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 »
Art Worlds of Brazil / Os Mundos da Arte no Brasil is a series of pre-recorded lectures that will be shared between September 2020 and June 2021, in anticipation of the 35th Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) World Congress: “Motion: Migrations” to be held in São Paulo… Continue reading »
The conservation, preservation, and restoration of material culture has historically been closely joined to artistic practice and the study of the history of art. Over the last century, art conservation, art making, and the discipline of art history have become increasingly specialized… Continue reading »
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 »
In this works-in-progress event, Braggs shares part two of her “Grace” series, “Runnin’ to Grace,” a short video performance that reflects her observations as Black faculty navigating the pandemic daily and teaching in hybrid mode throughout the fall semester at Williams College. This performance-in-progress event is prefaced by introductory and… Continue reading »
Trevor Paglen: Machine Visions: The advent of computer vision and various forms of machine learning and artificial intelligence have led us to a strange turning point in the history of images: the preponderance of images in the world are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the… Continue reading »
Artists Alice Aycock, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Rona Pondick come together in conversation with Pamela Franks, director of the Williams College Museum of Art, Lisa Dorin, deputy director and curator of contemporary art, and Elyse Mack (MA ’20), curator of In The Public Eye, a recent exhibition at the Williams College… Continue reading »
In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing considers what it means to make art history, how knowledge is shared (or obscured), and the way histories are made—and unmade—while also considering the personal stakes of scholarship. Each episode offers a lively, in-depth look into the life and mind of a… Continue reading »
In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing considers what it means to make art history, how knowledge is shared (or obscured), and the way histories are made—and unmade—while also considering the personal stakes of scholarship. Each episode offers a lively, in-depth look into the life and mind of a… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
In conjunction with the opening of A Change in the Light: The Cliché-verre in Nineteenth-Century France, Andrew Kensett, exhibition curator and 2020 graduate of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, will give a talk exploring the history of the hybrid cliché-verre printing process and its adoption by a… Continue reading »
The Research and Academic Program presents “How to Look with Soft Eyes”: Darby English on Description as Method, the first episode of Season 2 of its podcast, In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. Caroline Fowler, Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark, speaks with Darby English, the Carl… Continue reading »
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 »
Visual artist Jessica Vaughn will discuss her studio practice, and upcoming projects that focus on the metaphoric and real transmissions between concepts of labor, space, compliance, and race in the workplace. Inclusive of projects from 2017 to the present, Vaughn will highlight artworks currently on view at Mass MoCA, the… Continue reading »
This urban history lecture examines sex workers’ residences and places of solicitation, situating them in relation to members of their professional network, including their procurers, some of whom were gondoliers. Mapping these locations in relation to pedestrian and boat routes reveals a spatial syntax that connected sex work with the… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
Among the most prominent collaborative works involving both an African American and Asian American artist, Black & White (1993) by Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim occupies something of exemplary space in an art history particularly attuned to multiculturalism and its analogues. I argue that its urgency lies in how deftly it revealed… Continue reading »
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 »
The Research and Academic Program presents “The Object of Performance—A Conversation among Artists, Curators, and Critics.” At this public roundtable, artists Genevieve Gaignard, Jeffrey Gibson, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons will discuss learning from the past to produce new narratives for the spaces of the nation’s historic museums. Cheryl Finley… Continue reading »
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 »
Center for Spain in America Fellow Julie A. Harris presents, “The Elusive Line between Ornament and Meaning in the Ornamental Carpet Pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles (c. 1260–1320).” Full-page “carpet pages” in the Hebrew Bibles of Iberia, like their counterparts in Insular Gospels, functioned as frontispieces to the books… Continue reading »
Manton Post-doctoral Fellow Caitlin R. Woolsey presents “New Old Media: Tape, Type, and the Undiscovered Collages of Henri Chopin.” Henri Chopin (1922–2008) is known for mining expression beyond language in layered “audiopoems,” created by manipulating his voice and body noises with a portable tape recorder, and graphic concrete poems… Continue reading »
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 »
Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, is one of the foremost historians of early modern Europe and has authored ten books on aspects of this subject, including New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, which won the Los… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Darby English, the exhibition scholar for the American Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, will discuss Swallowed Sun, the featured sculpture in Liberty/Libertà, the exhibition by contemporary artist Martin Puryear, the 2019 United States representative to this year’s Biennale. SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 2:00 pm-3:00 pm Clark… Continue reading »
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 Jessica Horton presents “Earth Diplomacy: Diné Arts of Reciprocity, 1966–1968.” From 1966 to 1968, the United States government commissioned Diné (Navajo) artists Bertha and Fred Stevens to demonstrate weaving and sandpainting across Eurasia and Latin America, ostensibly as an exercise of Cold War “soft power.” Drawing upon… Continue reading »
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 »
Anthony Grafton considers the meaning and relevance of margin notes found in Renaissance texts. In this period, educated readers went through their texts pen in hand. They underlining passages, adding references to names and short summaries in the margins, and interpreting or responding to the text. Most marginalia were… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Adam Lerner is the Mark G. Falcone “MaFa” Director and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. His talk will explore the role of authenticity in his unique approach to museum programming that combines curatorial, education, and artistic production. Co-presented with the Graduate Program in Art History. Sat,… Continue reading »
