On October 29, former director of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, Guy Guthridge will present ANTARCTICA: Artists, Writers, and the “Continent for Science”. For 50 years, Antarctic Artists and Writers Program has been sending artists, writers, and scholars to Antarctica to research and create their work and to help document America’s Antarctic heritage.
Educated in the liberal arts, Guthridge spent his career developing the communication of science, engineering, and polar activities. He began his association with Polar Regions in 1970 when he joined the National Science Foundation to edit Antarctic Journal of the United States. Later, he managed the Polar Information Program -- the clearinghouse and source of information regarding Antarctica that has included scientific, technical, and public publications, translation services, and the world's premier polar bibliographic service. He also managed the Foundation programs for field participation in the United States Antarctic Program by artists, writers, youths, and teachers. Guthridge retired in 2005 and now lives aboard a boat, writing about science and societal issues about the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed. His talk begins at 7 pm.
At 9 pm, a pre-release screening of Werner Herzog’s film on Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World (Discover Films) will be shown. The documentary, which has not been released to the general public, chronicles a hidden society at the end of the world. 1000 men and women live together under unbelievably close quarters in Antarctica, risking their lives and sanity in search of cutting edge science. Now, for the first time, an outsider has been admitted. In his first documentary since Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog, accompanied only by his cameraman, traveled to Antarctica, with unrestricted access to the raw beauty and raw humanity of the ultimate Down Under. Encounters at the End of the World is Herzog’s latest meditation on nature that explores this land of fire, ice and corrosive solitude.Herzog (given name Werner H. Stipetic) was born in Munich and grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria. He didn’t see any films or television nor had a telephone as a child. He started traveling on foot from the age of 14. He made his first phone call at the age of 17. During high school he worked the nightshift as a welder in a steel factory to produce his first films and made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than forty films, published more than a dozen books of prose, and directed as many operas. “Herzog's cinema is a landscape of unbound passions and coded obsession,” writes Ian Penman for The Guardian. Encounters at the End of the World promises to be as compelling and emblazoned as his other documentaries.
Antarctica and this series of programs have been funded by an anonymous sponsor with additional funding from the FMC Corporation, ExxonMobile, the National Advisory Board of the UW Art Museum and the Wyoming Arts Council through the Wyoming State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts which believes a great nation deserves great art.
Each program is free and open to the public.
Bringing the world of art to Wyoming, the Art Museum is located in the Centennial Complex at 22nd & Willett Drive in Laramie. Hours for the Museum and Museum Store are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free. For more information, please call the Art Museum at 307-766-6622 or visit http://www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum
