Mixed Media

"Spectacle Spectacular" at the Handwerker Gallery

Dawn Hunter

— whose “Spectacle Spectacular: Cautionary Tales and Other Stories” is on display at Ithaca College’s Handwerker Gallery — will give an artist’s talk in the gallery on Wednesday, Sept. 30. Free and open to the public, the event will begin at 4:30 p.m.

 

Featuring Hunter’s drawings and paintings, “Spectacle Spectacular” explores the relationship between popular culture and gendered identity.

“I’ve conducted extensive research on fashion photography in the latter part of the 20th century,” Hunter said. “I’ve been particularly struck by the persistence of one particular seductive promise: that by recognizing their bodies as malleable objects that are always capable of improvement, women can attain greater status and power, and lead richer, more exciting lives. . . . My goal is to make the myth-building work of popular culture and its various paradoxes and contradictions more visible.”

“Spectacle Spectacular” will remain on display until October 11. For more information, contact Cheryl Kramer, gallery director and assistant professor of art history, at (607) 274-3548 or ckramer@ithaca.edu.

Pulitzer-prize winning poet will give free reading at Ithaca College

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz will give a free public reading at Ithaca College on Tuesday, Sept. 15. His presentation, which is sponsored by the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series in the Department of Writing, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall.

Schultz is the founder and director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He has been called by Norman Mailer “a hell of a poet, one of the very best of his generation.” Despite its name, Schultz’s collection of poems titled “Failure” was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize “for distinguished volume of original verse.”

Other honors for Schultz’s poetry collections include the Lamont Poetry Selection award from the Academy of American Poets for “Deep Within the Ravine” and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “Like Wings.”

Schultz has been awarded Fulbright, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Levinson Prize from “Poetry” magazine. His poems have been published in the “The New Yorker,” “Partisan Review,” “Paris Review” and “New Republic,” among other magazines.

Also giving readings in the Distinguished Visiting Writers series this fall will be National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter on Tuesday, Oct. 6, and essayist Jo Ann Beard on Wednesday, Oct. 28.