BYU NewsNet - Connecting the Southwest through MOA reading circle

For many people, the key to understanding art is the formulation of strokes of paint on a canvas, but for others it takes a literary approach to make the connection.

“Death Comes for the Archbishop” by Willa Cather will be the focus at this year’s first reading circle presented by BYU’s Museum of Art, in conjunction with the “Visions of the Southwest” exhibit.

Today at 7 p.m. museum faculty will gather in the West Lied Gallery of the MOA to participate in a reader directed discussion about Cather’s book.

Rita Wright, senior educator at the museum, produced the idea of the reading circle when talking about the Southwest exhibit with BYU English professor Gloria Cronin.

Cronin was also involved in this series of southwest events hosted by the museum and gave a lecture last week introducing Cather and her experience with the Southwest.

“Like their paintings, her anthropologically accurate prose was also filled with nostalgia and longing for the purity of the primordial — an unmediated space in which to rethink the American relationship between self, nature, God, culture and a disorienting modernity,” Cronin said in a news release.

The reading circle in accordance with the “Visions of the Southwest” from the Diane and Sam Stewart Art Collection will shed a new perspective on the way the Southwest is revealed.

Cather’s book portrays visuals of beautiful aesthetic landscapes that parallel paintings created by the artists of the exhibit, only using different mediums, Wright said.

Chris Wilson, marketing and public relations manager for the museum, said Cather’s numerous trips to Santa Fe and Taos, N.M., which are frequent destinations for artists, is where she got much of her influence for the imagery used in her book.

“It’s the last hold-out for the unspoiled, pristine America that hadn’t been established,” Wilson said. “It’s a stark contrast to the modern world.”

The museum tries to develop educational programs to go along with their art exhibits to help people find ways of connecting with the art in exhibitions and lectures are a standard museum practice, but this is the first time the reading circle has been done, Wilson said.

Wright said she hopes visitors have a cool experience and make a connection for themselves, which is her job as an educator at the museum.

“We want to encourage this quiet and thought-provoking opportunity to join us and consider one of the great masterpieces,” Wright said.