Conflicting Memories, a collaboration between the Salina Art Center and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, explores the role of art in creating and influencing a culture's record of its past.

The exhibition is organized in two sections. The first, drawn from the Spencer Museum's collection of prints, drawings, and photographs, will introduce the various ways that the idea of memory has been implicated in the arts. Works in this section will treat the notion of "the art of memory" (art as a mnemonic aid), memorials, and the idea of cultural memory. The second section of the project presents the works of contemporary artists who engage with the past by intertwining and overlaying cultural and personal memory, with a focus on specific cultural arenas. Contained in this section are works by Enrique Chagoya, Willie Cole, William Kentridge, Michael Krueger, Dinh Q Le, Deborah Muirhead, Roger Shimomura, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

Conflicting Memories was curated by Saralyn Reece Hardy, Director of the Salina Art Center, and Stephen Goddard, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Spencer, and both institutions will be host the exhibition, although the installations will differ slightly in content at each location. The exhibition will be at the Salina Art Center through January 25, 2004, and will travel to the Spencer February 7-April 4, 2004.

Conflicting Memories is sponsored in part by a grant from the Kansas Arts Commission.