November 29, 2011, Filed Under: Exhibitions + EventsIn the Galleries: Ogden Nash’s padlocked collection of poetry “All of these books are worse than opium… I would rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books,” declared Senator Reed Smoot of Utah in March 1930, speaking from behind a desk towering with “smutty” books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Robert Burns’s poetry. In 1929,… read more
November 22, 2011, Filed Under: Exhibitions + EventsIn the Galleries: Censorship of "The Sex Side of Life" In 1919 Mary Ware Dennett (1872–1947) published The Sex Side of Life, a sex-education pamphlet for young people that she originally wrote for her sons. The U.S. Post Office declared the pamphlet obscene in April 1922, and Dennett struggled on her own to get the ruling reversed, all the while… read more
November 18, 2011, Filed Under: Exhibitions + Events, PhotographyOld Inspires the New Austin-based Lakes Were Rivers, a group of 11 artists working in photography and video, recently collaborated with the Ransom Center to pair works of its artists with images from the Center’s photography collection, resulting in (Re)Collection, an exhibition in conjunction with the East Austin Studio Tour. Each artist selected an… read more