10/29
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 …
10/1
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 …
9/25
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 …
9/17
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) …
9/13
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 …
4/23
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 …
5/3
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 …
5/31
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 …
5/14
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 …
Best known as a performance artist, Esparza began his career in visual arts as a painter, yet was unable to relate to the “old master” paintings and drawings that he studied as an undergraduate. He turned instead to performance, making …
4/30
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, …
4/27
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 …
4/16
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, …
4/2
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, …
3/12
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 …
3/5
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 …
2/19
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, …
11/27
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 …
11/11
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 …
11/13
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 …
10/30
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 …
10/16
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 …
9/25
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 …
8/18
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 …
7/14
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 …
6/30
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. …
5/6
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 …
5/1
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 …
4/17
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 …
4/3
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 …
6/24
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 …
6/10
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 …
3/13
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 …
2/27
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 …
2/13
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 …
2/1
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 …
5/18
Nearly twenty years after the landmark Clark Conference “The Two Art Histories,” graduates from the Williams-Clark program will gather to honor its former director, and to consider the intellectual, vocational, and pedagogical challenges posed by the art object with new …
4/15
Drawn to Greatness includes some of Eugene Thaw’s finest Romantic drawings, among them outstanding works of art by William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, and J.M.W. Turner. This lecture by Matthew Hargraves, chief curator of art collections and head of college …
3/4
Focusing on the Renaissance and Baroque drawings in the Thaw Collection, including examples by Pisanello, Mantegna, Fra Bartolommeo, Altdorfer, Claude Lorrain, Rubens, and Rembrandt, this lecture given by John Marcieri, Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of …
2/11
In this talk in connection with Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection, Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, explores how French artists worked with models during the eighteenth …
2/3
In the opening lecture for Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection, Jay A. Clarke, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, addresses the liberation of drawing between the 1880s to the 1950s as the medium’s function shifted …
12/3
Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator, Emerita at the Williams College Museum of Art, explores how Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt worked with preliminary states (stages in the development of a print), which the esteemed print scholar William …
11/17
Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University, presents “Untimely Turner.” Friday, November 17 5:30-6:30pm Manton Auditorium
11/5
In this special artist demonstration, New York-based choreographer and dancer Jody Sperling presents a performance of solo dances in tribute to Loïe Fuller (1862–1928), a visionary artist whose performances drew on the light-play of Impressionism to create a new dance …
11/5
In the opening lecture for the special exhibition The Impressionist Line: From Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Jay A. Clarke considers the hallmarks of “the impressionist line” by exploring works from the exhibition, including luminous …
10/30
Spyros Papapetros, associate professor of history and theory of architecture at Princeton University, presents “Ornament and Evolution.” Enmeshed with the life histories of flourishing or atrophying social, political, and cultural organisms, turn-of-the-century discussions of the controversial topic of ornamentation invited …
