Events

Grad Art Announces Spring 2021 Contemporary Curatorial Workshop Guests

Each semester bi-weekly Contemporary Curatorial Workshops are available for students studying contemporary art and curatorial practice. Students present on-going curatorial projects, undertake studio and site visits, host local and visiting curators for presentations, and explore key topics in modern and contemporary art and curatorial practice. This spring’s guests include:… Continue reading »

New Ecologies Series at Williams College Museum of Art: Sustenance

This interdisciplinary conversation explores the reciprocal ways we nourish and are nourished by both land and community. Bringing together a range of creative practitioners working at the intersections of artistic practice, land stewardship, education, food studies, and activism, this program touches on topics including food justice, ritual, consumption, care, and… Continue reading »

GROUND/WORK Campus Talk: Analia Saban

From October 6 – 31, enjoy an outdoor, socially distanced hike to one of the Ground/work objects at 1 pm, Tuesdays through Sundays. On Saturdays, join Clark educators for a guided walk and conversation about Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw . Meet on the Fernández Terrace. Walks may involve uneven terrain… Continue reading »

Clark Fellow Virginia Burrus presents, “Curating Earthquakes: Between Ballroom Marfa’s ‘Hyperobjects’ (2018) and Jerome’s Life of St. Hilarion (390).”

This lecture explores the relation between memory and place, shuttling between Marfa, Texas, and Paphos, Cyprus, a contemporary exhibition and a fourth-century literary work. Earthquakes, and larger dynamics of destruction and resilience, provide a particular point of convergence, as the lecture engages both memory and place in their intimately material… Continue reading »

Clark Connects with Bénédicte Boisseron

Join Bénédicte Boisseron, professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, for a conversation about animality and otherness. Boisseron, who is the author of Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia University Press, 2018), will be in dialogue with associate curator of contemporary projects Robert Wiesenberger. This conversation is… Continue reading »

Lin May Saeed: Arrival of the Animals Catalogue Launch

Clark editor Kevin Bicknell and exhibition curator Robert Wiesenberger review the soon-to-be-released catalogue for Lin May Saeed: Arrival of the Animals with a discussion of the book’s form and contents. Please supply a valid email address to reserve your spot in the Zoom meeting. Participants will either need to have internet access… Continue reading »

In the Foreground: “Unpacking my Identity”: Genevieve Gaignard on Race in America and the Impossibility of Home

The Research and Academic Program presents “Unpacking My Identity”: Genevieve Gaignard on Race in America and the Impossibility of Home. Caroline Fowler, Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark, speaks with Genevieve Gaignard, a Los Angeles-based artist whose mixed-media practice explores the intersections of race, class, and femininity within… Continue reading »

Clark Connects with Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

Join Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, for a conversation on nineteenth-century drawing and the role of the body image. Lajer-Burcharth, whose research spans from eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art to contemporary art, as well as feminist and… Continue reading »

Clark Connects with Pia Camil and Mari Rodríguez Binnie

Join artist Pia Camil as she discusses her work and her current exhibition at the Clark, Velo Revelo. Camil, whose work explores the histories of fashion and postwar painting as well as questions of privacy, publicity, and femininity, will be in conversation with Mari Rodríguez Binnie, Assistant Professor of Art… Continue reading »

Clark X Williams Art Connect With Denise Murrell

Join the Clark and the Williams College Art Department for a conversation with Denise Murrell, Associate Curator of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator of the acclaimed exhibition Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse shown at the Musée d’Orsay in 2019. Dr. Murrell will be joined… Continue reading »

Michael Rakowitz in Conversation

This interdisciplinary panel with artist Michael Rakowitz and scholars Magnus Bernhardsson, Alison Gruseke, and Kirsten Scheid explores the historical context and contemporary resonance of Rakowitz’s installation “The invisible enemy should not exist (Room Z, Northwest Palace of Nimrud).” This event is preceded by a gallery viewing and reception at… Continue reading »

