Year of Arts & Culture | 2007-08

This exhibition, organized by the University of Michigan Museum of Art and drawn from their collection, covers over 1000 years of Chinese porcelains to illustrate the important role of foreign trade and changing domestic markets in stimulating Chinese potters — and their counterparts in Japan and Korea — to continually reinvent their repertoire of shapes and decorative techniques. The exhibition traces the exchange along the Silk Road between the Chinese Han dynasty and ancient Persia and the Mediterranean world; porcelains made for domestic use, foreign exchange and imperial families.

Ever wish you could go back to college, just for one day? Here's your chance! In conjunction with the East Lansing Art Festival (May 17-18), the MSU College of Arts and Letters will offer a day-long series of stimulating lectures, behind-the-scenes tours, art walks, and demonstrations on Friday, May 16. As part of this event, Kresge Art Museum will offer a gallery tour of the Silk Road to Clipper Ship: Trade, Changing Markets, and East Asian Ceramics exhibition, a behind-the-scenes tour, and a walking tour of WPA art on campus. For more information, call (517) 355-5633. A complete schedule, further details, and registration information for these free events will be available here - http://www.cal.msu.edu/OneDayU.php

Join the museum at the East Lansing Art Festival. Look for our booth where you can make and decorate masks and crowns. FREE, all ages welcome. NO registration required.

A lecture by Virginia Bower, Adjunct Associate Professor, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Ms. Bower (MSU, '72) is a well-known scholar of Chinese art and has been guest curator for numrous exhibits on Asian art around the country. She will give an overview of the objects in this exhibit.

Join the Friends of KAM for a day in Grand Rapids. First stop: coffee and sweets at the home of Mary Ann Keeler to see her modern art collection. Next on the agenda is a visit the new Grand Rapids Art Museum to experience the building and the collection, as well as a docent-guided tour of Rapid Exposure: Warhol in Series. Lunch follows at Leo's Restaurant in downtown Grand Rapids. The day concludes at the Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park with a docent-led tour of the exhibition Degas in Bronze: The Complete Sculptures and time to explore the gardens. Cost: $85.00 per person for Friends of Kresge; $95.00 per person for general public. Click here to download a registration form (http://www.artmuseum.msu.edu/PDF/grandrapids08.pdf) or call KAM today for details (517) 353-9834. After April 21, call for space availability.

Dr. Catherine Ryu, Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Culture, Department of Linguistics and Languages, MSU leads a lecture considering the exhibition theme in relation to the circulation of ideas, objects, and people in the increasingly globalized contemporary world order. Ryu's work reassesses the Silk Road as a conceptual metaphor used to analyze the interweaving of technology and knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge and power.

This is an award-winning 1991 Chinese-Hong Kong-Taiwan film, directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li. An adaptation of the 1990 novel Wives and Concubines by Su Tong, it is noted for its opulent visuals and sumptuous use of colors, the fi lm tells the story of a young woman who becomes a concubine of a wealthy man during the Warlord Era.