Art Up Close! on Tuesday, March 17, will feature poet and WVU Visiting Professor of Law, Michael Blumenthal, speaking about artist Sue Coe’s lithograph, “La Frontera.” The lithograph, dated 1997, depicts the kneeling figure of a man with his wrists bound in the American Southwest, referencing the border and issues related to immigration.

Art Up Close! presents faculty from various departments and schools discussing a single work of art selected from the collection of the Art Museum of WVU from the perspectives of their disciplines. Audience members have the opportunity to view the actual works of art at the programs.

Michael Blumenthal, formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, graduated from the Cornell Law School in 1974 and is currently Visiting Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Immigration Clinic at The West Virginia University College of Law. His first collection of short stories, “The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History,” was published by Etruscan Press in 2014, and Etruscan also published his eighth book of poems, “No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012” in 2013. He is the author of the memoir “All My Mothers and Fathers” (Harper Collins, 2002), and of “Dusty Angel” (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel “Weinstock Among The Dying,” won Hadassah Magazine’s Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, and has been re-issued in paperback by Pleasure Boat Studios, who also published his collection of essays from Central Europe, “When History Enters the House,” in 1998. Later this year, his collaboration with the baboon conservationist Rita Miljo, “Because They Needed Me: The Incredible Struggle of Rita Miljo To Save The Orphaned Baboons of South Africa” will be published in New York. In his free time, he reads and thinks about primates of all sorts.

Art Up Close! programs are held from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the Grand Hall on the lower level of the Museum Education Center (formerly the Erickson Alumni Center) adjacent to the WVU Creative Arts Center, followed by a question and answer session and light refreshments.

The Art Up Close! series is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by the Art Museum and the Friends of the Museum, a membership group for people who enjoy the arts, and social, educational, and cultural activities revolving around art.

For more information, contact the Art Museum of WVU at (304) 293-7790.

-WVU-

cl/03/17/15