Annual Lectures on Art and Psychoanalysis

The Lucy Daniels Foundation, in conjunction with the North Carolina Museum of Art, presents its 15th Annual Lectures on Art and Psychoanalysis. Each lecture is free and will be followed by a lovely reception. Ellen Handler Spitz is a repeat speaker and I've heard she's just fantastic. I'm particularly interested in Saturday's lecture on representing death to children. Several topics on death have come up in my house recently. One is in Grace's new book Little Red Riding Hood whose version has the grandmother and Red Riding Hood being eaten by the wolf and the wolf later being cut open by the woodsman to free Granny and RRH. I think this is the original Brothers Grimm version, the gruesome one, as many of their tales are.

Then the other night Johnny asked me if I was going to die, if Daddy was, if Grace was, etc. I told him yes, we all are going to die at some point. Johnny then wanted assurance that he wouldn't die until he was big (right, Mommy?) and I told him that no one knows exactly when they're going to die. He wanted to know if I was going to die and I told him, yes, someday. He said he would be lonely and wanted to know who would take care of him. He ran in to ask Daddy if he would take care of him if I died and Daddy said yes. That was all the assurance Johnny needed and after that, he didn't seem to care much if either of his parents died as long as the other would still be around to pour him his apple juice on demand.

What is Too Scary? Representations of Death in Works for Children

Saturday, February 3, 2007, 3:00 PM, Lucy Daniels Foundation, No charge

Drawing on her recent research, Ellen Handler Spitz explores ways we represent death and loss to children in the major cultural sites of animated film and television. Focusing in detail on a classic example from each of these prevalent genres, she asks us to reconsider the choices we make when we decide to show or to hide, to explain or to gloss over, to interpret or to share the sorrows of life with young children.

Art as Memory and Loss as Vanished Form

Sunday, February 4, 2007, 2:00 PM North Carolina Museum of Art, No charge

In the wake of tragic disasters worldwide, this lecture explores how visual art has served historically to facilitate public mourning and to ensure the persistence of both memory and oblivion. Raising questions about this type of art in general, we will focus on the oeuvre of a distinguished contemporary conceptual artist, Horst Hoheisel of Kassel, Germany, who creates dramatic, strinkingly effective pieces he calls "anti-memorials," thereby challenging us to interrogate the relations between public memorials, private shames and sorrows, and the inevitalbe processes of attrition.

Ellen Handler Spitz, PhD, lectures internationally on the arts and psychology and is the author of five books, most recently, "The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood" (Pantheon Books, 2006). Having held major fellowships and prizes including a Getty, a Bunting, a Clark, and a Camargo, she is currently Honors Professor of Visual Arts at the Unversity of Maryland-Baltimore County, where she teaches interdisciplinary seminars in the humanities.