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Ransom Center showcased in new book on campus-wide university collections

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UT Press has just released a book of campus-wide holdings celebrating the University of Texas at Austin’s vast collections. The Collections: The University of Texas at Austin is the initiative of Andrée Bober, founder and director of the University’s public art program, Landmarks. The book shares more than 80 discrete collections, reflecting the range of holdings at the University. The book offers a stunning look at the history, art, and artifacts that inspire imagination, creativity, and scholarship among the University community.

 

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Frank Reaugh: In retrospect

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From August 4 through November 29, the Harry Ransom Center hosts the exhibition Frank Reaugh: Landscapes of Texas and the American West. It showcases more than 100 artworks by renowned artist Frank Reaugh (pronounced “Ray”) drawn from the Ransom Center’s own collection as well as public and private collections from around the state. The companion book Windows on the West: The Art of Frank Reaugh, edited by Curator of Art Peter F. Mears, complements the exhibition, and published by the Ransom Center and UT Press. Excerpted below is the foreward to the book, “Frank Reaugh in Retrospect,” written by Ron Tyler. In it, Tyler reflects on Reaugh’s life and the context of Reaugh’s distinguished career. [Read more…] about Frank Reaugh: In retrospect

Ransom Center staff to contribute to new Texas-themed UT Press book series

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The University of Texas Press recently announced the undertaking of the publishing project The Texas Bookshelf, a series of 16 books, with an accompanying website, focusing on all things Texan.  All books are to be written by faculty and staff at The University of Texas at Austin.  The inaugural book, to be released in 2017, will be a history of Texas written by Stephen Harrigan, faculty member at the Michener Center for Writers.  The subsequent books will focus on Texas history, business, culture, art, music, film, politics, and more.

 

Of the contributors, two are affiliated with the Harry Ransom Center.

 

Greg Curtis, Humanities Coordinator at the Ransom Center and Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, plans to write a book on the history of Texas literature, with profiles of the lives of Texas writers and critical responses to their work.

 

Roy Flukinger, Senior Research Curator at the Ransom Center, will be writing and compiling a volume about the evolution and expansion of twentieth-century photography in Texas, which will feature hundreds of significant images created by important photographers and artists who worked throughout the state during that century.

 

Image: Photo of contributors to UT Press series The Texas Bookshelf by Michael O’Brien.

Conversation and book signing with photographer Nathan Lyons

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Cover of "Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews" (UT Press, 2012), edited by Jessica McDonald.
Cover of "Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews" (UT Press, 2012), edited by Jessica McDonald.

Jessica S. McDonald, the Ransom Center’s Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography, speaks with photographer, curator, and educator Nathan Lyons about his career and role in the expansion of American photography on this Thursday, November 8, at 7 p.m.

McDonald edited the anthology Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews (UT Press, 2012), which provides the first comprehensive overview of Lyons’s career as one of the most important voices in American photography. Below, McDonald shares insight about Lyons.

A relative newcomer to the arts and humanities, photography’s history is still largely uncharted, contested, and complex. The full impact of major figures on the development of this young field, especially during the American “photo boom” of the 1960s and 1970s, has not yet been accounted for. The historical complexity of this era became especially fascinating to me during my tenure in the Department of Photographs at George Eastman House, the museum of photography and film in Rochester, New York, that was a key center of creative and intellectual activity when few other museums collected photographs.

In Rochester I met Nathan Lyons, a figure who has had an inestimable impact on the history of photography in the United States and its expansion over the last five decades. As a curator at Eastman House in the 1960s, Lyons organized some of the most groundbreaking and ambitious exhibitions of the time, and he later founded the Visual Studies Workshop, an independent arts organization and graduate program that trained the next generation of photographers, critics, curators, and historians. Lyons played a role in founding many of photography’s important organizations, including the Society for Photographic Education, and consistently advocated for photographers to funding agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts. All the while he was an active photographer, exhibiting his work at nearly every major U. S. museum and publishing several volumes of his own photographs, including Notations in Passing (1974) and Riding 1st Class on the Titanic! (1999).

In 2008 I began formally researching his role in American photography, and with his cooperation—including generous access to his files and countless interviews—I put together a volume of his photographs and writings. Lyons will join me in conversation at the Harry Ransom Center this Thursday to celebrate the publication of Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews, published this year by UT Press. The presentation will combine photographs representing Lyons’s artistic development with a discussion of his pivotal essays and lectures. We will also consider contributions from important scholars in the field who have written on Lyons’s work as an artist, his influence as a curator, and his widespread impact as an educator. A book signing follows.

The program will be webcast live Thursday starting at 7 p.m. CST.

"The Gernsheim Collection" Earns Recognition

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"The Gernsheim Collection" (UT Press, 2010).
"The Gernsheim Collection" (UT Press, 2010).

The Gernsheim Collection, co-published by the Harry Ransom Center and the University of Texas Press, has been awarded an Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, which honors a distinguished catalog in the history of art published during the past year.

Edited by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator Roy Flukinger, The Gernsheim Collection coincided with the Ransom Center’s 2010 exhibition Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection, which explored the history of photography through the Center’s foundational photography collection.

The Gernsheim collection is one of the most important collections of photography in the world. Amassed by the renowned husband-and-wife team of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim between 1945 and 1963, it contains an unparalleled range of images, beginning with the world’s earliest-known photograph from nature, made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826.

The book includes more than 125 full-page plates from the collection accompanied by extensive annotations in which Flukinger describes each image’s place in the evolution of photography and within the collection.

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