|
NEWS SERVICES |
NEWS
| For immediate use |
Aug. 1, 2003 -- No. 391 |
Photo Note: For photo availability, see end of story.
Promise of cultural institutions subject of professor’s new book
CHAPEL HILL -- Overscheduled and plenty stressed, Dr. David Carr almost didn’t take his scheduled trip one afternoon in the mid-1980s to the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City that documents the art and architecture of medieval Europe.
But he made himself go. "I said, ‘OK, this will be a test for the Cloisters.’ And I was transfixed by it. I became mindful of the important and much larger things in my life instead of the small ones that I was allowing to distract me."
Carr, now a associate professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, describes this effect in his new collection of essays, "The Promise of Cultural Institutions." Altamira Press of California is publishing the book as part of a series for the American Association for State and Local History. The cover design is Carr’s photo of an archway at the Cloisters.
He writes that institutions such as museums and libraries have great power to alter one’s sense of self and the world. That’s just what happened to him that day at the Cloisters. He was teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey and had taken a sabbatical to study museums. The first part of the day had been a typical working American’s scramble.
"We lead lives very much constrained by time, the situations in which we find ourselves and other people who have expectations of us," he said. "And we’re constrained by our own inability to be generous in our thoughts toward ourselves, so we tend to feel tension and frustration, and disabled, when in fact we’re extremely fortunate and powerful."
Carr sees the museum, the art gallery and the library as antidotes to these modern perils: "A cultural institution impels you to think more generous thoughts and more inclusive thoughts than the narrowness of everyday life seems to emphasize."
The Cloisters, for example, is filled with religious artifacts from other centuries. " You begin to think about the hands that made them, the beliefs that they represent and the kinds of thinking and lives that created these very meaningful and powerful objects," Carr said.
Carr came to UNC in 1998 from Rutgers, where he had taught since 1975. He received the Teaching Excellence Award from the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) in 1994 and was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year for 2000-01 in the UNC school.
- 30 -
Photo urls:
Contacts: Dr. David Carr, 919-962-8364, carr@ils.unc.edu; Catherine Lazorko, 919-843-8337, lazorko@unc.edu
