November 6, 5:30-7:30pm

A reception for the Mulvane's three new exhibitions: Albert Bloch: Scenes from the Life of Christ, Washburn Art Faculty: New Works, and Kathy Tarr: Art of Remembrance.

 

Albert Bloch: Themes and Variations -- 
a lecture by Dr. David Cateforis

During his career, Albert Bloch repeatedly depicted a small number of biblical subjects that were particularly meaningful to him. Dr. Cateforis will discuss Bloch's changing interpretations of these subjects. 

Dr. Cateforis is a professor of art history at the University of Kansas. He has written several articles on Albert Bloch and is the curator of "Albert Bloch: Themes and Variations" currently on exhibit at the Lawrence Art Center.

 

Faculty Roundtable 
Faculty members of the Washburn University Art Department will discuss their work currently on exhibition at the Mulvane. Guests are encouraged to participate in the discussion, which will be led by Dr. Kelly Watt, professor of art history.

 

Not only a painter, Albert Bloch also wrote poetry that often reflected the themes of his art. His epic poem, "Garden of Asses," tells the story of Jesus' life from his own point of view.  Selections of the poem will be read by Eric McHenry and Jeffery Weinberg.

Roger Shimomura

Yellow No Same, suite of twelve prints, 1992

Despite the fact that he was a third generation Japanese-American, Kansas University emeritus art professor, Roger Shimomura and his family were interned in one of the concentration camps for people of Japanese descent that were opened after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942. This suite of prints explores the inability of Americans to distinguish between Japanese nationals and U.S.  citizens. The title refers to the artist's high school experience of Japanese American students chanting "Yellow No Same" to indicate that they were not the same as the Chinese American students.   

In these twelve works, Japanese persons stereotyped as Kabuki actors stand on one side of a barbed wire fence. With traditional face paint, hairdos, and weapons, they are stylized in the manner of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints. Behind the barbed wire, in contrast to the actors, are Japanese Americans, who are themselves stereotypes of "average" Americans with baseball and cowboy hats, pigtails and contemporary American dress and hairdos. In their stylized, flattened forms, bright color, and lack of three-dimensional space, these works demonstrate the influence on the artist of both American Pop Art of the 1960s and Japanese woodcuts, the popular art of their day. This irony was not lost on Shimomura.