Indiana Daily Student
ARTS
Monday, Jan. 29, 2018 idsnews.com
Editors Christine Fernando and Clark Gudas arts@idsnews.com
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Irish American painter presents diverse art By Clark Gudas ckgudas@umail.iu.edu @This_isnt_clark
Irish American painter Patricia Cole will have an opening reception for "Oil Paintings, Monoprints, Watercolors & Drawings" on Feb. 2 at the Thomas Gallery. The gallery will be open every Friday in February from 5 to 8 p.m., and also by appointment. “Mostly considered a neo-expressionist, she often chooses subject matter that is often somewhat different for the form,” Thomas Gallagher, owner of the Thomas Gallery, said. Born in Belfast, Ireland, Cole came to the United States at age three and settled in northern Indiana. She received a bachelor of fine arts in painting from IU and a master of fine arts in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Cole’s work deals with issues of dislocation and the redeeming power of nature, love and relationship,” according to her Ivy Tech website biography.
In 2001, Cole served as president of the Bloomington Common Council. She authored Indiana’s first Percent for Art Ordinance in 1994, which proposed improvement projects where part of the project budget is committed to public art, according to her Ivy Tech website biography. Cole also played an active role in establishing the Buskirk-Chumley Theater and the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center, according to her Ivy Tech website biography. Cole traveled and studied in France and across Europe in 1977 and 1978 before she established her studio in Bloomington that year, according to her Ivy Tech website biography. She has received awards and residencies, including Visiting Artist at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in France. She is a recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Prize for Painting at the National Academy of Design and Artist’s Development Grant from the
On being cultured: Western culture shouldn’t be the deciding factor Christine Fernando is a sophomore in journalism
A conversation with a few friends last week turned into a discussion about our favorite early 1990s movies, from “Silence of the Lambs” to “Schindler’s List.” But one of my friends was quiet. When we walked away, she said she hadn’t seen any of the movies we were talking about. “I’m so uncultured,” she told me. I reminded her about her encyclopedic knowledge about Bollywood film and music — a large chunk of the global arts industry that I knew nothing about. “That doesn’t make me cultured though,” she said. But it does. When we think of someone who is “cultured,” we conjure up an image of a person who can quote Walt Whitman, who goes to the IU Musical Arts Center to catch the spring ballet, who can pick out the best local underground musicians or who incorporates ancient Greek philosophers into conversations. We don’t think about the girl who can pull obscure but influential Bollywood actors out of her back pocket like they’re Pokémon or can talk for hours on end about changes in modern Indian music. Usually, the people we see as cultured are those who are familiar with Western culture, while those who don’t know as much about Western culture are pegged as uncultured. But Western culture should not be the measure of how cultured a person is or is not. Someone who knows the great American movies, books and musicals of the past century is no more or less cultured than someone who loves Bollywood or Nigerian Igbo movies or even Korean pop music. Our knowledge of Western culture should not be the deciding factor for whether we are considered cultured or not. In a 1994 interview with Vibe magazine, part of which was reprinted in Tom Perchard's book "From Soul to Hip Hop," the late rapper Guru said the jazz movement began in the African American community but was swept up into elite, sophisticated music when white elites picked it up. In his 2012 book, “Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878-1943,” Lawrence Schenbeck, an associate professor of music at Spelman College, also considers how white elites reconfigured the music of other cultures, especially
jazz, into something highbrow. Schenbeck claims white Americans began to think of jazz as high culture because they thought of African American music as “civilized” only when it resembled European classical music. For my cousins in Sri Lanka, American music, movies and TV shows are all the rage. If you don’t listen to English music radio stations or watch American movies and TV shows, you’re seen as uncool and lower class, even if you know Sri Lankan music, film and television. Why must art around the world resemble Western art in order to be considered part of high culture? And why is one segment of the world given the power to determine what high culture consists of or what being cultured really means? It just doesn’t seem fair to the cultural innovation of every other country in the world. We give high culture a narrow and exclusive meaning that is smug at best, and Eurocentric and elitist at its worst. But when personal taste is subjective, and the world has so much to offer in terms of culture beyond just the Western, there’s little to differentiate what we see as fancy, high-brow culture from the rest. To be cultured, you don’t have to read Shakespeare or listen to opera. Whether you listen to Beethoven or AR Rahman, drink expensive wine or cheap beer, watch American film noirs or Bollywood musicals, or read Whitman or “Harry Potter,” you participate in some form of culture. And if you love whatever section of global culture draws you in, you are cultured. Anyone who has knowledge in an area of culture, whether that be from the U.S. and Europe or elsewhere, should be able to sit in conversations about 90’s films and know that, while they may not know much about that specific cultural subcategory, they are not any less cultured. One of my friends recently created a group chat titled “Uncultured but woke swines at a spa night” in order to set up spa and movie nights to turn each other from “uncultured swine” to “cultured” by showing each other our favorite classic movies. So far, our list of movies only includes American or European films, such as “Shawshank Redemption,” “Star Wars” and “La Grande Illusion.” I think now we’ll have to throw some Bollywood into the mix as well.
