Anne Whiston Spirn's 'The Eye is a Door' Lecture and Reception Held on Oct. 24

Photo Submitted

Glen Loy, Scotland, taken in September 1978. (Photograph by Anne Whiston Spirn)

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Anne Whiston Spirn will present a lecture titled “The Eye is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery” at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture lecture series. The public is invited and admission is free. The lecture will have limited seating. 

An exhibition of work by Spirn, with the same title, is on display through Oct. 31 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery in Vol Walker Hall. Gallery hours for the exhibition are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. A reception for the exhibition will be held at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24, in the gallery, preceding her lecture.

Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an award-winning author, photographer, teacher and practitioner. Before coming to MIT, she taught at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the chair for the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning.

Spirn views seeing as a way of knowing and photography as a way of thinking. Mindful photography allows the photographer to look and think, and to open a door between what can be seen directly and what is hidden and can only be imagined. In conjunction with her exhibition, Spirn’s lecture will explore this concept and will challenge the audience to look deeply at the surface of things and beyond to the stories landscapes tell, as well as the processes that shape human lives and communities, the earth itself and even the universe.

Spirn has written several books, including The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (Basic Books, 1984), The Language of Landscape (Yale University Press, 1998), Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery (2014). Her current book-in-progress, titled Top-Down/Bottom-Up: Restoring Nature and Rebuilding Community, describes research-in-action and lessons to build safer, healthier and more equitable and sustainable communities. Spirn received a Guggenheim fellowship for this book.

Since 1987, Spirn has been the director of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, an award-winning program dedicated to restoring nature and rebuilding urban communities. The project was cited as a Model of Best Practice at a 1999 White House summit for leading scholars and artists in public life. In 2001, Spirn was awarded Japan’s International Cosmos Prize for “contributions to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind.”

The public is invited to attend the exhibition and the lecture, and admission is free. The lecture will have limited seating. Gallery hours for the exhibition are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.