Programs and Tours
LS&A Museums Theme Year
UMMA is pleased to be a key partner in the 2009 LS&A Theme Year Meaningful Objects: Museums in the Academy. This year-long investigation offers a wide array of courses, activities, events, and the opportunities to go behind the scenes to learn about the complex issues of museums and their audiences today.
A few highlights are listed here. Please see
the Museums Theme Year website at www.lsa.umich.edu/museumstheme for more information and complete listings.
The Wednesday Night Museums Lecture Series
Join us on Wednesday evenings for lectures by Museum professionals from across the country. They will speak on a range of unique topics and issues central to today’s museums. All lectures are free and open to the public and will take place in UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium unless otherwise indicated.
Lecture by Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu
Contemporary Art in China:
Where has it come from and where is it heading?
Wednesday November 4
6:30 pm Reception: Commons
7:30 pm Lecture: Helmut Stern Auditorium
Many assume that Chinese contemporary art emerged five years ago when the market was established through record-breaking auctions, but this belies a much longer history. Dr. Melissa Chiu’s lecture is designed to shed light on the early experimental developments in the Chinese art world through an analysis of the past three decades with specific attention on how these artists responded to local conditions while also keenly aware of their international audiences.
Dr. Melissa Chiu is Director of the Asia Society Museum in New York and Vice President of the Society's Global Arts Programming. She was appointed director in 2004 after serving for three years as the Museum's first curator of contemporary Asian and Asian American art. As a leading authority on Asian contemporary art, she has initiated a number of major initiatives at the Asia Society Museum, including the launch of a contemporary art collection to complement the museum's outstanding Rockefeller Collection of traditional Asian art. She earned her PhD in Art History and MA in Arts Administration in her native Australia.
This presentation is sponsored by the UM Center for Chinese Studies of the International Institute, the LSA Museum Theme Year, and the UM Museum of Art.
For more information, please contact the UM Center for Chinese Studies at 734.764.6308 or chinese.studies@umich.edu.
Natural History Museums, Aesthetics, and Conservation
November 18, 7:30 pm
Darwin's “descent with modification” combined with Kant's distinction between “beauty” and the “sublime” provide a framework for biologically sublime aesthetics, by which we more fully appreciate organisms and their environments. Natural history museums provide a nexus for integrating research, teaching, and conservation in that broader cultural framework, and thus for addressing the severe environmental challenges we now face. Professor Henry Greene will illustrate these claims with examples from the biology of amphibians and reptiles, with emphasis on exciting new discoveries about their evolutionary relationships and natural history.
Harry Greene taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for two decades, before moving to Cornell University in 1999 as a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. He has studied the behavioral ecology, evolution, and conservation of predators in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and most recently Brazil and the US-Mexico borderlands. His Snakes: the Evolution of Mystery in Nature won a PEN Literary Award and made the New York Times' list of 100 Most Notable Books.
Curating the Archive: Representing Scattered Collections of the Colonial Past December 2, 2009, 7:30 pm
Helmut Stern Auditorium
This talk by Pippa Skotnes, Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Centre for Curating the Archive at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, will focus on creative curatorship and the challenges of representing the material presence of the past. It will suggest that curating the archive is an act of both the intellectual and creative revivification of the events and actions that brought it into being and will illustrate several installations and exhibitions of the curated archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd.
Professor Skotnes was educated at the University of Cape Town, where she was awarded a Master of Fine Art degree and a Doctor of Literature degree. She studied fine art, archaeology and the book arts, and has published widely, including Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (1996), Sound from the Thinking Strings (1991), and Lamb of God (2003-08), the latter comprising, in part, several volumes inscribed on the bones of horses. Skotnes is an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities in December 2009
Tuesday Night Lecture Series
Translating Knowledge: Global Perspectives on
Museum and Community
“Translating Knowledge” considers strategies for engaging the peoples whose lives and histories are presented in the museum in the complicated processes of interpreting culture. This year-long lecture series organized by
the UM Museum Studies Program brings 10 scholars to the University of Michigan from South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, the Philippines, and the US.
These scholars’ work offers new paradigms
for confronting the social and political
challenges of representation in the museum. Each participant will present a lecture that examines the theory and a workshop that explores the practice of their community-
engaged scholarship.
All Tuesday night lectures are in the
UMMA Helmut Stern Auditorium and all Wednesday afternoon workshops are in
the UMMA Multipurpose Room.
Ana Labrador
Ateneo de Manila University
Lecture: November 17, 7 pm
Workshop: November 18, 4 pm
Howard Morphy
Australian National University
December 8, 7 pm: Lecture, Helmut Stern Auditorium
December 9, 4 pm: Workshop, Multipurpose Room
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