Year of Arts & Culture | 2007-08

The MSU Museum celebrates a landmark 150 years as Michigan's natural history and culture museum, and the state's first Smithsonian Institution affiliate

"Quilts and Human Rights" is an exhibition exploring the role that quiltmakers have played in raising awareness of human rights issues around the world and the power of textiles to communicate important ideas and information. The exhibition will feature inspiring and often provocative quilts made to document and express transgressions of human rights, to educate others about human rights issues and to pay tribute to leaders of human rights movements. A special component of the exhibition is being developed in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha, South Africa and will focus on human rights champions Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela. The exhibition and related programs are partially supported by funds from the MSU Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the Michigan Quilt Project Endowment.

Among the many projects to come out of the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal government programs to combat massive unemployment are those that dealt with the arts, architecture and crafts of American workers. Michigan State University Museum presents an exhibition of pieces from public work projects in Michigan and on the Michigan State College campus during the 1930s and early '40s. More than 8,500,000 Americans were hired through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) mostly to build roads, public buildings and parks. Unemployed artists and writers were also given work through branches of the WPA known as the Federal Art Project and the Federal Writers' Project. Their lasting legacy can still be seen and enjoyed throughout the state and the nation. Michigan State University and MSU Museum collections are rich with examples of a WPA legacy of art and craft.

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.

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.

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.