The Mitchell Center in collaboration with Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston and the University of Houston School of Art, is pleased to announce that it will host It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, a new exhibition by Turner Prize-winning British artist Jeremy Deller commissioned and produced by Creative Time and the New Museum.

The project will encourage public discussion of the history, present circumstances, and future of Iraq through unscripted, nonpartisan conversations in cities across the country. These talks will be held in public sites such as shopping malls and parks by guest experts Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, who were selected by Deller. Jeremy Deller will give a free lecture at the Glassell School of Art hosted by the MFAH Core Residency Program.

Also traveling with the experts is a car destroyed in a bombing on Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad in March 2007. This tragedy killed over thirty people, and has taken on added significance because the street, named after a well-known Iraqi poet, was the site of numerous book markets and cafés, and was considered the nexus of Baghdadi cultural and intellectual life. The car is meant to ground conversations in the facts, figures, and eyewitness descriptions that have been lacking in most information about the Iraq war, and is intended to serve as a visual aid to prompt open dialogue and civil conversation. Extensive information about the project can be found at www.conversationsaboutiraq.org.

This museum show traveling by RV will be on view in Houston on the following dates at the following locations:

THURSDAY APRIL 9
Location: Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center, University of Houston (Entrance 16 off Cullen Blvd FREE ADMISSION
Information: 713-743-5749
Artist Talk: 7:00pm at MFAH CORE, Glassell School of Art

FRIDAY APRIL 10
Location: Emancipation Park, Elgin & Dowling Streets
FREE ADMISSION
Information: 713-743-5749