WRITER: BRADLEY PAUL
CONTACT: PETER ALEXANDER
100 Old Public Library
Iowa City IA 52242
(319) 384-0072; fax (319) 384-0024
e-mail: peter-alexander@uiowa.edu

Release: Immediate

William Gass will deliver Spriestersbach lecture at UI Museum of Art

IOWA CITY, Iowa -- William H. Gass, director of the International Writers' Center at Washington University in St. Louis, will deliver the annual Bette Spriestersbach Lecture at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 11, in the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

The lecture, "La Maison d'en Face or That Other Art," is free and open to the public.

Using work by Elizabeth Bishop, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes and others, Gass will address the aesthetic issues behind visual works of art created by writers. He will particularly focus on the philosophical implications of metaphor and the way that an artist's training in one medium influences his work in another medium.

Gass was born in Fargo, N.D., in 1924 and was educated at Kenyon College and Cornell University. He was a professor of philosophy at Purdue University and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty of Washington University, where he is currently the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities.

Gass' novels and essays include "The Habitations of the Word: Essays," winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1985, and "The Tunnel," which won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. An article on Tom Phillips' "A Humument" recently appeared in "Artforum" as part of an ongoing series in which writers are asked to discuss a work of art that has special significance for them.

The annual Spriestersbach Lecture at the Museum of Art honors Bette R. Spriestersbach, a museum docent and a former program associate in the Child Health Specialty Clinics in the UI Hospital School. She is the wife of former UI vice president Duane C. Spreistersbach, who endowed the lecture in 1992 through a gift to the University of Iowa Foundation.

The UI Museum of Art is located on North Riverside Drive in Iowa City. Public parking is available in UI parking lots across from the museum on Riverside Drive, and adjacent to the UI Alumni Center, which is just north of the museum.

2/21/97