Calendar
Exhibitions
March 22 - 23, 2012
Beneski Museum of Natural History, Amherst College
Mead Art Museum at Amherst College
- Picturing Enlightenment: Thangka in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College
Following twenty-one months of painstaking attention, the Mead’s thangka have emerged transformed. Vibrantly colored, intricately patterned, and ranging in height from two to nine feet, each work rewards close study. Visitors will have the opportunity to become familiar with the entire collection of eighteen thangka over the course of the academic year. Nine thangka will be displayed from August 26, 2011 to January 1, 2012. The remaining nine thangka will be presented from January 20 to June 3, 2012. - Days of Their Lives? Fact and Fiction in 19th-century Genre Painting
The term “genre” (which literally means “type”) has come to signify one category of art: scenes of everyday life. This installation of paintings from the Mead’s collection focuses on American, British, and French genre paintings from the nineteenth century. Once castigated as ignoble because of its lower-class subject matter, genre painting came to be regarded as timely, imbued with feeling, and potentially heroic. Because genre paintings derived their subjects from everyday life but embellished them, they are perhaps best understood as imagined alternatives to the real conditions of industrialized capitalism, rather than as documents of lived existence. - A New Blake for Amherst
This focused exhibition celebrates a recent gift to Amherst from Dr. Henry deForest Webster, Class of 1948: The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (ca.1799-1800), a rare tempera painting by the British Romantic painter, poet, and printmaker, William Blake (1757-1827). - Exotic Muses: Dancers by Robert Henri and Nick Cave
Separated in time by a century, American ‘Ashcan’ painter Robert Henri (1865–1929) and contemporary sculptor and performance artist Nick Cave (born in 1959) are bound by a shared commitment to the human figure. This six-object installation, featuring a celebrated Henri at Amherst (Salome, 1909) and loans from the Colby College Museum of Art and two private collections, explores the artists’ representations of dancers as exotic “Others” — alluring, and perhaps unsettling, personifications of difference. This exhibition is supported by the Hall and Kate Peterson Fund and Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson.
University Museum of Contemporary Art
- EIJA-LIISA AHTILA: THE ANNUNCIATION
The University Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to present "The Annunciation," a new work by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, the internationally acclaimed artist from Finland who is a pioneer in the development of multi-media art. Her work explores the potential of the film medium, weaving an intricate web of references – between film and theater, painting and poetry, fiction and documentary. "The Annunciation" is an installation of three projected images in which one of the central motifs of Christian iconography and Renaissance painting is constructed and re-enacted through moving image. In this Annunciation the events are set in the present. The installation consists of both material made during the preparation for shooting, as well as an actual reconstruction of the event of the Annunciation. The film material was shot mainly during the winter season of 2010 in the snowy Aulanko nature reserve in southern Finland and on a set depicting the artist’s studio and the scene of the Annunciation. All the actors, apart from two, are non-professionals and clients of the Helsinki Deaconess Institute’s women’s support services. Although based on an existing script, the events, roles and dialogue were adapted during the filming process in accordance with the actors’ individual presence.
Smith College Museum of Art
- Debussy’s Paris: Art, Music, and Sounds of the City
In honor of the 150th anniversary of the composer and musician Claude Debussy’s birth, the exhibition—drawing largely from the Museum’s permanent collection—explores the relationship between his music and the artistic developments that revolutionized the world of painting in his time, particularly the French Impressionist movement. - Prints by Janet Fish
This special installation features prints from the SCMA collection by Smith College artist-alumnae Janet Fish (b. 1938). The prints in this exhibition span thirty years of Fish’s career and include a rare view of her lithographic and screenprinting process through several working proofs for Winsom’s Shells (1985), created at the Smith College Print Workshop. These proofs display the evolution of the print as a work-in-progress and are on view for the first time since they were produced and displayed at Smith College in 1985. - Pursuing Beauty: The Art of Edo Japan
The second of two Asian Art exhibitions this year examines a crucial period in Japanese history (1603-1868) when Japanese artists reconfigured previous conventions and adapted foreign influences to create innovative artistic styles and forms. The exhibition is part of the College and University Art Museums Collection- Sharing Project developed by the Yale University Art Gallery and funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. SCMA is one of six academic partner museums invited to develop exhibitions from Yale’s extensive holdings. - Susan Heideman: Animalmineralvegetable
A celebration of Smith Professor Susan Heideman, whose paintings and sewn paper collages explore the textures and movements of imagined organic forms. Heideman will retire in spring 2012. - Shared Inspiration: The David R. and Muriel Pokross Collection
Shared Inspiration: The David R. and Muriel Pokross Collection celebrates a generous gift from the family of Muriel Kohn Pokross, class of 1934, and David R. Pokross. The Pokross Collection is comprised mainly of paintings, drawings, and prints by major artists of the post-World War II period. The collection displays a strong inclination towards figuration – even many of the abstract works subtly engage the figure – and emotional connection.