Gerald O’Grady, a visiting professor at the School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, will discuss his upcoming exhibition and catalogue on Marshall McLuhan, who would have turned 100 on July 21, 2011, next week at York.
Right: Gerald O'Grady
For 50 of those years, O’Grady has been studying McLuhan’s work. Now, in celebration of the centenary, he has been asked to design an exhibition and write a catalogue for the Center for Art & Media Karlsruhe in Germany.
(W)rapping Around a Man with No Close, presented by York's Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, will take place Monday, Oct. 18 at 4pm in the Winters Senior Common Room, 021 Winters College, Keele campus.
Mindful that "every take is a mistake" – a dictum of the late American non-narrative filmmaker Stan Brakhage – O’Grady will present his "take" on McLuhan and answer questions about the problematics and the problems of such a proposed exhibition.
O'Grady was the founding director of the media centre at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and later of the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
He has been a visiting professor of media study at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research and New York University – all in New York City, and of the Department of Communications at the University of Texas. In recent years, he has been Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
He has published retrospective film catalogues for the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, and for the Japan Foundation, the Toronto International Film Festival and the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.