Ransome Center Rules!

In keeping up with my research for Passport:ATX--regular visits of the museums and cultural institutions in Austin--I made a visit to the Ransome Center on 21st and Guadalupe, right at the corner of the U.T. campus.

The current exhibit is a combination of a retrospective of Jess, a San Francisco-based visual artist who was one of the first modern artists to put develop collage, not only of images but of text. The huge collection of Jess's paintings, posters, collages, and books was accompanied by a retrospective of the Beat Generation, a visual/musical/poetic/cultural movement that took place in the 50s and 60s where jazz, drugs, civil rights, travel, and freedom began rebelling against established US white cultural norms and started to establish a new aesthetic.

The exhibition was great...so great that my head started to spin and I had to come outside for fresh air...so much information and beauty and history!

I will have to come back another time and take deeper looks at everything I skimmed over. The exhibition is up until August 3.

Also of interest. In the lobby of the Ransome Center there is a Gutenberg bible on display, a copy of published sometime in the 1450s, and only one of five complete copies in the US and 41 worldwide. It was in Latin, and in a Northern European script that was hard to read. Every three months they turn the pages so as not to damage the spine. Also on permanent display is the first photograph ever taken! It's actually a heliograph, from France, from the 1820s. It's not much to look at, literally, as the image is very dim and hard to make out, but what it represents is revolutionary in so many ways...