KU professors wrote a lot of books about arts and culture last year.
They wrote about painters Georgia O'Keeffe and Albert Bloch, about composer Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Wicked), film legends Douglas Fairbanks and Peter Weir. They wrote books of short stories and poetry. They wrote about heavier topics such as aging among minorities, transgender rights, African literature and environmental justice. One wrote a historical dictionary of Russian and Soviet foreign policy.
In all, faculty in the arts, humanities and social sciences wrote 32 books in 2014. On Tuesday afternoon, the Hall Center for the Humanities recognized them at its Annual Celebration of Books.
“We are a research university,” Hall Center Director Victor Bailey emphasized.
Bailey said he wished all of the faculty members whose books were for sale at the back of the room could speak, but instead he introduced three who would give short presentations, as if proxies for their research peers.
David Cateforis, a professor of modern and contemporary American art, said the book he edited, Rethinking Andrew Wyeth (University of California Press), was the first book about Wyeth to be published by an academic press. Wyeth was “one of the most celebrated and successful American artists who ever lived,” Cateforis notes. But in the 1960s, with the rise of pop art, minimalism and other art movements that rejected traditional realism, “critics turned against Wyeth and launched sharp attacks against both his art and the supposedly benighted taste of the public that flocked to his exhibitions and purchased reproductions of his art.”
Believing Wyeth deserved the same kind of “sustained attention” given to other important American artists, Cateforis recruited experts to write essays that would “open up new ways of thinking” about the painter’s art and career. The result is a provocative and gorgeous volume filled with iconic images (they came at a price, Cateforis commiserated with his colleagues: $4,638 spent on the rights to reprint images, paid by the UC Press, but eliminating his opportunity to earn royalties).
Cateforis contributed the opening essay, a survey of how critics responded to Wyeth exhibitions from his first solo show in 1937 to his final major exhibition in Atlanta and Philadelphia in 2005-2006. Besides recapping just how much debate there really was about Wyeth, Cateforis —perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps extra-noticeable to a journalist — captures the heyday of art criticism in the popular press, when seemingly every American town’s daily paper(s) had a critic weighing in.
Sherrie Tucker, a professor of American Studies, gave an overview of her Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke University Press). Open from 1942-1945, the legendary Hollywood Canteen was portrayed in movies and elsewhere in pop culture as the pinnacle of patriotism, where movie stars would dance with soldiers to boost morale.
The reality, of course, was much more complicated, as Tucker, a jazz scholar (among other things), discovered after she tracked down soldiers and volunteers who mixed it up on the dance floor there.
Jill Kuhnheim, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, said she hoped her book, Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America (University of Arizona Press) would open an area of scholarship for further study. Kuhnheim was braced for critics to point out all of the things she hadn’t covered in an area impossible to keep up with: performance poetry in the Spanish-speaking Americas from the early 20th century (when even people who couldn’t read knew poems that had been passed down through oral traditions) through today, when Spanish slam poetry is all over YouTube.
“This is enormous territory,” Kuhnheim said. Among her points is that poets can become “alternative cultural authorities” – something that’s certainly clear outside of academia, as anyone in the audience at the nearest poetry slam could attest.
Predictably, coming out of a research university, some of these books are thick (sometimes impenetrable) with the language of academia — book-club books for only the most intense grad school happy hours. But no one can blame researchers for wanting to spend time watching videos like this one, which Kuhnheim played for her colleagues:
“That would be totally different,” Kuhnheim noted, “if you read it.”
