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Winter 2004

Admission Fee:
$10 (for Undergraduate students and Group Leaders*)
$12.50 (for Graduate Students and Faculty and Staff)

*Group leaders must be U-M faculty, staff, or GSIs. How to book a group of 10 or more..
Group sales deadline for this event is: Friday, April 2.

This last trip of the semester is SOLD OUT, we hope that you can join us for a Culture Bus trip next semester!

Featuring the following special exhibitions:

Visualizing the Blues: Images of the American South 1862-1999 at the Grand Rapids Art Museum
(11:30 - 2:00 pm)

Overview: The Blues is an appropriate analogy for the complex culture of the American South. Every shade of human emotion can be found in the Blues. The music is sophisticated and engaging. It tells a story of suffering, survival, and human triumph. Photography is an art form with a parallel spectrum of expression. During the 160-year history of this medium, photographers have chosen the American South as a subject from the era of the Civil War to the era of civil rights.

2004 marks the 50 year anniversary of the commencement of the civil rights movement with the May 17, 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing the segregation in the schools. The next fourteen years transformed the South and the country as a whole. The death of Martin Luther King, on April 4, 1968, ended a era of change with a legacy of reconciliation. A new South was born and the Blues was its overture.

The exhibition consists of over 100 photographic images spanning outward from the Mississippi Delta region from the Civil War to the present. This so-called "Fertile Crescent of the American Music" attracted important photographers from around the United States and the world. Alfred Eisenstaedt, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Dorthea Lange, Edward Weston, and Gordon Parks are among the photographers represented in the exhibition. Their powerful images of the landscape and people of the South chronicle a society that was structured around crop cycles, community life, and church worship. Southern society was hierarchical yet languorous, conservative yet eccentric, orthodox yet sensual. The tensions of southern society fed the music and literature of the region, and people from poor rural areas achieved a richness of culture through their folklore and music traditions.

"George Segal: America" at the Frederick Meijer Gardens

Universally regarded as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, George Segal will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition of great critical importance. Associated with both Pop Art and social realism, the artist successfully revitalized the tradition of figurative sculpture in Modern Art. More than twenty-five of the artist's sculptures and drawings from throughout his celebrated career will be on view, including the plaster originals for the renowned F.D.R. and Kent State memorials. Also included are rarely exhibited early sculptures and a selection of his final drawings. All works on exhibition are on loan from the artist's estate, courtesy of his family.