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.

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.

Hands on Japanese calligraphy with Kitty Douglass, Program Assistant, Asian Studies Center, MSU. After a brief overview of the history of calligraphy, join us for a lesson in the way of writing. All materials provided, FREE, ages 6 years and up, MUST pre-register, call for availability. Funded by the Dart Foundation.

In this feisty election season, the Michigan State University Museum presents a new exhibition with a political theme: No Holds Barred: Political Cartoons of the Gilded Age. Among the most important developments in the popularization of the Gilded Age press (the late 19th Century) was the increasingly sophisticated use of visual ridicule -- political cartoons that informed, aroused, and pronounced on myriad contemporary issues, explains Samuel J. Thomas, MSU professor of history and the exhibition's curator. Favorite targets included graft and fraud that then, as now, too often characterized political life, most often at the local and state levels, but also at times at the national level.

A new, eye-opening image of Africa will be on display at the Michigan State University Museum, featuring the photos of a group of sixth grade Malian students from two small villages 500 miles southwest of Timbuktu. "Visual Griots," a project of the Academy for Educational Development, Washington, D.C., sent a team of Malian and U.S. photographers into the villages of Damy and Kouara to put cameras in the hand of youth, empower them to document their lives, and help them better connect with their communities and the world.

"Our Journeys/Our Stories" presents 25 portraits and narratives of well known Latino individuals - a Noble Prize-winning chemist, an astronaut, an athlete, an artist, a labor leader, to name a few -- and their personal stories, photos, oral history interviews and dichos (traditional sayings) to illustrate and celebrate this contemporary anthology of Latino accomplishments.