VCU news

By Tom Gresham

Author Lawrence Weschler, who the Boston Globe says "has an ability to bring his reader around to his level of enchantment that is positively uncanny," will speak at Virginia Commonwealth University next week about his unique examinations of art and popular culture.

Weschler, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 2006 book, "Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences," is the featured guest speaker in the Windmueller Arts Series at VCU School of the Arts. He will speak on Monday, Feb. 25, at 6 p.m. in the Grace Street Theater, 930 W. Grace St. Admission is free and open to the public.

Weschler's lecture will be "a defense of loosely synapsed moments," the kind of study that has enabled him to entertain leaps that transcend orthodox academic categories. "Everything That Rises," for instance, chronicles a number of convergences that Weschler has discovered — surprising visual rhymes and other unlikely connections — that contain larger meaning. The illustrated book attracted praise from many publications, including McSweeney's, which called it "a beautiful book, a brilliant book, an inspired and even
inspirational
creation."

Weschler served as a staff writer at The New Yorker for 20 years. He is the author of 11 books — three of political reporting and eight in his "Passions and Wonders" series. His 1995 book in the series, "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders," was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.

Weschler is the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, a contributing editor to McSweeney's and the Threepenny Review, curator at large for the DVD quarterly, Wholphin, and art wrangler for the Virginia Quarterly Review.

The Windmueller Arts Series was established through a generous gift from the Estate of Otti Y. Windmueller. Windmueller received a bachelor of fine arts degree from VCU and taught fashion design for 29 years in the School of the Arts. The Windmueller Arts Series each year hosts prominent national experts who share their expertise in the arts with VCU students and members of the Richmond community.