About Jean Fruth:

Jean Fruth’s trajectory as one of baseball’s preeminent photographers has taken her on a round-the-horn tour of the sport’s most indelible landmarks. Growing up in New York City, Jean’s earliest memories are of her Grandfather listening to his beloved New York Mets on a tiny transistor radio. In school, Jean fell in love with the alchemy of photography. When she moved west as a young adult she immersed herself in the business, becoming a portrait photographer in the wine country of California. When life got busy and she found herself spending hours at the field of her son’s Little League games, she started shooting the action, eventually submitting images to the local paper. That’s when the local editor spotted her keen eye for sports photography and invited her to submit more. Jean tried her hand at different sports but found that nothing compared to the art and poetry of baseball—to outsider’s: a slow-moving sport, to the aficionado: an orchestra of strategy, timing, and sheer athleticism.

Jean would eventually meet legendary San Francisco sports photographer Michael Zagaris “Z,” as he’s known in the sports world. Z took Jean under his wing and invited her to shoot alongside him at the Oakland Coliseum—the only major ballpark without a railing in front of its dugout. Jean began producing front page-worthy shots, then the real magic happened when Jean stepped away from the pack and began shooting from novel perspectives, including the cheapest seat in the house, the upper deck of the outfield. These images captured the attention of the MLB and the NFL, and would guide the next decade of Jean’s career, which she spent covering the San Francisco Giants, Oakland Athletics, and San Francisco 49ers. In between seasons, when most sports photographers take a break from the longest season in sports, Jean found herself chasing it, covering the Caribbean League in Winter months, then traveling with La Vida Baseball, a digital media company, that tells the story of Latino baseball across the United States and Latin America. In 2014, Fruth was invited to give a presentation of her grassroots baseball images at the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, where she grew even more convinced of the unique ability of baseball to reflect the culture of where it’s played. Eventually, she approached the Baseball Hall of Fame and proposed that they hire her as their traveling photographer, to add a contemporary voice to the museum’s marketing and connect it with the sport’s rich history, to attract a younger audience through social media. The original concept for the position grew organically and Jean’s work became a cornerstone of the organization’s marketing efforts and its permanent archive, which she helped assemble.

Through her journey, Jean has recognized the transformative power of baseball to help young people develop strength, skills, friendships, and to learn and practice the concept of teamwork. As a result, together with her partner, former Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson, she formed a non-profit organization called Grassroots Baseball, to promote and celebrate the amateur game around the globe, with a focus on encouraging interest and participation at the youngest levels. She is documenting their journey in a series of books, starting with Grassroots Baseball: Where Legends Begin (Simon & Schuster, 2019) with an introduction by Cal Ripken, Jr., and an afterword by Johnny Bench.

Get Tickets: https://hultcenter.org/events/jean-fruth-2026/

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Abigail Lapell will be performing at the Hult Center on October 30, 2025.

Toronto songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell returns with Anniversary, an evocative collection of original love songs. Produced with Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker, the album was recorded at 200-year-old St Mark’s Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Dekker helped shape the sessions’ spooky, resonant sound and also lent his voice to a couple of spellbinding duets.

Lapell’s deft lyrics jostle with love song tropes, grappling with love’s finitude and the irony of how codependency and longing are revered in popular music. A ghost story is woven through the album: waltzing in the dusty barroom country of “Blue Blaze,” buried in the superstitious lyrical streak of “Rattlesnake” and audible in a wheezing organ as it shuts down at the end of “Footsteps.” Still, Anniversary emerges as an earnest celebration of commitment. Earworms like “Anniversary Song” and “Someone Like You” showcase intricately layered harmonies, while closer “Stars” affirms that there’s no place the speaker would rather be than with the one she loves.

Dekker and Lapell assembled a stellar cast of musicians to support Lapell’s powerhouse vocals, piano, harmonica and signature fingerstyle guitar. The core band includes Dan Fortin on bass, Jake Oelrichs on drums, and Tania Gill on the church’s piano, harpsichord and organ. Rounding out the ensemble’s sensitive orchestral country-jazz arrangements are Rebecca Hennessy (trumpet), Rachael Cardiello (viola), Michael Davidson (marimba and vibraphone) and Joe Lapinsky (pedal steel), who also engineered and mixed the record. Lapell has garnered three Canadian Folk Music Awards, hit number one on Canadian folk radio and reached a staggering 40 million + streams on Spotify alone. She tours widely across Canada and the U.S.

  / abigaillapell  

  / abigaillapell  

https://www.abigaillapell.com/

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https://www.taemusic.com/taeandtheneighborly

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https://hultcenter.org/events/10-x-10-mikey-moo

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https://hultcenter.org/events/10-x-10-my-brightest-diamond

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She will be performing at the Hult Center, May 4, 2024. All tickets are just $10.

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