COURTESY PHOTO
Irish-American painter Patricia Leitch Cole will have an opening reception for "Oil Paintings, Monoprints, Watercolors & Drawings" on Feb. 2 at the Thomas Gallery. The gallery will be open from 5 to 8 p.m. every Friday in February and also by appointment.
Indiana Arts Commission, according to her Ivy Tech website biography. Cole has presented her work in the Grunwald Gallery at IU, the Blueline Gal-
lery in Bloomington and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as well as museums in Japan and across the United States. Gallagher said that art exhibits, like Cole’s, do much
for the cultural enrichment of Bloomington. “A community rich in the arts does much to enhance the quality of life,” Gallagher said.
Batman film producer to screen 'The Dark Knight' By Chris Forrester chforres@umail.iu.edu @_ChrisForrester
Film producer and IU professor Michael Uslan will present a screening of the 2008 action movie “The Dark Knight” at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 29 in the Franklin Hall commons. Uslan, who produced the film, will be present to give an introduction beforehand and hold a Q&A afterwards. The film, which will be free and open to the public, will be screened on the building's 24-foot-by-12-foot screen. “The Dark Knight,” directed by filmmaker Christopher Nolan, is a sequel to 2005’s “Batman Begins,” which introduced audiences to Christian Bale’s Batman, a notably darker take on the character. Uslan said he first bought the film rights to the Batman character from DC Comics in 1979. For him, seeing Christopher Nolan’s vision of the character come to life on the big screen was a dream come true. “What Chris has accomplished is to raise the bar for all comic book movies, because when you walk out of 'The Dark Knight,' you don’t have to say it was a great comic book movie," Uslan said. "You can now say it was a great film." Uslan added if he had his way, he’d screen all three of Nolan’s Batman films — “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises.” He said due to time constraints he chose “The Dark Knight” because it was the apex of the trilogy. He also said he wanted to screen the film, which turns 10 years old this summer, because of its thematic relevance.
WENSI WANG | IDS
Batman producer and IU alumnus Michael Uslan, a professor of practice in The Media School, speaks Feb. 4 of 2015 in the Ernie Pyle Hall auditorium on the future of the film and television industry. Uslan will hold a screening of the 2008 action movie “The Dark Knight” at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 29 in the Franklin Hall Commons.
“I think today we no longer live in a comic book world of black and white, good and evil,” Uslan said. "We live in a gray world and we live in a world of order versus chaos. I think that ‘The Dark Knight’ is as relevant, if not more relevant, today as it was when it came out.” Uslan said he also wanted to show the film because he is back in Bloomington to teach two intensive Media School courses this semester. Uslan also said he wanted people to have the opportunity to see “The Dark Knight” on a big screen. “I believe that when you see a movie of this genre, whether it’s 'Batman' or 'Star Wars' or whatever, watching it on a small screen at home, you lose a tremendous amount of the impact,” Uslan said. “And giving students a chance to see it on the big screen for the first time, we always get the most wonderful reactions.” Jon Vickers, director of the IU Cinema, also said the experience of seeing a film
such as “The Dark Knight” on a big screen is a powerful one. “Seeing it on the big screen with a good sound system is much more powerful than watching on a small screen, like your computer or your phone,” Vickers said. The best part of Monday night’s screening is bound to be Uslan, Vickers said. “I think what really is going to be fun about this event is that you get Michael,” Vickers said. “Michael has been married to Batman for decades now, and he has a lot of great stories of what it took to bring Batman back to the screen. That’s where the experience is in this event.” Vickers added, while Uslan might not be Nolan in terms of being able to speak to creative choices in the film he’ll surely offer an interesting and invaluable perspective on the making of the movie. Uslan also said he hoped people would come to see the film and celebrate it. “There’s nothing like the big screen experience,” he said.
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