Join us at Noon on Wednesdays to get a focused look at a single piece of art. A Little Art Talks will last about 15-30 minutes, leaving ample time to drop by the café for lunch. Attendees will get free iced tea or coffee when they dine in the café. Presenters include museum staff, docents and Auburn students taking “Modernist Cities” and “Race and Art: The Visual Culture of Power in Europe and America, 1750-1965.”

Feb. 18, 12 pm: Auburn University’s Mosaic Theatre Company

On September 2, 1963, 13 African American students attempted to integrate all-white Tuskegee High School as a result of the civil rights court case Lee v. Macon County Board of Education. Governor George Wallace responded with an executive order closing the schools for one week and ordered state troopers to surround the school to prevent integration, prompting federal intervention to enforce the court order.

Told from the perspective of participants and witnesses, this Reader’s Theatre style performance features first person recollections, photographs, and music about the integration of Tuskegee High School in 1963. This compelling story is brought to life through the rich memories and honest reflections of the people who lived it.

Mosaic Theatre Company is composed of Auburn University students and is directed by Dr. Tessa Carr in the Department of Theatre of Auburn’s College of Liberal Arts.

Coming Spring semester 2015:

Drawing on objects from JCSM’s permanent collection and John Himmelfarb: TRUCKS (January 24–May 10, 2015), advanced art history students from Auburn University will present short noontime gallery talks designed to familiarize our patrons with the art JCSM owns and exhibits, the artists who made it, and the historical contexts in which it was made. This semester, students of Dr. Emily Burns and Dr. Kathryn Floyd studying modern and contemporary art and the arts of Asia will present the talks.

Please join us to welcome the 2015 Breeden Scholar in Residence and 2014 MacArthur Fellow, Rick Lowe. Lowe is an artist who resides in Houston, Texas. His formal training is in the visual arts. Over the past 20 years, he has worked both inside and outside of art world institutions by participating in exhibitions and developing community-based art projects. The program will be followed by a reception and cash bar. This appearance is sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University and Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.

Alan Salz has been the director of Didier Aaron, Inc., in New York since 1982. With branches in Paris, London, and New York, Didier Aaron specializes in important Old Master and nineteenth-century paintings and drawings; it also promotes contemporary artists whose styles intersect with the gallery’s high-quality inventory recognized around the world.

Having graduated from Colgate University in 1975, Alan pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, where he concentrated on French and Italian Baroque painting. Despite his professors’ hopes for his eventual placement in academia or the museum world, Alan always knew that he wanted to be an art dealer. He held several positions in the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while an undergraduate and graduate student, including an Andrew Mellon Fellowship, but it was his summer jobs at the Wildenstein Gallery when he was in high school and college that truly confirmed his future.

The art world has changed dramatically during the decades that Alan has been associated with the firm. Didier Aaron has sold works by artists such as Titian, David, and Fragonard to institutions such as the Getty, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but that caliber of art is nearly impossible to find today. Indeed, exhibition catalogues written in the early 1980s make clear that the supply of major Old Masters is steadily drying up. On those rare occasions when such works do become available, their extraordinary prices make them virtually impossible for a gallery to acquire for resale. Concurrent with this change in available stock has been a shift in the taste of collectors: most of them pursue contemporary art, an interest fueled in part by an abundant supply, rather than seek out older paintings, furniture or objets d’art. The gallery eagerly awaits its next Koulbak exhibition, to open in October 2015.

In an era when explosive police-community relations and widening income inequality regularly make the headlines, it is worth revisiting the turbulent years of the mid-1960s when the administration of President Lyndon Johnson sought to grapple with racial inequality and persistent poverty against the backdrop of urban riots, growing political polarization, and an increasingly unpopular war abroad.

David Carter, associate professor of history, has taught at Auburn since 2000. With research interests in the history of the civil rights movement, the history of the American South since the Civil War, and U.S. history since 1945, he is particularly drawn to the role of race and ideology in shaping American history. Carter is the author of The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Administration, 1965- 1968 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), a study of the shifting relationships between the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and grassroots advocates of racial and economic equality following passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965..

Recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, McGrain has worked as an artist for more than 25 years, and devoted himself to this project for more than a decade. McGrain has permanent sculpture installations at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York; St. Paul Sculpture Park, St. Paul, Minnesota; Kissimmee Prairie Preserve, Okeechobee, Florida; Brand Park, Elmira, New York; Grange Audubon Center, Columbus, Ohio; Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Museum Civico Zoologia, Rome, Italy.