April
4 , 2003
Quidnunc
Words on Fire
Assistant
Professor of English Lois Brown served as guest curator for Black
Books: The First African American Authors, an exhibition
now on display at the Boston Public Library. The exhibition is
part of “Words on Fire,” a new festival sponsored
by Boston’s New Center for Arts and Culture that coincides
with the seventieth anniversary of book burnings in Bebeplatz
Square, Berlin. On May 10, 1933, Nazis set ablaze thousands of
books by nearly two hundred scientists, philosophers, political
theorists, and poets deemed “degenerates and racial undesirables,”
including Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein,
Helen Keller, Shalom Asch, H. G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, Sigmund
Freud, and Emile Zola. Through citywide art exhibitions, films,
lectures, and community events, “Words on Fire” explores
themes evoked by this event and celebrates the reclamation of
once-silenced voices. The Black Books exhibition presents
a number of rare first-edition copies of influential works written
and published by African Americans, the first black works published
abroad, copies of the first African American newspapers, and other
examples of groundbreaking African American print culture. “It
really is a splendid collection of amazing and invaluable works
that brings the African American literary tradition into sharp
focus,” says Brown. She hopes to arrange student visits
to the exhibition, which runs until May 11.
Art Show Marks
Louisiana Purchase Paul Staiti, Professor of Fine Arts
on the Alumnae Foundation, has cocurated Jefferson’s
America and Napoleon’s France, an exhibition commemorating
the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 that will be
on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) April 12–
August 31. The show features three hundred French and American
paintings, sculpture, and objects that profile both nations and
their cultural exchange at the turn of the nineteenth century,
including works by Gilbert Stuart, John Vanderlyn, Jacques-Louis
David, and Baron Gros. The Louvre, Versailles, Malmaison, Monticello,
the National Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are among
the institutions contributing to the show. Staiti has coathored
an accompanying exhibition catalogue that will be published by
NOMA and the University of Washington Press.
The
counter is
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