Artist Lecture: Laurie Beth Clark

Laurie Beth Clark will give a lecture in conjunction with OSSUARY opening Friday night at the UT Downtown Gallery. Three hundred artists have contributed to this Ossuary. Their work, in many media, includes single bones, clusters of bones, and art works inspired by, using, or playing with the idea of bones. These bones are political statements and personal elegies, memorials to individuals and statements about mortality. They represent connections to our ancestors and/or to our descendants. Some works are serious and some use bones in a completely playful manner.

Ossuary was developed in response to the repositories of bones that have accured in countries like Cambodia and Rwanda, but Ossuary is not a project about those traumas. Rather, Ossuary offers a poignant counter-image to mass violence. It is a project about the hope that art brings.