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CORVALLIS - The rise and fall of "liberal-modernist" federally funded art projects is the subject of a lecture on Monday, May 20, at Oregon State University. Casey Blake, director of the American Studies Program at Columbia University, will speak on "Public Art and Civic Imagination in Contemporary America." His free public lecture begins at 4 p.m. in Memorial Union Room 206.

The lecture is part of OSU's American Culture and Politics Speaker Series, sponsored by the university's Department of History and the Horning Endowment.

In his lecture, Blake will make the case that liberal cultural policy-makers - beginning in the Kennedy era - looked to public art to provide a focal point for the reconstruction of urban civic space along crisp, modernistic lines. Federally funded public art thus not only had aesthetic value, he argues, but provided a stage for a public life overseen by liberal and modernist authorities.

Within two decades, however, the project "lay in ruins" as federally funded institutions found themselves under attack by Americans of divergent backgrounds and ideological commitments.

Blake is a professor of history and American studies at Columbia. He previously taught at Reed College, Washington University in St. Louis and Indiana University. He has written widely on cultural and art history and his lecture is derived from a book-in-progress called "Public Art and the American Civic Imagination."