Mensans from Topeka, Lawrence, and the Kansas City area met at the Spencer Museum of Art on the KU Lawrence campus on October 27th to visit the exhibit knowledges, rethinking the roles university research and art play in our collective consciousness.
Four installation artists created art consisting of holograms of faculty committee members arguing issues while projected above elementary school desks, stacks of textbooks sculpted as geological formations, the elements of a human being distilled in containers and categorized and an electronic LED tapestry representing spoken words of immigrants recorded and digitized for volume. The artists were Assaf Evron, Danielle Roney, Fatimah Tuggar and Andrew S. Yang.
We then visited Stephen Johnson’s exhibit of 81 small mono-prints called Ninth Street Rhythms at the Lawrence Art Center. Stephen’s exhibit showed everyday objects from ground level near Ninth Street and a nine-block square. Vines, power meters, trash, painted fences, trees, sidewalk designs and church architecture were portrayed in color and each framed in black. Red dots by the frame meant the print was already sold. Mary Johnson joined us there and then we toured Stephen’s art studio where we saw some of his art previously displayed at the Spencer.
We retired across the street to the Lawrence Beer Company for a dinner and lots of beer varieties to savor. Professor Ted Johnson and Mary Johnson dined with Brad Lucht, Karin Miller, John Scheirman and David and Coleen Routh. David and Coleen first met in Professor Johnson’s French Stylistics course in 1977. ~ David Routh
Editor’s note: This article has been reprinted from the Mension December 2019 (pg. 23).
