updated 9/10/06
updated 9/10/06
Students in seminars meeting two hours per week will be required to attend fifteen hours of third-hour events. All students in the Freshman Seminars Program, even those whose classes meet for three hours per week, must attend the following third-hour activities: a library workshop and a session on time management presented by a staff member from the Learning Skills Center. The latter requirement is met in this class by turning in your TM materials. Nine other third hours are included in the class schedule: the Downtown excursion, the Zilker Park excursion, and the visits to Waller Creek, the Tower Garden, Dobie's house, the Bob Bullock museum, the Texas Natural Science museum, the Littlefield House, and the Blanton museum. That leaves the library workshop and four other third-hour activities to be completed.
The Freshman Seminar website includes a list of approved Third-Hour Activities. You should consult this Web site throughout the semester since activities will be added and/or updated. The library workshops will take place at different hours during the semester, but it is advisable to begin attending the sessions as early as possible, since they will not continue during the entire semester. In the case of some activities, for example, the art museum tours, only a limited number of students may attend any one session, so that it will be necessary for you to sign up in advance. In addition to the approved list, you may propose alternative third-hour activities to the instructor. After receiving the instructor's approval, you may report on those activities as well to receive credit.
For most of the third-hour activities you will need to prove you attended and write up a short description for the Third-Hour Discussion Board. The description must not duplicate any previous descriptions. For the library workshop, all that is needed is a slip from the instructor to prove you were there on time and stayed for the entire session.
REQUIRED LIBRARY WORKSHOPS
Library Instruction Services has developed a library site
to support
the Freshman Seminars program. The site includes research guides,
citation assistance, and contact information for our librarians and our
Ask a Librarian email and chat services:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/services/instruction/resources/FreshSeminars.html
Your students must attend one of the twelve
general library orientation
sessions offered for Freshman Seminar students. The schedule of
orientation sessions is available at:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/services/instruction/resources/FreshSeminars_Lib.html
FOUR RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL THIRD HOUR ACTIVITIES
The University of Texas is renowned for its vast collections, which are housed throughout the university and used to further teaching and scholarship. As a 2006 freshman seminar student, you are invited to tour a sampling of these collections for your third hour activity. Some instructors may ask you to complete the following assignments as a course requirement, but you are welcome to take the tours even if they are not assigned.
Most of the following tours may be completed at your leisure. Simply follow the instructions for each assignment in order to learn how to visit the collections. To tour the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, please remember to sign up by September 29th in order to reserve a space.
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum is one of eleven presidential libraries administered by the national Archives and Records Administration. The library houses forty million pages of historical documents, which include the papers from the entire public career of Lyndon Baines Johnson and also from those of close associates. These papers and the vast administrative files from the presidency are used by anyone interested in conducting research about the Lyndon Johnson presidency. The galleries in the museum are open to the public and admission is free of charge.
HOURS OF OPERATION
Daily 9:00-5:00
Closed on Christmas Day
LOCATION
Building Code: LBJ
For map, visit: http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/index.html
EXHIBITIONS
Power to the People
September 2, 2006 to May 28, 2007
Walk into a world before television, computers, the i-pod, even refrigerators. The exhibit, Power to the People: The Electrification of Rural Texas, is a uniquely Texas story of dark times in rural Texas in the 1930s, the efforts to bring electricity to the region, and the impact rural electrification had on families and the landscape of Central Texas. Lyndon Johnson grew up without electricity and worked diligently with local officials and Congress to bring electric lines to this region, an effort he called one of his greatest achievements.
The White House Rooms
One permanent view is a replica of the Oval Office which duplicates the actual office at 7/8th scale. The office looks exactly as it did during Johnson’s presidency including the desk he used beginning in his Senate days through the White House years. Johnson kept abreast of the news with a teletype machine and three screen television console to watch all three networks simultaneously.
The First Lady Gallery
On December 22, 1998, the LBJ Library and Museum opened a permanent exhibit about Lady Bird Johnson. The First Lady’s Gallery is a portrait of Mrs. Johnson’s legacy as a humanitarian, an unofficial diplomat, and a champion of nature. The exhibit tells the story of Lady Bird Johnson from the time she met Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1934 to her role as First Lady and then onto life after the White House. Love letters from their courtship are just a few of the objects in the gallery. Showcasing her whistlestop campaign for LBJ’s 1964 re-election is a re-creation of the caboose platform on the “Lady Bird Special.” Also highlighted in the gallery are programs Mrs. Johnson actively promoted as First Lady, such as Head Start, VISTA, and the Space program.
