergarten through 12th grade. Tickets for the Tijuana performance will be available soon.

Learn more at panchorabbit.org.

— San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer Lori Weisberg contributed to this report.