Annual Whitney Stoddard Lecture–Kelema Lee Moses

Kelema Lee Moses is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Occidental College whose work focuses on critical contemporary issues in the architectural and urban landscape of Pacific island cities. Her current book project, Island Modernism/Island Urbanism: Encountering Statehood in Honolulu, Hawai’i, suggests that island cities offer a place-based perspective… Continue reading »

Scholar lecture: THE (TRANS)FORMATION OF AIR-CONDITIONING COMPLEXES

Manton Fellow Jiat-Hwee Chang presents “The (Trans)formation of Air-conditioning Complexes: Architectural Histories and Futures from Asia.” How did cities and urban populations around the world become dependent on air-conditioning? How did air-conditioning dependency transform built environment, material culture, and social practices? This lecture seeks to explore these questions by… Continue reading »

Artist Talk: Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of imagination. She draws from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction to make things that offer a phenomenological experience. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019 @ 6:00 pm Lawrence Hall, 231… Continue reading »

Scholar Lecture: CURATING “JERUSALEM ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE”: POLITICAL LESSONS FROM A NON-EUCLIDEAN CITY

Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Kirsten Scheid presents “Curating Jerusalem Actual and Possible: Political Lessons from a non-Euclidean City.” Treating an exhibition not as a representation but a “system of action,” reveals how it provides participants with a “critical space,” i.e., a semi-physical, sensorially alter-space. In this lecture, Scheid examines an… Continue reading »

Scholarly lecture: MATERIAL MATTERS: RACE AND MATERIALITY IN THE DECORATIVE ARTS

Curatorial Fellow Adrienne Childs presents “Material Matters: Race and Materiality in the Decorative Arts.” A seventeenth-century ebony “blackamoor” cabinet, an eighteenth-century sterling silver slave candlestick, and a twenty-first-century black Murano glass chandelier are examples of decorative arts that figure into Childs’s examination of what she calls “Ornamental Blackness.” Childs… Continue reading »

Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art

Kenturah Davis is the featured speaker in this fall’s Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art. Kenturah Davis is an artist working between Los Angeles, New Haven, Conn., and Accra (Ghana). Her work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, she explores… Continue reading »

Clark Fellow lecture–Susan Gagliardi: “Mapping Senufo”

Clark Fellow Susan Gagliardi presents “Mapping Senufo: Rethinking the Scholarly Monograph in the Era of Digital Publication.” What might research and the publication of results look like if scholars producing them integrated decades of theories about the construction of identities and the politics of knowledge production into their work… Continue reading »

Scholar Lecture–Jared Sexton-“Basic Black”

Beinecke Fellow Jared Sexton presents “Basic Black.” What would happen, what would be enabled theoretically and practically if we re-imagined and re-envisioned all color and all colors as blackness in the most expansive sense? Thinking about the universe (of color) as black tout court presents the challenge of addressing… Continue reading »

Clark Symposium: THE ART ACADEMY OUTSIDE EUROPE

This public symposium will undertake a collective and comparative study of the art academy outside Europe and the United States as a way of defamiliarizing art and its associated practices in a global context. Speakers will examine case studies of institutions in Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, Japan, China, Colombia, Iran,… Continue reading »

Emilie Boone on James Van Der Zee’s Photography

A talk at WCMA on James Van Der Zee’s Photography by Emilie Boone, Assistant Professor of Art History in the African American Studies Department at CUNY New York City College of Technology.  The talk will look at some of Van Der Zee’s lesser-known studio practices, considering them within the scope of… Continue reading »

Talk, Vincent Valdez

Vincent Valdez is most recognized for his monumental portrayal of the contemporary figure. His drawn and painted subjects remark on a universal struggle within various sociopolitical arenas and eras. “My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds… Continue reading »

Stoddard Lecture: Barry Bergdoll

Professor Bergdoll’s broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1750. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics… Continue reading »

Talk, Dave McKenzie

Dave McKenzie is a visual artist who uses video, performance, and text to explore how and why subjects engage-with and become-with one another. Through simple gestures and an exploration of popular culture, language, and politics, McKenzie’s work reveals complex layers of meaning. In 2004, while an artist-in-residence at The Studio… Continue reading »

