Christoph Irmscher

A first-of-its-kind institute will take place on the IU Bloomington campus, beginning July 6. The four-week Picturing John James Audubon summer institute will bring teachers from across the country to meet with experts on Audubon, American art, and natural history.

The institute is directed by IU Bloomington English Professor Christoph Irmscher and funded by a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant comes through the NEH's Picturing America initiative which is intended "to introduce Americans to their artistic heritage and to inspire them to become more informed citizens." The program features "carefully selected American masterpieces," including works from artists such as Gilbert Stuart, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mary Cassatt, and Dorothea Lange.

The Picturing John James Audubon Institute will immerse its participants in all things Audubon, including the works of three award-winning authors who are institute faculty members — recently retired IU Distinguished Professor of English and writer Scott Russell Sanders, author, most recently, of A Private History of Awe; poet Dave Smith, chairman of the Hopkins Writing Seminar; and Canadian novelist Katherine Govier, author of Creation, a novel about Audubon. Also participating in the institute will be PBS filmmakers Diane Garey and Larry Hott, who directed Drawn from Nature, an "American Masters" documentary about John James Audubon, for which Irmscher served as a consultant and interview subject.

Painter and author John James Audubon, for whom the Audubon Society is named, is perhaps best known for his life-sized "Birds of America" drawings that chronicled more than 400 species of birds in the 1800s. Lesser known are his prolific — and sometimes grammatically incorrect and risqué — writings about life and nature.

Irmscher is part of a small group of archival scholars for whom Audubon's writings are at least as interesting as his paintings.

"I always say Audubon is the first great American artist of international distinction, but he's also one of the first great nature writers in the American tradition," says Irmscher, who wrote The Poetics of Natural History, a book that sought to rehabilitate Audubon as a writer, and co-edited the forthcoming ecocritical anthology, A Keener Perception, with art historian Alan Braddock of Temple University. "As a nature writer, Audubon deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson," he says.

One particular problem with looking back at Audubon's written work is that his writings were censored by his granddaughter, Irmscher says, particularly the journals. "She destroyed some and ended up rewriting others out of a notion of Victorian propriety," he says.

Much of the institute at IU will take place at IU's Lilly Library, one of the foremost repositories of rare books and manuscripts in the world and home to unparalleled Audubon resources, among them a pristine set of Audubon's Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America and an early, paper-wrapped edition of the Royal Octavo edition of the same work.

He may have been "a pretty wild man" and even crass at times, but Audubon was a multilingual, cosmopolitan visionary, according to Irmscher. Unlike mainstream artists who produced unique works of art destined for private ownership, Audubon was interested in making his work available to others through prints. He traveled to England for that very purpose, where an engraver painstakingly reproduced the works in what was then a complicated process.

"It's unusual for art," Irmscher says. "We tend to think of artists as solitary geniuses who produce exceptional masterpieces, but, from the beginning, Audubon wanted to produce these images as prints so people could have all of the birds of America in their hands, so to speak."

For more information about the Picturing James Audubon Institute, see http://sites.google.com/a/indiana.edu/picturing-john-james-audubon/.

For more information on the NEH Picturing America series, see http://picturingamerica.neh.gov/.