October 18 - October 24 @ the IU Art Museum

Noon Talk

"The Scabs of Conciousness": Walker Evans and James Agee

Gallery of the Art of the Western World, first floor

Wednesday, October 20, 12:15-1:00 pm

 Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975). Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama, July-August 1936. Gelatin silver print. Henry Holmes Smith Archive

Christoph Irmscher, IU professor of English, will take a fresh look at the role that Walker Evan's photographs played in James Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and will discuss the ways in which the photographer and writer unsettle, battle, and occasionally reaffirm the assumptions underlying their art forms. Drawn from the IU Art Museum's large archive of Farm Security Administration photographs, this talk is presented in conjunction with the IU Archives and Special Collections Month theme of "Sustainability of Our Cultural Heritage."

Stop by during the lunch hour this Wednesday for a Noon Talk exploring the complex creative relationship between photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee. While you're here, check out the nineteenth-century section of the Gallery of the Art of the Western World, which has recently been reinstalled.

From the Steppes and the Monasteries:

Arts of Mongolia and Tibet

Continuing through December 19, 2010

Special Exhibitions Gallery, first floor

Spanning a time period from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century, this exhibition offers a tantalizing glimpse of the arts of Tibet and Mongolia, whose practice of Buddhism has joined them together at key moments in their history.

African Reinventions:

Reused Materials in Popular Culture

Continuing through December 19, 2010

Special Exhibitions Gallery, The Judi and Milt Stewart Hexagon Gallery, first floor

Plastic bags, aluminum cans, wire, and scraps of wood, cloth, metal, and plastic are given second lives throughout sub-Saharan Africa when they are transformed into a variety of utilitarian and decorative items. With objects including a working radio, a movie poster painted on an old flour sack, and a menagerie of animals made out of cans and wire, African Reinventions presents an engaging assortment of creative uses of recycled materials.



This exhibition was organized in conjunction with sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small Planet, the Fall 2010 College of Arts and Sciences Themester. For more information about this Themester, visit http://themester.indiana.edu/.