Kyla Schuller (Rutgers, author, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century), will be speaking on the 1950s invention of gender, as well as a new way of conceptualizing sex/gender that differentiates on the basis of scale, rather than substance. Mel Y. Chen (UC Berkeley;… Continue reading »
University of Chicago Assistant Professor of Art Seth Estrin is a historian of the art, archaeology, and visual cultures of ancient Greece. His research explores the making and viewing of art as a form of social practice in the ancient world, and engages with current theoretical discourses in art history… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and has been published as well in… Continue reading »
Mel Y. Chen presents “Arts of Agitation” This talk considers “agitation” as an interaction between bodily and political being. My attention to agitation has emerged as the last aspect of a study of chemical intimacies, wherein intoxication has operated as a projection in the congealment of race, disability, and time… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
“Indigeneity” and the Cultural Production of Mexico’s Pueblos Originarios: A Panel Discussion with Citlali Fabián, Ana Daisy Alonso Ortiz, Isaura de los Santos Mendoza and Amal Eqeiq; moderated by Roxana Blancas-Curiel. This panel discussion, organized in conjunction with the exhibition of two photographic series by Citlali Fabián, centers on… Continue reading »
Artist Daniel Kukla discusses his practice and the intersections of photography, landscape, and environmentalism. Conversation moderated by students Elyse Mack MA ’20, Nanase Shirokawa ’19, Perry Weber ’19, and Maggie Wu MA ’19. Thursday March 7 6PM Williams College Museum of Art … Continue reading »
Citlali Fabián, an Oaxacan photographer, will give an artist’s talk on her Mestiza Portrait Series displayed on the 1st and 2nd floor lobbies of Hollander Hall. The opening reception is on Monday, March 4 at 4pm and a second walk through with the artist is on Wednesday, March 6… Continue reading »
Meets Monday February 18th with artist and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden in WCMA’s Rose Study Gallery 4-6pm. All current grad students invited to attend. Continue reading »
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 »
Jonathan D. Katz—founder of the Harvey Milk Institute and director of the visual culture studies doctoral program at the State University of New York at Buffalo—frames the Andy Warhol’s pop art through the lens of queer studies. While Andy Warhol’s queer art and his queer identity have long been… Continue reading »
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 »
The Research and Academic Program presents, “Grand Challenges: Social History of Art and Digital Humanities Methods,” a public discussion among leaders in the field of art history about the state of the field in relationship to the digital humanities and the possibilities of a digital art history. Participants include: Anne… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Jeffrey Kapali Lyon, Associate Professor of Religion, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa This program series, presented in conjunction with “The Field is the World: Williams, Hawai’i, and Material Histories in the Making,” explores how methods of collecting and displaying material artifacts impact past and present narratives. WCMA November 15 7-8pm… Continue reading »
A conversation for students, faculty, and staff of Williams College to reckon with the histories surfaced in ““The Field is the World:” Williams, Hawaiʻi, and Material Histories in the Making.” WCMA Nov. 1 7-8pm… Continue reading »
An afternoon of music and conversation on cultural and artistic production in and out of Cuba. Featuring multimedia artist Nestor Siré, scholar Paloma Duong, and musicians Neil Leonard and Miguel Núñez. The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, established in 1994 by Madeleine Plonsker, Harvey Plonsker ’61 and… Continue reading »
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 »
Healoha Johnston, Interim Director of Curatorial Affairs, Curator of the Arts of Hawaiʻi, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas, Honolulu Museum of Art This program series, presented in conjunction with “The Field is the World: Williams, Hawai’i, and Material Histories in the Making,” explores how methods of collecting and displaying… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Center for Spain in America Fellow Doron Bauer presents, “The Aesthetic Colonization of Conquered Islamic Cities: From Palma de Mallorca to Tel Aviv.” A detailed examination of the transformation of Islamic Madina Mayurqa into Christian Palma de Mallorca after the Catalan conquest of 1229 sets the parameters for a… Continue reading »
Herbert Kessler, Visiting Professor of Art at Williams College and Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, will give two lectures on medieval stained glass windows in October: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 5:30 pm “Consider the glass, it will teach you”: The Meaning of Medieval… Continue reading »
Florence Gould Foundation Fellow Gülru Çakmak presents “Painting, Photography and the Long Duration of History in Osman Hamdi’s Paintings.” In this talk, Çakmak will discuss a series of paintings made in the 1880s and 1890s by the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi (1842–1910), highlighting a set of pictorial and compositional… Continue reading »
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art before the Age of Art History Frédéric Ogée presents “Truth and Nature in British Art.” This lecture will survey British artists’ writings from c. 1700–1920, bringing out the priorities and values shared by those artists, and the ways in which they addressed… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 Jane R. Becker, collections management associate at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, discusses the often overlooked work of these artists, as well… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Explore the philosophical connections to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations in Sam Gilliam’s work with Assistant Curator Horace Ballard. Tuesday, April 10 at 4:00pm Williams College Museum of Art… Continue reading »
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 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 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 »
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 »
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley, will deliver the lecture “Minds Over Matter.” Thursday, May 3 5:30pm Location: Lawrence 231… Continue reading »
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art Shira Brisman presents, “The Provisionality of Sixteenth-Century Designs.” In the sixteenth century, as goldsmiths affiliated with families such as Jamnitzer and de Bry began to publish their engraved designs for objects that could be implemented as metalwork—jewelry, tableware, knife handles and sheaths—they… Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
The first Greek temples appeared in the 8th century B.C., a century and a half before the creation of the classical orders. These early temples of wood and mud looked very different from the iconic temple we know. This talk examines these crucial early stages of temple architecture… Continue reading »
