Wayne Gudmundson to deliver MSUM’S annual Dille lecture Thursday
Wayne Gudmundson, a Minnesota State University Moorhead mass communications professor, has been selected to deliver this year’s Roland and Beth Dille Distinguished Faculty Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24 in the campus Science Lab Building 104. A reception will follow in the atrium.
The title of his lecture is “Ancestral Landscapes: Iceland, Photography and Other Odd Bits.” It will trace the evolution of a long-term photo/writing project that explores a genealogical line back to a man named Grimur Kamban, who was the first settler of the Faeroe Islands around 825 A.D.
The photographs and travel journal entries examine specific family locations from south Moorhead, to Mountain, N.D., to and through Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, the British Isles and Norway.
Prairie Public Television followed Gudmundson to Iceland to explore the landscape and people that have inspired countless artists. The program, “A Photographer’s View of Iceland,” airs Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 9 p.m. and again Sunday, Sept. 27 at 6:30 p.m.
A well-known photographer, Gudmundson’s work has appeared in nine books and forms part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland.
A Fargo native, he graduated from MSUM in 1974 with degrees in education and mass communications and later earned a master of fine arts in photography from the University of Minnesota and a master of science in educational administration from Tri-College University. He joined the faculty here in 1989.
The Dille Fund for Excellence is a permanent endowment established in 1994 by the MSUM Alumni Foundation, through the generosity of MSUM alumni and friends, to honor the university’s former president, Roland Dille and his wife, Beth Dille. The endowment raised nearly $3.2 million in gifts and pledges in 1994 and supports annual grants and the Dille Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award.
Each year, the Dille Fund for Excellence Committee and the president select one MSUM faculty member to receive the Dille Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award, which is one of the highest honors MSUM bestows to its faculty. Being selected comes with a $1,200 prize.