UH: The Art of Folk Spirit
What: The Art of Folk Spirit
When: 4:30 – 7:00 p.m., Thursday April 19, 2012
Where: Honors Lounge, M.D. Anderson Library, University of Houston
Three presentations by prominent folklorists, complemented by a photo exhibit, offered to celebrate the inauguration of the Global Studies minor of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies.
All three talks will center on community religious expressions and how they communicate values, belief, and esthetics. Each of the talks will be based on the speaker’s intensive ethnographic research. Each will highlight “the local knowledge” of distant folk communities that possess close analogues in the Houston area.
The photographic exhibit, “Seeing the Unseen,” created by the Folklife and Traditional Arts program of the Houston Arts Alliance, will feature the visual and ritual arts of the Houston area’s varied religious communities.
The three speakers:
Henry Glassie, speaking on Mehmet Gursoy and the stars of Kutahya.
Glassie is University Professor Emeritus of Folklore at Indiana University, a past president of the American Folklore Society, the 2011 American Council of Learned Societies Haskins Scholar, and author of sixteen books, including three cited by the New York Times as Notable Books of the Year: Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), The Spirit of Folk Art (1990), and Turkish Traditional Art Today (1994). He has worked extensively with Mehmet Gursoy, a Turkish ceramic artist whose religious art adorns a Houston mosque.
Diane Goldstein, speaking on folkloric response to tragedy in Newfoundland.
Goldstein is Professor of Folklore at Indiana University, current president of the American Folklore Society, past president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, and an internationally known specialist in folk belief and the legendry of AIDS. Her talk will concern folkloric responses to the accidental drownings of two young boys in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, and especially ways in which community members used local traditions to create spontaneous rituals and shrines to express their grief for the boys as well as the resistance to the ways in which government officials responded to the deaths.
Pravina Shukla, speaking on the Indian concept of darshan and the central role of image in Hindu spirituality.
Shukla, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University, is also Associate Curator of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and a member of the adjunct faculties of Indiana University’s Department of Anthropology, India Studies program, and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her first book, The Grace of Four Moons (2008), explores adornment and body art in the everyday lives of Indians.
Pat Jasper, Curator; Debra Ham et al., Photographers; and the Houston Arts Alliance, “Seeing the Unseen.” An exhibit of the arts of Houston-area congregations created as part of HAA’s Sacred Songs, Sacred Sites initiative. The exhibit was featured in the HAA gallery for several months in 2011.
This program will serve as a way of foregrounding the new Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston, creating a link between the university and the Folklife and Traditional Arts program of HAA, strengthening links between the university and the various international communities and organizations focal to the interest of the Comparative Cultural Studies Department, and generally emphasizing the richness of Houston’s diverse traditional communities.
Schedule and Details
Diane Goldstein, Chair, Dept of Folklore & Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
Shrines, Tragedy and the Spirit of Resistance:
A Newfoundland Case [4:45 p.m.]
Pravina Shukla, Associate Professor of Folklore, Indiana University
The Art of Indian Bodily Adornment [5:25 p.m.]
Henry Glassie, College Professor of Folklore emeritus, Indiana University
Turkish Spirit: The Art of the Potter in Kütahya [6:10 p.m.]
Photos
Mehmet Gürsoy of Kütahya, Turkey, with one of his creations — photo: Henry Glassie.
photo: Pravina Shukla.
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