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

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

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.

Devised by the Sacred Heart Archive, a multi-disciplinary arts project, The Key Said Run and the Door Said Fly reinvents the folk tale of Mr. Fox using physical performance, traditional songs, and found objects. Incorporating a daring use of autobiography, The Key Said Run and the Door Said Fly investigates issues of sexual violence, and the body's capacity to remember. The ultimate result is a compelling picture of the relationship between freedom and fear.

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.

Curated by educator and fabric artist Chris Worland, this exhibit of West African traditional and contemporary fabrics at the MSU Museum will include the work of three guest Artists-in-Residence (Kandioura Coulibaly and Boubacar Doumbia of Groupe Kasobane in Mali and American Janet Goldner) who will also participate February 2-16, 2009 in Worland's spring 2009 RCAH 291 Fabric Art Workshop and in several community outreach and engagement projects. Other linkages planned include gallery tours at the MSU Museum and RCAH workshop space for local community and school groups.

The Chicago-based performance artist and women's studies theorist, Melissa Thompson, is teaching and performing with groups of students throughout the year.