UNC Asheville’s annual Arts and Ideas Lecture will feature a talk by Jonathan D. Katz on “Art, Eros and the Sixties” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, at UNC Asheville’s Owen Conference Room. The lecture is based on his forthcoming book of the same name, which discusses social liberation and the collective capacity of art to free the mind through a return to the body. The noted GLBTQ scholar will examine how a diverse group of artists, from Andy Warhol to Yoko Ono, were driven by this concept to create the first international movement in contemporary art. The event is free and open to the public.

Katz is currently an associate professor of visual studies at the University at Buffalo, honorary research faculty at the University of Manchester and Terra Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute in London. He was the founding director of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, as well as founding chair of the first department of lesbian and gay studies in the United States, at the City College of San Francisco. Katz also founded the Harvey Milk Institute, the activist group Queer Nation-San Francisco and the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association. His exhibition, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” which opens in 2010 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, will be the first queer exhibition at a major museum in the nation.

For more information, call Brian Butler, UNC Asheville associate professor and chair of Philosophy, at 828/251-6272.