Exhibition Showcases Literature About
Baseball, Boxing, Football and Other Sports
 
AUSTIN, Texas—“Literature and Sport,” an exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center, showcases the literature of sport through fiction, essays, poetry and plays. The exhibition runs from June 11 to Aug. 4, 2013, at the Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin.
Featuring more than 150 items drawn entirely from the Ransom Center’s collections, the exhibition is organized by sport and highlights some of the finest examples of literary writing about baseball, football, boxing, tennis, cricket, bullfighting and other sports. Writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Marianne Moore, Joyce Carol Oates and David Foster Wallace have written about sport. But their works are no mere play-by-play accounts of a ball game or tennis match or prizefight. The competition, spectacle, personal struggle and exaggerated personalities so characteristic of sport offer writers the perfect backdrop upon which to look deeply into human nature and create literature that transcends sport itself.
“The Ransom Center’s collections are filled with rich, masterfully written works about sport, works that reflect the complexities of life, from its challenges and disappointments to its great pleasures,” said Megan Barnard, curator and assistant director for acquisitions and administration.
From Bernard Malamud‘s “The Natural” to Mailer’s “The Fight,” great literary works capture the appeal of sport and its ability to transform both the individual and society, all the while demonstrating through lyricism and verbal dexterity how writers elevate language to literature. Corrected drafts, handwritten manuscripts, letters, photographs, books, art and other items offer visitors a unique, rarely seen view of these works and their authors’ creative processes.
Some highlights in the exhibition include manuscripts of Wallace’s writings on tennis, DeLillo’s writings on baseball, Mailer’s writings on boxing and Hemingway’s writings on bullfighting; scripts and props related to Robert De Niro’s films “Raging Bull” and “Bang the Drum Slowly;” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s golf clubs.
High-resolution press images from the exhibition are available.
“Literature and Sport” can be seen in the Ransom Center Galleries on Tuesdays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended Thursday hours to 7 p.m. On Saturdays and Sundays the galleries are open from noon to 5 p.m. The galleries are closed on Mondays.
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Exhibition Highlights Work Influenced by Harry Ransom Center’s Collections
 
The Harry Ransom Center presents “Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive,” an exhibition created in cooperation with the Lakes Were Rivers collective, an Austin-based group of artists working in photography and video.
 
Members of the collective created a body of work influenced in some way by the Ransom Center — its space, its purpose, its collections. About 50 new works are displayed alongside Ransom Center collection materials chosen by the artists. The pairings highlight how archives and cultural collections stimulate new ideas and creative acts.
The exhibition runs from June 11 through Aug. 4 at the Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin.
The 11 artists in the Lakes Were Rivers collective focused on the process of discovery, on moments when the unexpected occurred and an unanticipated relationship between the Ransom Center collections and the artists’s own work became apparent. Photographic concepts of material, time and illusion shaped their encounters with the collections.
 
For example, Jason Reed discovered a remarkable kinship between his photographs of the Texas-Mexico border and those taken by W.D. Smithers nearly a century ago. Mike Osborne was intrigued by photographic surveys of rivers becoming lakes, directly linking the collective’s name to material in the archive. Barry Stone saw parallels between his practice of purposefully introducing glitches in digital image data and earlier technical photographic experiments by Alvin Langdon Coburn and others. Susan Shahan responded to textures and structure in the archive, and Anna Krachey was captivated by degrees of translucency and opacity.
Items from the Ransom Center’s collection represented in the exhibition include photographs by Ansel Adams and Man Ray, manuscripts from the Herschel family papers and the E. E. Cummings archive, William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” an embellished Maurice Ravel score and props from the Robert De Niro collection.
 
The Lakes Were Rivers artists are: Leigh Brodie, Elizabeth Chiles, Anna Krachey, Jessica Mallios, Sarah Murphy, Mike Osborne, Jason Reed, Ben Ruggiero, Adam Schreiber, Susan Shahan and Barry Stone. The collective takes its name from the fact that all the lakes in Texas except one were made from rivers.
 
High-resolution press images from the exhibition are available.
 
“Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive” can be seen in the Ransom Center Galleries on Tuesdays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended Thursday hours to 7 p.m. On Saturdays and Sundays the galleries are open from noon to 5 p.m. The galleries are closed on Mondays.
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