11/14
Mellon Decade Fellow Andrew K. Scherer presents “Baak: The Qualities and Craft of Ancient Maya Bone.” This illustrated lecture explores the materiality of human and animal bone among the Pre-Columbian Maya (ca. 400 BCE to 1502 CE). The importance of …
10/31
Christopher Heuer presents “Arctic Ink.” When a mysterious cache of sixteenth-century Netherlandish engravings was found in the Arctic circle in 1870, many questions arose. What do such objects, for example, tell us about narratives of Renaissance globalization? About “cultural exchange” …
10/17
Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Agnes Lugo-Ortiz presents, “Slave Portraiture at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation).” This talk will address the visualization of enslaved subjects in portraiture during the period of emancipation in the Caribbean. It will underscore the conflictive …
9/26
Clark Fellow Victoria Rovine presents “Cloth and Colonialism: France, French West Africa, and the Construction of Cultures.” Cloth’s soft, pliable nature makes it an improbable vehicle for the assertion of power, yet it played a singular role in the history …
9/12
Beinecke Fellow Matthew Jesse Jackson presents “Everythingism.” It could be argued that the most compelling art is no longer defined by particular media (painting, sculpture, photography, video), or by particular subjects (portraiture, landscape, still life, devotional image), or by particular …
6/17
Few artists’ legacies have experienced the extreme highs and lows accorded to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema over the last century. Since the 1980s, private collectors and museum curators have rediscovered Alma-Tadema’s many charms. Peter Trippi, co-curator of a large Alma-Tadema exhibition …
This exhibition was curated by Margo Cohen Ristorucci MA ’17. Borrowing its title from the final lines of This Is How You Lose Her — Junot Díaz’s collection of short stories chronicling the fallout of infidelity — The Half-Life of Love …
6/11
This talk by Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Sculpture Jay A. Clarke investigates how Picasso’s creative collaborations fueled and strengthened his art. We often think of Pablo Picasso as the ultimate artist genius, working alone in his studio, but he …
5/5
The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents “Ecologies, Agents, Terrains,” a Clark Conference. What is the place of art and its histories in a time of ecological crisis? This conference will bring together art historians, artists, …
5/4
The Clark Conference “Ecologies, Agents, Terrains” begins its two-day conference with a presentation by Ghana ThinkTank. Ghana ThinkTank (GTT) is an artist collective known for its unconventional approach to negotiating social conflicts. Using a blend of public art and community …
4/7
April 7-9, 2017 Convened by Kaira M. Cabañas (University of Florida) and Suzanne Hudson (University of Southern California) Participants: Lynne Cooke (National Gallery of Art), Ivone Margulies (Hunter College), Briley Rasmussen (Independent Scholar), Ana Maria Reyes (Boston University), Judith Rodenbeck …
6/4
Co-curators Kathleen Morris and Alexis Goodin share stories behind the creation of the exhibition and show how this project brings back to life one of the great interiors of the Gilded Age. Sunday, June 4, 2017 3:00 pm-4:30 pm …
6/2
Twenty-second Annual Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art Symposium The M.A. Class of 2017 will deliver individual scholarly papers throughout the day. Starts 9am Manton Auditorium, Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street
4/13
Visiting Professor at Williams College Sarah Bassett presents “In Search of the ‘Dark Continent’: Defining Late Antique Art in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.” Thursday, April 13, 2017 5:30 pm-6:30 pm Michael Conforti Pavilion
2/24
Site/Border: The Fragility of Narration Clark Colloquium February 24-25, 2017 Convened by Avinoam Shalem (Williams College/Columbia) and Christopher Heuer (RAP/Clark) Participants: Yto Barrada (Brooklyn-based artist), Holly Edwards (Williams College), Jérôme Game (Columbia University), Peter Geimer (Freie Universität), Emily Jacir (Palestine-based …
4/23
In this lecture, “Looking Anew at European Prints and Drawings,” curator Lara Yeager-Crasselt introduces the exhibition Looking North and South: European Prints and Drawings, 1500–1650. Highlighting Dutch, Flemish, German, and Italian prints and drawings from the Clark’s permanent collection, Yeager-Crasselt …
3/26
Professor of History of Art Julie Nelson Davis, University of Pennsylvania, presents a lecture on ukiyo-e (“images of the floating world”) prints, considering their subject matter, networks of production, and the historical context in which they were created. Sunday, March 26, …
