Join us in exploring a world of arts & culture at MSU

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.

This exhibit of 37 paintings from 1910-1960 presents a variety of styles by artists of the Midwest. It examines the unique style of the Great Lakes region through artists from Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and New York who were active in the American Regionalist art movement during the first half of the 20th century. Their work, often direct and energetic in approach, offers a glimpse into everyday life in the Midwest of this time, including shoreline scenes of the Great Lakes, powerful depictions of the region's industry and commerce and portraits of Midwestern people in both urban and rural settings. The paintings, on loan from the Flint Institute of Arts, are selected from their large collection of artists of the Great Lakes. Many are from the recent acquisition of inland painters collected by Michael Hall and Pat Glascock.

If you have ever wondered about the large mural in the MSU Union Lobby, this exhibition of Edgar Yaeger's WPA sketches will provide answers about the artist, his mural commission, and his working method.

Yaeger received six commissions from the Federal Arts Program (FAP) for murals in schools, libraries, hospitals, and elsewhere. The 1942 mural in the Union is only a portion of Yaeger's extensive room of murals from the Detroit's Public Lighting Commission building, saved when the building was destroyed in 1977.

Color and pencil sketches on view, selected from over 120 drawings by the artist in KAM's collection, enable us to reconstruct the rest of the subjects, including Benjamin Franklin flying a kite.

This exhibition is presented in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the New Deal art projects of Franklin Roosevelt's Administration Download KAM's walking tour of WPA art and architecture on campus http://www.artmuseum.msu.edu/wpa/WPA/default.htm) and visit KAM this fall to see additional work.

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.

Photographer Alexandra Huddleston will be exhibiting her photography from Mali in the RCAH Lookout! Gallery while serving as an artist-in-residence.

Join KAM staff for a guided tour of Artists of the Great Lakes, 1910-1960.

Best known for her large twisted and woven sculptures made from discarded urban materials such as rubber tires, Booker's work references notions of identity, mobility, industry, environment, and the human condition. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Fellowship.

Thursday-Saturday, October 9-11 Michigan State University is hosting the Meaningful Play Conference starting at 8 a.m. Thursday and ending at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the MSU Union. Students, game designers/developers and academic researchers will discuss the world of video game development and design and presentations will be given. To register, the student fee is $145 (must be at least a high school student) and the regular fee is $295.

The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art has a rich tradition of supporting local and regional artists. Highlights from the CRMA's holdings of works by Grant Wood, along with those of Marvin Cone, will be discussed along with a wide variety of other Midwestern artists from the collection, to provide a fuller and more complete picture of the Midwest's contribution to the history of American art. A part of programming for KAM's Artists of the Great Lakes, 1910-1960

A painter and faculty member at Maryland Institute College of Art, Majumdar explores the interactions and isolation of people in interspaces: people on mass transit, taking escalators, waking up or just going to sleep.

A synthesis of high tech and hand-wrought processes; Mosely uses stop-motion animation, sculpture, and narrative to explore the intersection of communication and technology. An honored recipient of the Rome Prize and Pew Fellowship, his work was screened at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Bill Barrett's graceful sculpture, Twyla, a perfect abstraction of the modern dancer Twyla Tharp's movements, dances in perpetuity on the northwest side of the new MSU parking ramp facing Grand River. This sculpture is a commission of the University Art on Campus Committee. When the ramp was built, a percent of the construction budget was set aside for art. Made of fabricated bronze, Twyla is nearly eight feet high and has sparked much positive commentary. Barrett, who has studios in Manhattan and Santa Fe, has installed approximately 40 major pieces of sculpture on commission publicly and privately all over this country including two on the campus of the University of Michigan.

In his 11 drawings, on display in KAM's Works on Paper Gallery, you can see the forms that eventually become the active elements in his sculptural compositions emerging from imaginary planes standing at angles in a stage-like space. Color, as so often happens with a sculptor, takes second place to form and everything is 3D.

Speaker: Bill Barrett Artist Bill Barrett, whose drawings are on display in KAM's Works on Paper Gallery during Bill Barrett Drawings (Oct. 20–Nov. 16) will speak about his artwork, including Twyla, his recent sculpture commission for MSU.

Noted ceramicist Jeanne Quinn is interested in notions of gender, the structure of language and communication, and the history of objects and their use. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and faculty member at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Join KAM staff for a guided tour of Artists of the Great Lakes, 1910-1960.

Dare yourself to enter the world of illusion and enchantment, and witness some of the finest magicians in the business, together for the very first time! This group, known for their grand illusions, comedy, death defying feats and beautiful Vegas showgirls, are the recipients of the International Magicians' Society's Show of the Year for the past two years. Do not miss your chance!

Haunting imagery of faces, hands, and feet emerge from densely-piled clusters in Glantzman's paintings that examine human interaction and experience. She has received numerous awards, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock-Krasner, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

With a collage-like aesthetic, painter Elizabeth Heuy threads together symbolist narratives that are historical, personal, and psychological. Since receiving her MFA from Yale in 2002, she has built an impressive international exhibition record and most recently was honored with a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

Painter Lisa Sanditz sources the contemporary urban landscape of malls, parking lots, and suburban housing developments. Her paintings capture the sublime through an investigation of the dynamic relationship between natural and artificial environments. She is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.

Co-founder of the visual culture publication DOT DOT DOT, Bailey is a designer, editor, and writer. His interest in publishing is echoed in the experimental Dexter Sinister design collaborative whose work was included in the 2007 Whitney Biennial.

Japan's virtuoso percussion ensemble makes its triumphant return to the Wharton Center as part of its ONE EARTH TOUR. This performance will electrify the audience with their bold virtuosity, enormous strength and stamina. The performers showcase a sheer mastery of their instruments ranging from small drums as big as saucers to as large as a tree trunk. Their goal is to trascend barriers of language and custom and reminds us of our membership in that larger community: the world. Do not miss this inspiring performance!

Writing extensively on contemporary African, American, and international art, Okwui Enwezor is a regular contributor to Artforum. He has served as Artist Director for Documenta and the Johannesburg Biennale. Enwezor is currently Dean at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Critic and poet, Barry Schwabsky writes regularly for The Nation and Art in America. He is co-editor of international reviews at Artforum and has authored many works of art criticism, including The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art and Vitamin P.

As curator of the Sender Collection, Todd Levin is responsible for assembling and managing one of the world's largest collections of Post-War/Contemporary Art. The Collection is over 800 pieces strong and lends artwork to major museums across the world.

Research Curator of Late Antique Egypt at the British Museum, O'Connell's areas of expertise include the social history and material culture of Roman and Byzantine Egypt. She has received numerous awards supporting her fieldwork including a Yale Egyptological Grant and Kress Fellowship.

Working with the familiar debris of the housewife's daily life, Chicago-based artist Anne Wilson investigates themes of time, loss, and ritual. She was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and is a fibers professor at the Art Institute of Chicago.

A hybrid of painting, drawing, and collage, Lecia Dole-Recio's work employs a language of handmade geometric abstraction. These experiments of material, surface, and color have been widely exhibited including recent shows at MOCA and the Whitney.