Art Dept. Chair's Wabash Lecture Gets Newspaper Coverage
February 8, 2002
February 8, 2002, Greencastle, Ind. - “These are very challenging images,” Mitchell B. Merback, assistant professor of art history and chair of the department of art at DePauw University is quoted as saying in an article in the Journal Review of Crawfordsville, Indiana. The February 8 article by Doug Hunt tells of Professor Merback's lecture the night before at Wabash College, where the photographs of Lucinda Devlin are on display. The photos depict, in writer Hunt's words, "haunting images of death row cells, electric chairs, gas chambers and injection rooms from institutions throughout the United States."
Merback told the audience, “This is good contemporary art that asks the viewer to be the bearer of the meaning of the photographs. In a sense, (photographs) are like mirrors. They make us look at ourselves (as a society).”
You can read the entire article online
by clicking here. There's also a photo of Dr. Merback's lecture on the homepage of the Journal Review's web site. You can reach it by clicking here.
Merback's book, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe was recently published as a softbound edition by London-based Reaktion Books. It first published in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press. You can learn more in this previous story.
Back