President's Colloquium to explore art, history, marginalia

Presented by Andrea Eis, associate professor of art in the Department of Art and Art History, the event is set for 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 17, in the Oakland Center Banquet Rooms.

As a person who frequently writes her own notes in the margins of books, Eis was pleased to discover extensive notations in a series of 20 books found in the library at the International Center for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies in Athens, Greece.

The books were originally owned by an American woman, Meta Glass, in the early 1900s. The woman's handwritten notes so fascinated Eis that she launched a project over the course of several months to photograph the books, and has since worked to transform the images into her own fresh art.

Eis’s artworks are photographic fusions of ancient artifacts, classical texts, handwritten translators’ notes and contemporary spaces. Years of academic training in ancient Greek language and culture gave her a personal core of inspiration and knowledge, and a belief in the relevance of that knowledge.

In her art, the past is a series of stratified conversations to join in on, dialogues that can illuminate the present. The marginalia also represents a contemporaneous visual record of the workings of Meta Glass’s mind, whose presence is still vivid after one hundred years.

Eis’s presentation will explore her photographs, her efforts to collaborate with the original author of the Greek text, and to mingle with Meta Glass, to celebrate “the pleasure of words in the margins.”

A reception with heavy hors d’oeurves begins at 11:30 a.m. and the President’s Colloquium starts at noon. Seating for the event is by invitation only. For more information, call (248) 370-4915.