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Tag: 2015

Staff Spotlight: Mike Hankins

Joining the Beach Museum of Art in 2013 as a curatorial intern, Mike Hankins is working on a PhD in History.  Reflecting his passion for music, Mike’s undergraduate degree is in jazz performance from the University of North Texas, Denton, TX.  He has worked as a professional cartoonist and a web designer and does as much musical work as possible.

“My role at the museum allows me to use my historical research skills to reach out to the public through art,” Mike explains. “I’m very passionate about bridging the gap between the academic world and everyday people. Art and history overlap quite a bit and I enjoy finding those connections. In a lot of ways, art is about trying to understand and communicate something fundamental about the human experience, and in that sense, art is very similar to what I do as a historian – try to uncover and comprehend past human experience in a way that speaks to us in the present.”

Fun fact: Mike lost about 130 pounds in a little over one year.

Mike Hankins
Mike Hankins

Exhibition showcases more than visual arts

 

The Dinner and a Mid-night Snack: Gifts of Contemporary Works on Paper from Don Mrozek and Scott Dorman exhibition features special in gallery programing. Guest curators Thomas Bell and Katie Kingery-Page host special performances by Kansas State University faculty and students for a series of salon style performances. February 12, 2015,we enjoyed KSU saxophone performances; see more pictures on our facebook page. In March you can look forward to poetry readings and a vocal performance and in April KSU Theatre students will perform.

March 12, 2015, 6:30-7:30 p.m. Drip Torch poetry reading & David Wood vocal performance

April 9, 2015, 6:30-7:30 p.m. KSU Theater and Dance student performances.

 

Reflections on VTS Part III

This post is part three of three written by the Director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Linda Duke, as a follow up to her director’s message featured in the Winter/Spring 2015 inSIGHT newsletter available at www.beach.ksu.edu.

Art is about the experience of being human, in our own time and place and in other times and places. Sometimes we have to slow down to discover this. Art doesn’t always give up its meanings to a quick glance. What appears at first self-evident in a work of art may reveal itself to contain uncertainties upon reflection. And sometimes it’s revelatory to hear someone else – not an expert, but a person who has looked carefully – describe what they see and what they think about it. Art usually sends not just multiple messages, but mixed messages. In that sense art is both about us and very like us. Interacting with it helps us understand ourselves and our species. I’ve learned these things about art from thinking about it myself and from hearing the observations of thousands of teachers, students, incarcerated teens, people in recovery and homeless transition programs, medical students, and others in Visual Thinking Strategies discussions. Most of these people didn’t know the artists’ names or the stylistic terms, but they knew how to look at art.

I learned from my own encounters that VTS isn’t just for school kids. And of course, neither is art.

-Linda Duke, Director