Lawrence Weschler will speak at
Noon, Oct. 17 in Weitz 236 (tentative location)

Lawrence Weschler is a writer of creative non-fiction and a passionate advocate of wonder. A longtime New Yorker contributor, Weschler has written about an artist who draws and "spends" images of money, a  storefront museum of ostensible natural history, among many other topics of curiosity and amazement. His collection of ruminations about surprising visual coincidences, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences was awarded the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

The presentation is entitled  "Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing"
Nowadays, artists and scientists tend to think of their ways of probing the world as distinctly different.  But such was not always the case (in fact the divide is only a few centuries old; think of Leonardo, think of the wonder cabinets of the seventeenth century).  Nor may the differences be all that distinct or even real.In a lecture originally developed for a conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation, longtime New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler--director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU (where the sciences are emphatically included as part of and central to the humanities) and author, among others, of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences--will extrapolate on such themes, with side-meanders into the thinking of artists Robert Irwin and David Hockney (subjects of his two most recent books) and a whole new interpretation of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson.

Lunch provided for 40