Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar gives the Duncan Phillips Lecture

Artist Alfredo Jaar presenting the Duncan Phillips Lecture on October 3, 2010.

As a fine art student at Virginia Commonwealth University, I was lucky enough to hear visiting artist Alfredo Jaar speak in 1991 about his installation piece Geography=War (1990). This work was comprised of enlarged color photo transparencies mounted on light-boxes that hung face-down from the ceiling, reflected in the surfaces of large oil drums filled with water. The installation spaces were dark and viewers had to keep moving around the work in order to read the images in full. The reward for such physical engagement was Jaar’s powerful photographs of ravaged landscapes and people enslaved to environmentally destructive labor. He was a passionate and captivating speaker and demonstrated that the world can be changed by the messages we create with our art.

Jaar gave another inspiring talk as part of the Duncan Phillips Lectures in October 2010. If you missed it in person, be sure to listen to it here.

Bobby goes to SunTrust

Robert McDuffie performs in the Music Room (Photo by James Brantley)

We were lucky enough to have the American virtuoso violinist Robert McDuffie open the 2010-11 Sunday Concerts season.  Accompanying McDuffie were students and colleagues from the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University.

During the Coda Session with Music Director Caroline Mousset, McDuffie showed his Southern gentlemanly wit.  Click below to listen to his account of his initial meeting with James Williams, former chairman of SunTrust Bank, to get investors to help him purchase his extraordinary violin, a Joseph Guarnerius del Gesu from 1735.

The final piece on the concert program gave a glimpse of Violin Concerto No. 2 “The American Four Seasons” with a clever transition into Violin Concerto No. 1, both composed for Robert McDuffie by Baltimore’s Philip Glass. Click here to listen to McDuffie performing the Glass compositions.