3/5
In the opening lecture for An Inner World: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, curator Lara Yeager-Crasselt explores the innovations in genre painting that emerged in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Focusing on the significant developments in subject matter and technique pioneered by …
2/19
Kathleen Morris, curator of decorative arts, and Alexis Goodin, curatorial research associate, give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into planning the Henry Morris and Elizabeth H. Burrows Gallery of American decorative arts, an installation over six years in the making. Their conversation …
1/17
Kristen Oehlrich, assistant director of the Clark’s Research and Academic Program, presents a gallery talk focusing on the work of women photographers Julia Margaret Cameron, Anna Atkins, and Gertrude Käsebier, whose work is included in the exhibition Photography and Discovery. …
5/2
Clark Fellow Ajay Sinha presents “An Indian Dancer in American Photographs.” This lecture tells a story of transcultural attractions in a set of more than a hundred photographs of the Indian dancer Ram Gopal, taken by the American photographer Carl …
4/25
Robert Sterling Clark Professor Mary Roberts presents “An Orientalist Gesamtkunstwerk? Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall.” Throughout his career British artist Lord Frederic Leighton traveled extensively across the Near East amassing an exceptional collection of Islamic art. Distancing himself from prevailing conventions …
4/18
Clark Fellow Tamara Sears presents “Wilderness Urbanisms: Architecture, Landscape, and Travel in Southern Asia.” In the early 1340s, the sultan of Delhi tasked the famed Moroccan traveler, Ibn Battuta, with the job of accompanying a group of Mongol emissaries on …
4/4
Mellon Decade Fellow Delinda Collier presents “Natural Media—Light, Water, and Wind—in Souleymane Cissé’s Finye (1982) and Yeelen (1987) .” Cissé’s un-commonsense proposition about “new” mediums is that they are both reducible to natural media and arbitrarily connected to language. This …
3/15
Clark Fellow Ivan Gerát presents “Image, Narrative, and Mentality: Recent Perspectives in Approaching Medieval Pictorial Legends.” The role of narratives in creative artistic processes and their influence on the historical functions of images open many fascinating questions in art history …
3/7
Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art Jeehee Hong presents “Framing Affect and Vision in Middle-Period China.” This paper addresses how emotional expressions were shaped in material form through various modes of visual and spatial experiences in middle-period China (ninth–fourteenth …
2/28
Clark/Oakley Fellow Marden Nichols presents “The Painted Stage: Drama in Pictures and Pictures in Drama at Rome.” Despite the undeniable importance of sound and song to dramatic performances, the ancient Romans referred to their audiences as spectatores, or viewers. This …
12/7
The Clark’s Research and Academic Program presents a free screening of State of Suspension (2008, 82 min), Mieke Bal’s experimental documentary of fragments in nine chapters; a provocative and critical look at Israel, sixty years after independence. The screening will …
12/11
Exhibition curator Jay A. Clarke provides an introduction to Japanese Impressions: Color Woodblock Prints from the Rodbell Family Collection, followed by a conversation between Clarke and Adele Rodbell, the collector who made a gift of sixty-three Japanese prints to the …
11/20
Robin Kelsey, dean of arts and humanities and Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University, presents “Finding Remains: The Process of Discovery in Early Photography,” the opening lecture for Photography and Discovery. Kelsey, a former Clark Professor at …
11/13
Olivier Meslay, Felda and Dena Hardymon Director, gives his first public talk since assuming his role earlier this year. Meslay, the fifth director of the Clark, discusses the Institute and his plans for its future. Sunday, November 13, 2016 1:00 pm-2:30 …
11/12
Annabelle Selldorf, the architect for the Manton Research Center’s redesign, talks about her practice and her work. A conversation follows with curators Kathleen Morris and Jay A. Clarke, librarian Susan Roeper, and Research and Academic Program Director Emeritus Michael Ann …
11/10
A gallery talk exploring works by Émile Bernard and Odilon Redon is led by Curatorial Assistant Genevieve Hulley with special guest collector Dr. Heinrich Medicus. Clark Permanent Collection Galleries Thursday, November 10, 12-1 pm
12/6
At the turn of the 1970s, a new infrastructure for art emerged on the basis of importing people rather than artworks. Originally a Northern European phenomenon, coinciding with the importation of American minimal and conceptual art, this model proved to …