TOUR
You must sign up for a scheduled tour by SEPTEMBER 29th. Sign up for a tour (the dates are listed below) by sending an email to Freshman Seminar Program Coordinator Megan Seaholm (Seaholm@mail.utexas.edu). In your email, you must include this information: your name, the title and unique number of your Freshman Seminar, and the tour date you wish to attend.
Parking in the LBJ surface lot is only available to students with health conditions who must park nearby. If you would like to arrange for a temporary parking permit, you must send an email to marsha.sharp@nara.gov. Please write, “freshman seminar parking” as the subject of your email. In the email, include your full name with the date and time of your tour at the LBJ Library.
Your tour will be led by a docent and will begin with a twenty-minute video introduction to the special exhibition. Tours last two hours, so make sure that you allow enough time. Attendance will be taken. The following times are scheduled for tours:
Monday, 10/2, 9:30 am
Tuesday, 10/10, 1:00 pm
Wednesday, 10/18, 9:30 am
Thursday, 10/26, 1:00 pm
Friday, 11/3, 9:30 am and 1:00 pm
Monday, 11/6, 9:30 am and 1:00 pm
Friday, 11/10, 9:30 am and 1:00 pm
Tuesday, 11/14, 9:30 am and 1:00 pm
Wednesday, 11/29, 9:30 am and 1:00 pm
Assignment
After watching the video introduction and taking the tour, write an essay that addresses the following questions:
1. Describe your tour and the types of exhibits that you saw.
2. Which exhibit was of particular interest and why?
3. Why is it important for a President to have a library and who do you imagine uses the materials housed there?
4. If you could have changed one aspect of the exhibits, what would it be and why?
5. Create an exhibition idea that would be appropriate for the LBJ. What subject would it treat, how would that be conveyed, and who would it attract?
HARRY RANSOM CENTER
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/
The Harry Ransom Center is one of the premier cultural institutions in the world. Holding more than 45 million items, the extensive collections include 36 million literary manuscripts, one million rare books, five million photographs, and over 100,000 works of art.
Highlights include the Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455), the First Photograph (c. 1826), important paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and major manuscript collections of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Tennessee Williams, to name but a few.
The Center is used extensively for research by scholars from around the world and presents numerous exhibitions and events showcasing its collections. Exhibitions and events are free and open to the public.
HOURS OF OPERATION
Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 10:00-5:00
Thursday 10:00-7:00a
Saturday and Sunday noon-5:00
Closed Mondays and the following days: Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve Day, Christmas Day and New Year's Day.
LOCATION
Building Code: HRC
For map, visit: http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/index.html
To visit the Ransom Center, you should plan to participate in one of the docent-led tours listed below. No pre-registration is necessary.
EXHIBITIONS
Norman Mailer Takes On America
September 5, 2006-December 31, 2006
Paul Theroux has described the literary world that existed in the two decades after World War II as "an age when writers were powerful, priest-like, remote and elusive. They were risk takers and romantics, lovably disreputable, seldom interviewed but often whispered about." Not so Norman Mailer, who was a key figure in the transition to writer as public figure. This post-war period was also an age of literary censorship, the Cold War and McCarthyism, advances in civil rights and social programs, and bitter opposition to the Vietnam War.
Drawing on the recently acquired Norman Mailer archive, the exhibition will set the career of Norman Mailer in this cultural context and trace the central role he has played in our awareness and understanding of what Morris Dickstein calls the "shocks of history, politics, and contemporary life" that reshaped the last half of the twentieth century and continue to unsettle the twenty-first.
Feliks Topolski: Portraits of Britain's Twentieth-Century Literary Greats
September 5, 2006-December 31, 2006
In 1960, the Harry Ransom Center acquired a large, full-length portrait of George Bernard Shaw by Feliks Topolski along with other, original illustrations. Interest in these artworks reflected the Center’s goal to enlarge dramatically its collections of paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings relating to British literary subjects. From these initial Topolski acquisitions came the “Twenty Greats,” a commission of 20 paintings of the twentieth-century’s greatest British authors painted from life and created between 1959 and 1962.
Portraits of Britain’s Twentieth-Century Literary Greats brings together for the first time the complete Topolski commission of 20 portraits. Included in the exhibition are portraits of W. H. Auden, Ivy Compton-Burnett, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, John Osborne, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, C. P. Snow, Stephen Spender, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Rebecca West. The exhibition explores the commission and the range of candid comments from each of the subjects after viewing the results. The exhibition also examines the artist’s memorable style and working process through a wall installation of The Topolski Chronicle, twice-monthly broadsheets published by the artist from 1953 to 1979 that totaled over 3,000 drawings.
