Sofia Sokolove

Inside UT’s historic Gregory Gym is a modern-looking annex that was surely not part of the campus institution’s original floor plan in 1930. Or at the very least, certainly not with its current purpose in mind: to house neatly stacked rows of floor-to-ceiling bright white Amazon lockers. The futuristic package delivery room is the epitome…

On the day I sit in on Eve Nicols’ “Aesthetics: Theory & Practice” textiles and apparel course, the professor of instruction is waxing poetic about fabric, stacked silver bangles clinking up and down both of her arms as she gracefully sweeps them around to make her points. “Fabric will tell you by the way it…

As soon as Clay Johnston’s video pops up on Zoom on the morning of June 19, the dean of Dell Medical School apologizes to me. “I’m a little distracted today,” he says, eyes darting across his screen. “It’s not public yet, but we may have had over 1,000 new COVID-19 cases in Austin yesterday.” The cl…

Around May of last year, after a few months of working (and doing just about everything else) from home, I decided to turn my concrete balcony into something a little more lush. Like anyone who has been confined to a very small condo during the pandemic, I became a bit obsessive over something that, pre-COVID,…

In 1991, Howard Nirken caught the attention of the Texas Exes. As a President’s Leadership Award finalist, the gregarious undergrad was being interviewed by the association for the award when he mentioned a recent community service event he had organized involving more than 1,500 student volunteers.…

It occurs to me that you’ve now had a full year of Alcalde letters from me that muse about “the new normal” and the changes in every aspect of our lives—the alumni association experience being chief among them. Even with all the disruption, we managed to bring fellowship and enrichment to Longhorn…

“‘Black Is Beautiful’ was my directive,” writes photographer Kwame Brathwaite, in the monograph that accompanies his upcoming exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art. “I focused my craft so that I could use my gift to inspire thought, relay ideas and tell stories of our struggle, our work, our liber…

A crowd at Memorial Stadium, circa 1960. In 1924, Texas played its first-ever game at what was originally a 27,000-capacity War Memorial Stadium. A sea of burnt orange during a 2019 Texas vs. Oklahoma State game at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, which was dedicated as such on Sept. 21, 19…

When Alice Embree arrived on the Forty Acres in the fall of 1963, UT dorms were still segregated. President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, was living at Kinsolving—a fact UT’s inter-racial committee knew would be controversial—and Embree and others gained national attention demonstra…

Rachel Lindsay comes from a family of Longhorns. Her parents, both first-generation college students, met at UT. Many of their siblings followed. This is exactly why, as an 18-year-old from Dallas, she wanted to go anywhere but The University of Texas. “I wanted to break free, I wanted to be in a bigger city, I…