Join us for our first reception and talk of the academic year, titled “Repatriation of a Centaur” by artist Prof. Beauvais Lyons. His exhibition, Association for Creative Zoology, is on display in Rueff Galleries West (Pao Hall) through Oct. 10. The talk and reception will be on Monday, Sept. 8, at 5:30PM in Rueff Galleries.
Prof. Lyons is the Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and has taught printmaking there since 1985. He received his MFA degree from Arizona State University in 1983 and his BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. Lyons’ one-person exhibitions have been presented at over 80 museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. His prints are in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; The New York Public Library; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. PA, and many more.
Lyons’ talk, “Repatriating a Centaur”, will focus on a fictive centaur burial created in the 1980’s by Bill Willers, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. The project toured to several university galleries in the late 1980s, and was later acquired by the University of Tennessee, for which an elaborate showcase was designed and installed in the university’s library beginning in 1994 as an educational and cultural resource. The text panel for the exhibition asks viewers “Do you believe in centaurs?” and it was regularly used as part of campus tours, and course assignments, from Classics to Anatomy to encourage critical thinking. It was also cited in both poplar and academic literature, including Roger Manley’s, Weird Tennessee: Your Travel Guide to Tennessee's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets (Sterling Publishing, 2010) and Adrienne Mayor’s, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton University Press, 2001). Lyons will discuss the history of the exhibition, the task force report that recommended its removal, and his own failed efforts to create a Centaur 2.0 that would repurpose the exhibition as an educational and cultural resource that would comply with NAGPRA requirements while also teaching about the changing ethical standards.
Also check out other Arts events in West Lafayette, Exhibitions in West Lafayette, Workshops in West Lafayette.
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