Alternative Art Histories: Future Directions in U.S. Latinx Art

Alternative Art Histories is a two-day symposium focused on U.S. Latinx art and art history. The symposium will bring together leading museum curators, museum directors, and art historians to discuss the aesthetic contribution of U.S. Latinx arts and how we might (re)imagine art history as a more aesthetically expansive, culturally… Continue reading »

24th ANNUAL GRADUATE PROGRAM SYMPOSIUM

The Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art Class of 2019 presents scholarly papers in its annual symposium. This keystone academic event is free and open to the public. FRIDAY MAY 31, 2019 9:00 am-5:00 pm Clark Art Institute Manton Auditorium… Continue reading »

JUDITH M. LENETT MEMORIAL LECTURE

Nora Rosengarten, the Judith M. Lenett Memorial Fellow, Williams College MA Class of 2019, discusses the subject of her yearlong conservation fellowship at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center: two early-nineteenth century globes produced by Josiah Loring in Boston, Massachusetts from the collection of Williams’s Chapin Library. Among the first… Continue reading »

Season Celebration-Williams College Museum of Art

Raise a glass to our spring exhibitions: “possible selves: queer foto vernaculars,” “James Van Der Zee: Collecting History,” “Uncovering Williams,” “New Painting,” and “Object Lab.” Remarks 5:30 PM, followed by a series of student performances responding to exhibitions. Featuring dance group CoDA, students from the Advanced Poetry Workshop, musicians Lily… Continue reading »

Fellows Lecture: IN QUEST OF THE GORGON’S HEAD

Clark Fellow Celeste Olalquiaga presents “In Quest of the Gorgon’s Head.” The terrifying Medusa of mythical fame is a reinterpretation of an archaic apotropaion, or protective emblem, the Gorgoneion. Greek classic culture transformed this protective figure into a destructive one, creating a paradoxical icon of female fury and power. Continue reading »

Fellows Lecture: THE ART OF COMMODITIES: MEDIEVAL VENICE

Mellon Decade Fellow Philippe Cordez presents “The Art of Commodities: Medieval Venice.” Since the twelfth century, Europe has seen a steady increase of highly specialized objects produced in large quantities, involving a variety of materials, techniques, ornaments, images, and functions, the very first of which was to be sold. Continue reading »

Scholar Lecture: LOUISE NEVELSON: MODERNIST DRAG

Robert Sterling Clark Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson presents “Louise Nevelson: Modernist Drag.” This talk investigates the work of sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), in particular her all-black wood-based reliefs—a formal idiom she pursued for decades—to argue for a politics of queer commitment, persistence, and excess. TUESDAY APRIL 2, 2019… Continue reading »

Fellows Lecture: STRATEGIC INVISIBILITIES: MIGRATION AND POST-REPRESENTATION

Clark Fellow Jennifer Bajorek presents “Strategic Invisibilities: Migration and Post-Representation.” This lecture explores work about migrants and migration in contemporary France. Bajorek thinks with artistic strategies that decenter the migrant as an anchor of truth and rights claims, and that privilege instead abstraction, redaction, non-representational cartography, occupation, and post-participatory… Continue reading »

Fellows Lecture: ALMA THOMAS AND THE GRAPHICAL PICTURE PLANE

Mellon Network Fellow Kris Cohen presents “Alma Thomas and the Graphical Picture Plane.” This talk describes how Alma Thomas’s Earth Paintings address, in ways both belied and surprisingly revealed by the language of abstraction, nascent configurations of the computer screen and the forms of labor and personhood associated with… Continue reading »

Fellows Lecture: JOHN SINGER SARGENT AND THE MATTER OF PAINT

Clark Fellow Susan Sidlauskas presents “John Singer Sargent and the Matter of Paint.” The cosmopolitan son of a physician, John Singer Sargent dissolved the distinctions among fabric, flesh, and paint with the pictorial equivalent of dissection and its counter-activities: masking, binding, suturing, folding, and wrapping, sometimes within the very… Continue reading »

