Award-Winning Author to Speak on Art and Science April 17 at UW

A longtime New Yorker writer, acclaimed author and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities will discuss art and science Monday, April 17, at the University of Wyoming.

Lawrence Weschler, a renowned writer on art, politics, human rights, history and science, will present “Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing” at 5 p.m. in Room 129 of the Business Building.

The Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research at UW sponsors the event, which is free and open to the public. The UW College of Law, the UW Department of Art and Art History, and the UW Department of Zoology and Physiology co-sponsor the talk.

Nowadays, artists and scientists tend to think of their ways of probing the world as distinctly different, Weschler says. But, such was not always the case, and the differences might not be that distinct or even real.

Weschler will focus on these themes, and he will explore the thinking of artists Robert Irwin and David Hockney and share an interpretation of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson.”

For more than 20 years (1981-2002), Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award -- for cultural reporting in 1988 and magazine reporting in 1992. He also is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award.

Weschler’s numerous nonfiction works include “The Passion of Poland”; “A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers”; “Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas”; “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin”; “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder”; and “Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences.”

“Everything that Rises” received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and “Mr. Wilson” was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Weschler has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, University of California-Santa Cruz, Bard College, Vassar College, Sarah Lawrence College and New York University, where he served as the longtime director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and is a distinguished writer-in-residence at the Carter Journalism Institute.

He also is the artistic director emeritus with the Chicago Humanities Festival and curator for New York Live Ideas, an annual body-based humanities collaboration with Bill T. Jones and his NY Live Arts.

For more information about Weschler, visit www.lawrenceweschler.com.