Born in Poland and centered in London his entire creative career, Feliks Topolski (1907-1989) achieved recognition as a talented and fiercely independent artist who, while embracing modernism's inventive freedoms, worked at the edge of its mainstream, thanks in part to his bold expressionist style that brought acclaim as well as controversy. Topolski’s energy and vision invariably gained him recognition as a talented and innovative chronicler, illustrator, caricaturist, portraitist, muralist, and in George Bernard Shaw’s judgment, “an amazingly talented draughtsman.”
TOUR
Tours of the Ransom Center are regularly scheduled on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Unless your instructor has scheduled a group tour for your class, you will not need to pre-register and you may go to any tour that suits your schedule. Once you arrive at the tour, you must sign an attendance sheet.
Tours meet at the lobby of the Ransom Center and will be led by a docent. Tours will provide a general introduction to the Ransom Center, its collections, and exhibitions. Each tour will last approximately 40 minutes.
The following times are scheduled for tours:
Tuesday, October 3 at 10:00
Saturday, October 7 at 2:00
Tuesday, October 10 at 10:00
Saturday, October 14 at 2:00
Tuesday, October 17 at 10:00
Saturday, October 21 at 2:00
Tuesday, October 24 at 10:00
Saturday, October 28 at 2:00
Tuesday, October 31 at 10:00
Saturday, November 4 at 2:00
Tuesday, November 7 at 10:00
Saturday, November 11 at 2:00
Tuesday, November 14 at 10:00
Saturday, November 18 at 2:00
Tuesday, November 21 at 10:00
Saturday, November 25 at 2:00
Tuesday, November 28 at 10:00
Saturday, December 2 at 2:00
Assignment
After taking the tour, write an essay that addresses the following questions:
THE FINE ARTS LIBRARY
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/fal/index.html
The Fine Arts Library (FAL), a unit of the The University of Texas Libraries, opened July 16, 1979. The library contains the art and music collections and most of the theatre and dance materials. Its collections support research and instruction in the College of Fine Arts, which includes the School of Music, the Departments of Art and Art History, and Theatre and Dance. The Fine Arts Library collection includes approximately 300,000 books and scores, 900 current serial subscriptions, 36,000 compact discs, 4,400 video cassettes and videodiscs, 6,200 reels of microfilm, and 24,000 microfiche.
HOURS OF OPERATION
During the semester, the library is open the following hours:
Monday—Thursday 8:00–10:00 pm
Friday 8:00-5:00pm
Saturday 12:00-5:00
Sunday 12:00-10:00
Circulation desk closes 15 minutes before the library closes.
LOCATION
The library is located on levels three through five of the Doty Fine Arts Building at 23rd and Trinity Streets. The exhibition is located in four cases on the fourth floor of the library near seminar room 4.104.
Building Code: DFA
For map, visit: http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/index.html
EXHIBITION
History of Musical Recordings
Fall 2006
Musical recordings have taken many forms since the introduction of the cylinder. Sound has been captured on devices such as records, 78s, wire recordings, reel-to-reel tape and piano rolls. This exhibition traces the history of recorded sound through materials in the Historical Music Recordings Collection, a special collection of the Fine Arts Library.
Assignment
Look at the history of musical recordings exhibit and read the exhibition materials. Go to the circulation desk (on the 3rd floor) and request a CD for the exhibit that is on reserve for freshman seminar students. The attendant at the circulation desk can suggest equipment that you can use to listen to the disk. Preview the tracks on the disk. Select one track to listen to carefully and write an essay that addresses the following questions:
COMPACT DISK RECORDINGS
Flexidisc (45), mid-1950s
"Music to Shave By" a tear-out 45 advertisement for
the Adjustable Remington Automatic Shaver. This is a medley of songs performed
by Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Rosemary Clooney, and The Hi-Lo's.
A Two-disc Set of 45s, 1954
"Calypso Carnival" a song called "Little Mary
Had No Lamb"
A 16-inch Disc, 1950s
MASTERWORKS OF FRANCE with Debussy piece called "Hubeau"
Piano Roll, undated (FAL has CD)
"Arabesque
no. 2" by Debussy (entire piece on one roll)
CD
Call #: Compact Disc 24,411
Piano
Roll: Metro-Art 200042
78, 1940
Alabama Bound – Ledbelly and the Golden Gate Quartet, Victor. 19
Boxed set “Midnight special and other Prison Songs”
Cassette, 1980
Boxed set Verdi’s Othello Overture (first cut)
JULIA MATTHEWS WILKINSON CENTER FOR PRINTS AND DRAWINGS at the JACK S. BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART
The Julia Matthews Wilkinson Center for Prints and Drawings houses the collections, the H-E-B Study Room, and the curatorial offices for the Blanton Museum of Art’s Department of Prints and Drawings. The department is responsible for over 15,000 works on paper and organizes ten to fifteen small, thematic exhibitions per year, which rotate on four-month cycles in the Julius and Suzan Glickman Galleries, on the second floor of the museum. The collections are comprised of approximately 13,500 prints, and 1,500 drawings, ranging from the 15th century to the present. Reflecting the history, characteristics, and processes of the medium from the Renaissance to the present day, the collection’s prints form the only encyclopedic collection in Texas and one of the finest on an American campus. The museum’s collection of drawings includes examples from most periods and cultures with particular strengths in the areas of both Old Master drawings and contemporary Latin American drawings. The holdings are among the best in the country, with renowned groups of Italian, French, and German Baroque works.
