No space for student displays
Crowded walls
Paintings, squeezed frame-to-frame on the wall of this storage room in Spooner Hall, illustrate the lack of space needed at the Art Museum.
Photo by Halina Pawl
(Editor's note: This is the third in a series of articles on dissatisfaction among art students and faculty concerning facilities and other conditions.)
By SARAH DALE
Kansan Staff Writer
A natural division has always existed between the arts and sciences at any university.
At KU, students and faculty worry about the unnatural division inside the arts.
Students and faculty members of the visual arts department point to the division between the KU Art Museum in Spooner Hall and their department. While they have the opportunity to view contemporary and historical exhibits, they complain that they can't exhibit their own projects.
"Faculty and students have not had exhibits in the Art Museum simply because we do not have the space," explains Bret Waller, museum director.
Waller said he wrote an article for the Kansas Alumni magazine in 1965 outlining the problems at Spooner.
"Like an outgrown shoe, an inadequate building cramps, injures, and may ultimately cripple. Today the shoe pinches in several spots," Waller said.
Today, Waller said, the conditions are crippling.
When Spooner was built in 1894, it was intended to be a library. The museum is now in its 41st year in Spooner.
No room for local exhibits
"This is a beautiful building," Waller said, "but it is just too small."
The Art Museum can't provide the space for student and faculty exhibits, Waller said.
The visual arts department, on the third floor of Strong Hall, suffers from lack of exhibition space also. This is the consensus of the administrators, he said.
Waller remarked that faculty
and student shows must either be displayed in the Kansas Union with limited security or in the small exhibition room in Murphy Hall with no security.
In the past three years, visiting faculty members, with the exception of John Talleur, professor of drawing and painting, have had the opportunity to exhibit their work in the Art Museum.
This spring, Edward Avedisian and Julius Hatofsky, visiting lecturers in drawing and painting, will display their work. "We have not had formal requests from the art department for student exhibition space," Waller siad. "We have six good exhibitions in the course of an academic year which we feel are important for the students to see. To have these exhibitions is a major effort."
Lack of exhibition space for the art department is only one of the problems the art museum faces.
The museum has only one gallery with temperature and humidity control, causing some of the paintings on the second floor to become cracked and damaged, Waller said.
Poorlv-lit hall
The visiting exhibitions, which are displayed in one main hall are poorly lit, he said. Presently there are thirty paintings from the University of California at Berkeley displayed in this hall, which is 15 feet wide and 45 feet long.
This exhibition hall is just off the art history lecture room, Waller complained and this gives employes ten minutes between continuous lectures to install exhibitions.
'Two Virgins' missing from Lawrence shops
A leading record shop in Wichita has a record that they keep in their storeroom. You can't even find it in Lawrence-not even in a back room.
The record is "Two Virgins," by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. What's on the record doesn't keep it off the shelves—it's what's on the cover.
Would you believe John and Yoko standing hand-in-hand in their birthday suits?
other pin-ups—if you can find the cover.
didn't like the sound and took out an ad in the University Daily Kansan offering to sell it to the highest bidder.
Just think guys, you can hang the cover on the wall with your
Kief's record shop in Lawrence won't carry it because lawsuits could result from its sale. The Sound record shop can't even get it from their distributors. They don't want it, they said, but they can't get it.
The dealer he got it from said there was nothing wrong with selling the record but he wouldn't put it on his shelves because it might hurt his business.
There was an article in the Wichita Free Press about the record which led a Lawrence resident to buy a copy from a Wichita dealer. He listened to it,
You know, who would send their kids to a record shop to buy "Mary Poppins," when they might see John and Yoko right next to it?
Swami extolls wisdom
A passion for truth and human happiness and welfare are the main concerns of those who follow the ancient Indian monistic philosophy, Vedanta, a monistic member of the Ramakrishna Order in India, said last night.
Swami Ranganathananda, speaking in the Kansas Union Forum Room said a truly modern man possesses the spirit of inquiry, a love of truth, a particle of efficiency and the scientific spirit.
Mar. 7
1969 KANSAN 13
In his speech, titled "The Appeal of Vedanta to Modern Man," he explained the Vedanta philosophy as wisdom—the confirmation of knowledge.
Ranganathananda emphasized a single-minded love of truth and the search for truth as the mind's highest level, enabling man to consider the reason for his being.
He added that knowledge without wisdom is a source of unhappiness, and unless man has "assimilated and digested knowledge, it is of no use."
He added that an in-depth
study of man is needed and the "inner man" must be found. He described man as living in two different worlds, one physical and one within himself.
The art objects in the oriental gallery, a continuation of the main hall, must be stored when a borrowed display is assembled, he said.
Ranganathananda said "the human mind is flimsy to begin with, but it can be trained through discipline." This will help man to see truth in both the external world and the inner man, he said.
He concluded that that which is real in man is his divine nature. "Quest and conquest; experiment and realization—these have made religion vital to man," he said.
When the objects are stored, they are put in the one small storage room in the museum with many other objects which have never been displayed, Waller continued. Paintingts in this room are hung to the ceiling on wire backing; they are also behind hot water pipes or any available square inch, he said.
"To have a decent exhibition we need facilities." Waller said.
"We also need an elevator. Not only does this hinder us when we have a 500-pound piece of sculpture, but we have actually had to carry old people in wheel chairs up the stairs."
The only place trucks can unload displays is at the back doors on the west side of the building, the smallest doors in the Art Museum, he said.
The crowded conditions at the museum would seem to offer little help for the art department. But a solution may be in sight.
"I would like a changing exhibition gallery, for faculty, students and professionals," Wallaer said.
Waller continued, "When the Berkeley collection came, it was unloaded at the Lawrence Mayflower warehouse.
"This was simply terrible, when we brought the crates back to the museum we had to carry the large paintings outside of the crates to bring them inside."
This gallery, as well as other needed facilities, may become possible, Waller said, because one of the aims of Chancellor Wescoe's Council for Progress is a new art museum.
"We're the only state supported art museum in Kansas," Waller explained, "and we have hundreds of visitors. Obviously, this museum is not for students in the visual arts alone—it's for everyone. The core of our program is based on what we feel the University needs."
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