12/15
Take a closer look at a special object in the Clark’s collection with Looking and Lunching, an afternoon of focused investigation and friendly discussion with fellow art lovers. This month, join Jay Clarke, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, …
10/31
This lecture revisits the relationship between Victorian critic John Ruskin and his disciple and translator Marcel Proust in order to rethink key aspects of Ruskin’s investments in the past, present, and durational intensity of works of art, as well as …
11/29
Clark Fellow Robert Slifkin presents “The New Sense of Fate: Detrital Monumentalism in Postwar American Sculpture.” Tuesday, Nov. 29 5:30pm Conforti Pavilion
11/18
The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning art critic Sebastian Smee visits the Clark to discuss his acclaimed new work, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art. Friday, Nov. 18 7-8:30pm Conforti Pavilion
11/17
Take a closer look at a special object in the Clark’s collection with Looking and Lunching, an afternoon of focused investigation and friendly discussion with fellow art lovers. This month, join Lea Stephenson, MA candidate in the Williams Graduate Program …
11/15
Clark Fellow Ernst van Alphen presents “The Melodramatic Imagination in Painting: Gesture and Emotion in Christina’s World.” Tuesday, Nov. 15 5:30pm Conforti Pavilion
11/1
Join six senior scholars and artists for the Clark conversation, “Art After Democracy.” This informal gathering centers loosely on post-1989 art to consider the place of critical politics, theory, and the “post-socialist” condition. Scheduled near the eve of the United …
10/25
Mellon Decade Fellow Stephanie Porras presents “Maerten de Vos and the Renaissance In-between.” Maerten de Vos was a sixteenth-century Flemish artist who worked in Italy, a double convert (to Lutheranism before returning to Catholicism), and an export artist whose work …
10/18
Robert Sterling Clark Professor Avinoam Shalem presents “When Nature Becomes Ideology: Disclosing the Ruined Landscapes of Palestine (after 1947).” When Nature Becomes Ideology focuses on the topography of Palestine’s rural landscape after 1947. The modern era and especially the age …
10/4
Clark Fellow Martha Buskirk presents “The Convenient Fiction of Authorship (On the Interwined Fortunes of Art and Copyright).” Arguing that it is impossible to understand modern and contemporary art without taking into account articulations of intangible value that are the …
10/4
The paintings in Splendor, Myth and Vision belong to the era of Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, to name a few of the influential dramatists and writers of 17th-century Spain. What are some of the shared …
9/30
Dr. Martinez-Conde will use paintings from the exhibition Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado to talk about behavioral insights developed by Old Masters and how they used or challenged perceptual cues in their work. The program is hosted …
9/23
“Whose Nudes? Painting, Collecting, Displaying the Body in Early Modern Europe” is a scholarly symposium held in conjunction with the Clark’s exhibition, Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes from the Prado. This event brings together a group of international scholars, specializing in …
10/1
This symposium will explore the question of place in art, literature, philosophy, cultural geography, and environmentalism. Participants will engage in a cross-disciplinary dialogue that will explore the importance of place for personal and social identity, and consider the local, national, …
9/21
In this talk by Guy Hedreen, professor of art at Williams College, we explore aspects of nature, gender, and sexuality in several pictures of these demigods in the exhibition from the Prado. September 21st 12:30-1:00pm The Clark’s Special Exhibition Galleries
10/9
Between 1636 and 1638 Rubens designed over sixty paintings of mythological subjects for the Torre de la Parada, the Royal Hunting Lodge outside of Madrid. In this lecture Margaret D. Carroll, Professor of Art at Wellesley College, argues that Rubens …
9/25
Scholars of Northern European art Larry Silver and Aneta Georgievska-Shine present two complementary lectures on the mythological paintings of Peter Paul Rubens.
7/10
Join curators Mark C. Taylor, Professor of Religion at Columbia University, and Henry W. Art, Robert F. Rosenburg Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Williams College, for the opening lecture of Sensing Place: Reflecting on Stone Hill. Sunday, July 10, 2016, 3:00 pm-4:30 …
6/19
University of Edinburgh art historian and Renaissance specialist Jill Burke explores the emergence and evolution of the nude in the Renaissance. SUNDAY, JUNE 19, 2016 3:00 pm-4:30 pm MICHAEL CONFORTI PAVILION