The H-E-B Study Room is designed to accommodate small university and high school classes, individual scholars, collectors, connoisseurs, and museum visitors who wish to study specific works, otherwise not on view.
The Department of Prints and Drawings has a library with significant holdings of catalogues raisonnés, sales catalogues, and reference books pertaining specifically to the prints and printmakers in the permanent collection. These materials may be used in the center during public hours.
PRINT ROOM HOURS
Tuesday-Friday 1:00-5:00
If all reserve materials are checked out upon your arrival to the print room, then you will either have to wait until another student is finished or you will have to return at another time.
Because a class may occupy the print room during visiting hours, you should call before your visit to make sure that the room is available for viewing. Contact Rebekah Morin, Curatorial Associate, at 471-9208, or by email, ramorin@mail.utexas.edu.
LOCATION
Located on the first floor of the Blanton Museum of Art
Building Code: BMA
For map, visit: http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/index.html
PRINTS ON RESERVE
Albrecht Dürer
German, 1471–1528
Saint John before God and the Elders, before 1498, from the Apocalypse
Woodcut, Bartsch 63, Meder 166
Purchase through the generosity of the Still Water Foundation, 1996.288
Schelte Adams Bolswert
Flemish, 1586–1659
The Lion Hunt, circa 1622, after Peter Paul Rubens
Engraving, Dutuit 1, Hollstein 298, Bodart 75, only state
Archer M. Huntington Museum Fund, 1988.96
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Spanish, 1746–1828
Disparate general [General Folly], plate 9, from Los Proverbios or Disparates [The
Proverbs or Follies], circa 1815-1824
Etching and aquatint, Delteil 132, Harris 256, third state of three
The Teaching Collection of Marvin Vexler, '48, 1994.16
Wassily Kandinsky
Russian, 1866–1944
Lithographie fur die Fierte Bauhausmappe, from “Bauhaus Drucke – Neue Europäische
Graphik, 4te Mappe: Italienische und Russische Künstler” [Bauhaus Prints –
New European Graphics, 4th Portfolio: Italian and Russian Artists], 1922
Four color lithograph from four stones, Peters IV/8, Roethel 162, first state of two
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Gonzalez, 1989.102.8/11
Pablo Picasso
Spanish, 1881–1973
Seated Girl, frontispiece to Recordant el Reventós, 1951
Engraving and drypoint, Bloch 1837, only state
The Leo Steinberg Collection, 2002.2595
Assignment
Review the rules for viewing prints before you visit the print room. Once there, request to see one of the five prints that are on reserve for the freshman seminar students. Study the print carefully and write an essay that addresses the following questions:
RULES OF PROCEDURE FOR VISITING THE H-E-B STUDY ROOM IN THE JULIA MATTHEWS WILKINSON CENTER FOR PRINTS AND DRAWINGS
BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
The Department of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art is responsible for more than 15,000 works both in the permanent collection and on long-term loan. During your visit to the Print Room you will be viewing precious works up close and without a protective plexi-glass barrier. While this provides a unique study opportunity, it also makes the objects vulnerable. In order to preserve these works for the future use of scholars and students, we ask that you observe the following rules:
The department will do its best to accommodate every request to view works of art in the study room. Due to space and personnel constraints, the number of works viewed per visit may be limited by the person assisting you. If you know prior to visiting the study room which prints or drawings you would like to see, an appointment can be made in advance, allowing staff to reserve the space and gather materials ahead of time.
Class and group visits are limited to 20 people at a time,
and are by appointment only. Appointments for these larger groups must
be made at least two weeks in advance to ensure room and staff availability.
Professors and teaching assistants should advise their students of the rules
outlined above prior to bringing classes to the study room.
Office: Parlin 132
Fall Hours: Tu. 9:45-10:45, 5:45-6:15
Th 9:45-10:45, 3:15-3:45, and
by appointment
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