Season Celebration at WCMA

WCMA’s Season Celebration Meet our new Class of 1956 Director Pamela Franks and celebrate our fall exhibitions: The Field is the World, Kay Sage: Serene Surrealist, Anicka Yi: Our Love Is Bigger Than an AIDS Quilt, Diana Al-Hadid: Delirious Matter, and Object Lab. Remarks at 5:30pm. WCMA October 18th … Continue reading »

Lecture: Jill Casid — Necrolandscaping on the Border

Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Jill Casid presents “Necrolandscaping on the Border.” In recent calls for an ecological aesthetics capable of reckoning with global Anthropocene crisis, landscape’s colonial and neo-colonial dreamwork, master-of-all-I-survey perspectives, and distanced way of seeing that reduces nature to object appear under the sign of negation. However, as I… Continue reading »

Michael Hartman–OPENING LECTURE: EXTREME NATURE!

Nature’s limitless possibilities inspired nineteenth-century artists who transformed hazardous weather, natural disasters, and the Earth’s darkest caverns into awe-inspiring portrayals of natural phenomena. Curator Michael Hartman, Williams MA ’18 and current PhD student at the University of Delaware, examines how the rise of popular science transpired into a cultural… Continue reading »

Lecture: JOHN MCHALE AND THE DISSOLVING ARCHITECTURE OF POP

Beinecke Fellow Mark Wigley presents, “John McHale and the Dissolving Architecture of Pop.” The British artist John McHale made some of the most radical and prophetic propositions about art, information, media, ecology, education, social life, prosthetics, the body, buildings, and the brain in the post-war years, yet has remained… Continue reading »

Talk Together: Cultural Appropriation

This week’s conversation around “Dance We Must,” which has been shaped jointly by WCMA staff and students, will explore the following: What do we make of the phrases cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation? How do we negotiate the categories of inspiration versus exploitation in the arts? How might/should cultural institutions… Continue reading »

Berthe Morisot and the Making of Modernity

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris attracted women artists from around the world, drawn to the city’s academies, museums, studios, and salons. Guest lecturer Nicole Myers, Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, discusses the often-overlooked work of these artists, as well as… Continue reading »

A Conversation with Jennifer Steinkamp

Join Senior Curator Esther Bell as she welcomes Jennifer Steinkamp for a one-on-one conversation in conjunction with the exhibition Jennifer Steinkamp: Blind Eye, the groundbreaking video installation on view in the Lunder Center at Stone Hill from June 30–October 8. Saturday, June 30, 2018 11:00-12:00 Manton Auditorium… Continue reading »

Senior Studio Art Exhibition and Reception

On Friday, May 11, the art department welcomes you to join the opening reception of It’s Not Nothing: The Senior Studio Art Exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The exhibition features the work of nine Williams College studio art majors: Hudson Bohr, Julia Cancio,… Continue reading »

The Landscape of the Modern Museum: A Conversation

What role does the modern museum play in the landscape and community in which it resides? How does leadership navigate the delicate line between stewardship and evolution? Clark Director Olivier Meslay joins Clark Grounds Manager Matthew Noyes, Chief Apiary Inspector and Apiary Program Coordinator at the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural… Continue reading »

Close Look with Artist Lordy Rodriguez

Close Look: Mapping Stories Professor of Geoscience José Constantine and Artist Lordy Rodriguez discuss Rodriguez’s conceptual maps that visualize global relationships, history, and culture. Tuesday, April 3 at 4:00pm Williams College Museum of Art–Object Lab gallery… Continue reading »

Yasmine Taan lecture: Establishing an Arab Modern Visual Culture

Yasmine Nachabe Taan, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Design at the Lebanese American University, will discuss the breadth and depth in Hilmi al-Tuni’s illustrations and Abdulkader Arnaout’s typographic work. She will first highlight Arnaout’s contribution to the development of a rich repertoire of Arabic typographic styles, and… Continue reading »

Lumi Tan: Envisioning Curatorial Practice

Lumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions and produces performances with artists across disciplines and generations. She co-curated From Minimalism into Algorithm (2016), a year-long performance and exhibition series. Recently, she has worked with installation artist Sara Magenheimer, performance artist Danh Vo, and… Continue reading »

Other Uses Film series at EMPAC– Ulysses Jenkins

Curated by Lucas Matheson, Williams Graduate Program MA ’18, the fifth screening in EMPAC’s Other Uses film series features the work of Ulysses Jenkins, whose videos examine television’s power to shape current events and historical episodes.Ulysses Jenkins is an artist who has given particular consideration to the portrayal of… Continue reading »

Nina Dubin Lecture: Master of the World

Clark Visiting Professor Nina Dubin presents “Master of the World.” In the wake of the world’s first international financial crisis, Cupid claimed pride of place in French eighteenth-century art. The naked, winged infant deity personified not only the folly of love, but also the forces of inconstancy, mutability, and… Continue reading »

Daniel Savoy Lecture: Food for the Soul

Holly Fellow Daniel Savoy presents “Food for the Soul: Michelangelo, the Laurentian Library, and the Body’s Spiritual Nourishment.” In his celebrated book, The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961), the late James Ackerman (1919–2016) interpreted the Library of S. Lorenzo in Florence as a cohesive, living body, engaged in physiological dialogue… Continue reading »

Opening lecture–The Art of Iron

Before the advent of modern building materials, iron was used for everything from architectural gates and grills to household implements. Exhibition curator Kathleen Morris discusses some of the extraordinary objects included in the exhibition and what they tell us about bygone customs. Sunday, June 24  3-4pm Manton Auditorium… Continue reading »

Women Artists in Paris–Opening lecture by Esther Bell

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris attracted international women artists, drawn to the city’s academies, museums, studios, and salons. Curator Esther Bell considers the influential, often-overlooked work of these artists, as well as the barriers they encountered to their artistic education and expression. Women Artists in… Continue reading »

Getting a Read On : The Body

A new program series called Getting A Read On The Body will happen at WCMA, the first installment of which will take place Thursday, Jan 11 at 5:30 PM in WCMA’s Reading Room. Come for some tea and conversation around the recent acquisition of Nude, Harlem by James Van… Continue reading »

Joseph Rodriguez, Acclaimed Documentary Photographer, to Speak

Internationally recognized documentary photographer, Joseph Rodriguez, will speak about his life-long passion for recording the stories of people whose lives are often ignored by mainstream narratives. A recipient of the “Pictures of the Year Award” by the National Press Photographers Association, Mr. Rodriquez is the author… Continue reading »

Public Lecture: The Hagiography of Place

Mellon Decade Fellow Kevin Carr presents, “The Hagiography of Place: Illustrated Legends of the Zenkōji Triad and the Formation of Sacred Cartographies in Medieval Japan.” In medieval Japan, why did people make pilgrimages and donate to religious centers? What role did the visual arts, material culture, ritual, cartography, and… Continue reading »

Public Lecture: Take Two: On The Origins Of Graphic Design

Mellon Decade Fellow Renzo Baldasso presents, “Take Two: On the Origins of Graphic Design in Printed Books.” The lecture will focus on graphics revisions found in books from Gutenberg’s Bible to the Jenson’s early publications. Analysis of examples of page-design revisions will shed light on the origins of graphic… Continue reading »

Public Lecture: Rococo Thought Patterns

Lauren Cannady presents “Rococo Thought Patterns.” If eighteenth-century curiosity cabinets were repositories for the dead and ossified, the garden was a parallel cabinet that provided a space for the viable, for living curiosities. Given that the organizing principal of the garden parterre was applied not only to plants, but… Continue reading »

Public Lecture: Titus Kaphar Speaks: Making Space For Black History

Mixed media artist Titus Kaphar presents a free lecture, “Making Space for Black History: Amending the Landscape of American Art,” as part of Claiming Williams Day, a campus-wide program at Williams College that focuses on building and sustaining a more inclusive community. Kaphar—who demonstrates “the deliberateness of a surgeon coupled… Continue reading »

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