Time/Frame
August 23 - December 14, 2008 | North & South Balcony Galleries
Schedules, appointments, deadlines, PDAs, day planners, calendars, wristwatches...
Such timekeeping devices give structure to our lives, and we rely on them to chart the minutes of our days and the moments of our existence. As astronomer and anthropologist Anthony Aveni notes, “Time gets spent, wasted, killed, kept, and lost. We have leisure time, quality time, good times, bad times, hard times, and even hot times.” Our interest in keeping time is by no means a recent phenomenon, when one recalls that prehistoric man, by simple observation of the stars, changes in seasons, and conditions of day and night began to come up with early methods of measuring time to pursue such activities as farming, hunting, and the celebration of sacred feasts. Our concern with time has continued unabated to the present day.
In Fall 2008, the Spencer Museum of Art will consider the ways in which artists have pondered and pictured time. Assembling works from North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and across various media, the exhibition Time/Frame considers how time is manifested visually in art and material culture from around the world.
Time/Frame is organized collectively by the 2007-08 Spencer Museum of Art graduate student interns: Robert Fucci, Shuyun Ho, Lauren Kernes, Lara Kuykendall, Ellen Raimond, and Stephanie Teasley.
Public Programs
- 8.21
- Hawk Week Film: Back to the Future
- 7 PM / SMA Auditorium
- Sponsored by SMA Student Advisory Board / Shown in conjunction with Time/Frame / A fast-moving and heart-warming comedy, Back to the Future is Robert Zemeckis’ well-loved 1980s classic. It is the story of a teenager from 1985 who commandeers the time-traveling DeLorean invented by a wacky scientist friend and is accidentally sent back in time to the 1950s. (1985, 118 minutes)
- 9.13
- It Starts With Art! Childrens art appreciation classes for ages 5-14: Turning Time
- 10:30 AM & 1:30 PM / Central Court & Galleries
- Using the Time/Frame exhibition as a starting point, students explore ways to depict time before designing and drawing their own time machine / $ / To enroll, contact Jessica Johnson, SMA Education Department, 785.864.0137 or smakids@ku.edu or visit our website to enroll online.
- 9.18
- Film: 49 Up
- 5:30 PM / SMA Auditorium
- Shown in conjunction with Time/Frame / How do people change over time? Can the adult already be found in the child of seven? What account would you give that child of the life you have lived since? These are the questions that have been explored, with mounting tension and surprise over four decades, in one of cinema’s most remarkable enterprises, the Up series. In 1964, England’s Granada Television "World in Action" team interviewed a diverse group of seven-year-olds from across England, asking them to describe their lives and hopes. Over the years, Granada has tenaciously pursued the Up series, revisiting the children every seven years as they have grown up, navigating the divides between childhood dreams and adult reality. As 49 Up revisits questions of love, marriage, career, class and prejudice — deftly inter-cutting footage from earlier films with contemporary interviews — it discovers surprising ruminations about the Up film series itself as well as unexpected turns in individual lives as they enfold over time.
Press
