VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Menil Collection presents the Menil/Rice Lecture Series.  The 2008-2009 theme is  Museums and the Medical Humanities.

“Museums and the Medical Humanities: The Arts of Transformation” continues the biennial series organized by the Menil Collection and Rice University’s Department of Art History. Each of the four lectures (two hosted by the Menil, two by Rice) addresses a single theme, taking inspiration from the Menil’s permanent collection. The series explores a nexus of themes and topics, aesthetic and scientific: human creativity, trauma, diagnosis, healing, reflection, prevention, and transformation.

The lectures at Rice University are made possible in part by the generous support of alumna Suzanne Deal Booth.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 7:00 p.m. at Rice University’s Herring Hall:  Barbara Maria Stafford: “The Slow Conscious Look" Toward a Pedagogy of Attentiveness"

The William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago, Barbara Maria Stafford  (pictured) studies the ways in which information technologies and cognitive neurosciences intersect with aesthetics, creativity, innovation, and museum curatorial practices. These themes often have directly impacted conceptions of medicine and the body, ideas she has explored in the books Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Devices of Wonder: From Images in a Box to the World on a Screen, and Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images.