APSU Provost Lecture Series: Art professor Barry Jones to present Common Hope on September 26th

Clarksville, TN – An Austin Peay State University art professor will present the next session of the Provost Lecture Series this week at APSU.

Barry Jones, interim chair of the APSU Department of Art, will present at 3:00pm, Thursday, September 26th, in the Morgan University Center, Room 303. His lecture will be about the “Common Hope” community art project he developed this year.

Throughout the spring semester, Jones visited local public institutions, such as schools, churches and community and senior centers. Armed with a digital audio recorder, he asked everyone from children to senior citizens, conservatives to liberals, four simple questions. What are your hopes and dreams? What is the most important thing in your life? What does it mean to live a good life? What are our responsibilities to each other?

“My theory was that the hopes and dreams of a child in elementary school would be very similar to the hopes and dreams of a senior citizen, and I set out to prove it,” Jones said. “What I’m looking for are those common hopes. And when we talk about responsibility, everybody says we have to take care of each other. We may disagree on how, but it’s nice that we all want to do it.”

Typographic animation of the responses was projected onto public buildings throughout Clarksville last spring. The result, along with the audio responses, made it seem as if the buildings were talking.

All sessions of the Provost Lecture Series are free and open to the public.

Jones is a professor of art at APSU, and he lives in Clarksville with his wife, Jennifer, and their four children: Marlena, Aidan, Hope and Elliott. Jones has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally, but he is most proud of his public projects in Clarksville, the Southwest Virginia Mental Health Institute and with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill’s South Carolina chapter.

Sessions of the Provost Lecture Series also can be viewed in real time via online streaming. Other sessions in the Provost Lecture Series also are planned for the academic year. All sessions are from 3:00pm-4:30pm in the MUC, Room 303.

The Provost Lecture Series seeks to foster a spirit of intellectual and scholarly inquiry among faculty, staff and students. The program will be used as a platform for APSU faculty members who are recent recipients of provost summer grants, who have been awarded faculty development leaves and who have engaged in recent scholarly inquiry during sabbatical leaves.

For more information about the Provost Lecture Series, call Dr. Brian Johnson, assistant vice president of academic affairs at APSU, at 931.221.7992 or email him at johnsonb@apsu.edu.

APSU Provost Lecture Series Schedule