2011 Community Dialogues

The 2011 program was made possible by a grant from the Porter Fleming Foundation and focused on the topic High and Low: What Is Excellence in the Arts?

The ASU Humanities Program worked with The Morris Museum of Art to host the following two events, both free and open to the public:

Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, noon, University Hall room 170, Augusta State
Keynote speaker Franklin Einspruch, art writer, speaker, and cultural critic from Boston, will present High and Low: What Is Excellence in the Arts? followed by discussion with the audience. Mr. Einspruch will introduce the topic, provide historical background, and offer some insights into the issue's contemporary relevance.
For a transcript of Mr. Einspruch's speech, Click Here.

Friday, Oct. 28, 2011, noon, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta
Three panelists will further develop the topic of High and Low: What Is Excellence in the Arts? and take questions from the audience. Panelists include artist and Grammy-award-winning musician Art Rosenbaum (whose art exhibit will be on display at the museum concurrently), art historian and philosophy of aesthetics expert Dr. Michael Schwartz of Augusta State University, and Dr. Jed Rasula, poet and Lanier Professor of English at the University of Georgia at Athens.

Speakers' Brief Biographies

Franklin Einspruch (BFA, Rhode Island School of Design; MFA, University of Miami) is an artist and art writer based in Boston. His work has appeared in fifteen solo exhibitions and over two dozen group shows. He has been an artist in residence at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Greece, Stock 20 in Taiwan, and the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation in Maine. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and has authored over a hundred published essays and art reviews, which have appeared in Art in America, the New Criterion, Artcritical, and many other publications.

Jed Rasula (BA, Indiana University; PhD from the History of Consciousness Program at University of California, Santa Cruz) taught at Pomonoa College (California) and Queen's University (Canada) before coming to UGA in 2001. Some of his publications include This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (2002) and Syncopations: Contemporary American Poetry and the Stress of Innovation (2004). His poetry books include Tabula Rasula (1986) and Hot Wax (2007). Among his current projects is an anthology: Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity.

Art Rosenbaum (MFA, Columbia University): Painter, muralist and illustrator, he is the Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts Emeritus at the University of Georgia at Athens. His work is widely exhibited and is held in many public collections, including the Georgia Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. He was a Fulbright Scholar in France and in Germany. He is also a collector and performer of roots music, having done fieldwork resulting in more than fourteen documentary recordings. In 2009, he won a Grammy Award for his Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1.

Dr. Michael Schwartz, (PhD Columbia University), teachers art history, aesthetics, and world humanities at ASU. He is co-founder and co-lead officer of an international philosophy organization, the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, which has a peer review journal and book series on Northwestern University Press. He is also Art and Aesthetics Editor for Integral Life, for which he curates an online art gallery monthly; and founding executive director of the Integral Art Center at Integral Institute Michael, who has published and lectured widely in art history, philosophy, and contemplative studies, has co-edited and co-authored five books on topics ranging from art to philosophy to Hindu-Buddhist tantrism.