Thank you for being a part of the WCMA community and for making the museum a part of your life.
With WCMA’s August 2021 public reopening, we were delighted to welcome all audiences back to the museum after a year of being open only for Williams classes. It has been a wonderful time of renewal, including fresh appreciation for simply being able to come to the museum anytime during open hours again. Student co-curricular activities and the museum’s celebrated Williams Art Loan for Living Spaces (WALLS) resumed. Teaching and learning with the collection in the galleries and Rose Study Classroom surged in the 2021-22 academic year, surpassing pre-pandemic levels. We actively considered which technological innovations to bring forward, and embraced the possibilities of hybrid digital and in-person programming in hopes of staying connected to the extended public we reached virtually during Covid. And it was a year of big news, as the Williams College Board of Trustees approved the museum building project moving forward to the design phase and President Maud Mandel selected the architecture firm SO-IL as our partner for this next step. As we look toward the museum’s centennial in 2026, we remain deeply engaged with the guiding principles outlined in our strategic plan as well as our commitment to the work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. We are energized and excited about the future of WCMA and its promise and potential, and we invite you to imagine the future of the museum with us as we reflect on the impacts of our mission-in-action throughout the past year.
Pamela Franks
Class of 1956 Director
Strategic Priorities
In 2020, WCMA published a five-year strategic plan which identifies seven mission-critical areas as opportunities for growth and development leading up to the museum’s centennial in 2026. We are focused on the following priorities:
Teaching and Learning with Art
Mining and Diversifying the Collection
Nurturing the Cross-Disciplinary Arts
Partnering across the Cultural Ecosystem
Influencing the Future of the Arts
Advancing Infrastructure and Sustainability
Exploring a New Home for the Museum
Here are key examples of how we fulfilled these priorities this year.
Teaching with Art
Object Lab is a hybrid gallery-classroom that visualizes the Williams liberal arts curriculum through the museum collection. Rose Study Classroom is a complementary space that provides a seminar setting for faculty from across disciplines to teach with works of art for close study. Here are some examples of students engaging deeply with objects and exhibitions throughout the semester.
TOTAL COURSES
UTILIZING THE MUSEUM
124 courses across
25 departments
COURSES WITH
MULTIPLE VISITS
59
COURSES MEETING IN OBJECT LAB
68
COURSES USING
ROSE STUDY CLASSROOM,
A SPACE FOR CLOSE LOOKING
67
TOTAL CLASS VISITS
196
TOTAL STUDENT VISITS
WITH CLASSES
4,184
Classes Using WCMA Collections
Work with Living Artists
This past academic year, WCMA was thrilled to host five contemporary women artists through different programs, talks, and workshops, to examine their own works in the museum's collection and highlight their participation in current exhibitions.
Cara Romero
The 2021 Plonsker Family Lecture featured Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero, who spoke about her photographic practice and recent projects engaging with contemporary issues of Native representation and identity. Romero’s photographs Coyote Tales, No. 1 and Evolvers are in the museum’s collection. Watch Romero highlight these works in her lecture.
Social Snapshot: Cara Romero was our most popular artist talk on YouTube this year!
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
In April 2022, interdisciplinary artist and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed led an interactive talk in conjunction with her site-specific installation, Worshipping at the Altar of Certainty. As part of her talk, the artist invited visitors to wander the museum in search of shapes and texts they could use to create their own ephemeral works.
Wendy Red Star
In November 2021, Red Star made a trip to WCMA as a part of her residency at MASS MoCA to interact with staff and students on-site about her work in the museum’s collection, No Good Dirt Plateau (Wild Horse Ridge).
Christine Sun Kim
This artist talk was presented in September 2021 in conjunction with the exhibition Sweaty Concepts, which included work by Kim from WCMA’s collection. The talk was one of the museum’s first to be presented with ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation.
Amalia Mesa-Bains
Artist, activist, and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains joined Deputy Director for Curatorial Engagement Lisa Dorin in a conversation about The Library of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, a site-specific installation which Mesa-Bains created for WCMA in 1994. As the museum prepared to restage part of the installation for the exhibition Sweaty Concepts, this conversation revisited the artwork's past and present.
Acquiring
Art
Since the fall of 2015, Economics professor Stephen Sheppard and the museum's Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of American and European Art, Kevin Murphy, have taught the biennial course Acquiring Art: Selecting and Purchasing Art for WCMA. This interdisciplinary course, developed as a collaboration between the museum and the Economics department, has brought over a dozen works of art into the WCMA collection. The 4th edition of the course in Fall 2021 brought works by Guadalupe Maravilla, Mildred Thompson, Jungjin Lee, and Allison Janae Hamilton.
Social Snapshot: One of our Instagram posts to receive the most likes and comments this year was the introduction of our Mellon Curatorial Fellows. We're so glad to have them on our team at WCMA!
Student Engagement
In May 2022, nineteen Williams artists in the Senior Studio Seminar created a group exhibition full of diverse media and artistic practices spanning video, sound, installation, photography, works on paper, and more. Explore the virtual exhibition, Sticky Voids.
Williams Summer Arts & Museums Immersion Program
We were so excited to inaugurate an exciting and unique summer internship offering, the Williams Summer Arts & Museums Immersion Program, in June 2022. Students in the program worked at WCMA, as well as other institutions across the Berkshires including Chesterwood, The Clark, MASS MoCA, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Preservation Office and Stockbridge Mission House. In addition to living and working together, the group had weekly professional development sessions, field trips, and the opportunity to take advantage of a variety of arts offerings.
“Working at my internship placement is extremely interesting, and exactly in line with what I am hoping to do in the future. I am expecting to get a lot out of this positions that will help me as I move forward in museum studies. I enjoy having a cohort of students who are doing similar things as me.”
“It has been quite rewarding intellectually and socially. I am finding new avenues of interest and exploring or defining my own niche. It feels holistic, so I am able to understand and experiment with what I am truly passionate about and how what I learn in class is applicable in the world.”
Feedback From Student Participants
WALLS
This year WCMA loaned works from the WALLS (Williams Art Loan for Living Spaces) collection to 242 student borrowers across the fall and spring semesters. Meet some of our borrowers and read notes from their reflection journals on living with these works of art.
Programs
WCMA was able to offer a variety of virtual and in-person programming, highlighting and celebrating current exhibitions and our permanent collection.
I/O in Strict Beauty
I/O New Music is a contemporary music ensemble open to all Williams student instrumentalists, singers, composers, conductors, and musicians interested in making immersive and adventurous music. Students created new work inspired by WCMA’s exhibition Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints.
Social Snapshot: These performances were our most watched videos on Instagram this year.
Francesca Hellerman ‘23
Two Arcs in Motion Over a Grid (2022)
In response to Arcs from Sides or Corners, Grids & Circles, Sol LeWitt
Family Programming
This spring, WCMA re-imagined speciality programming focused on in-gallery experiences for children and their caregivers, the All Together with Art Series.
After a year of being open only to students for classes, we were delighted to re-open to the public starting in July 2021 with a reduced schedule and a limited capacity. From July 2021-June 2022, the museum welcomed 15,800 total visitors, including 6,000 new visitors, and 300 alumni and their families over the college’s Reunion Weekend in June.
Visitors
Some of the most common words that visitors used this year to describe WCMA and its programming:
•
Wonderful
•
Informative
•
Helpful
•
Gem
•
Friendly
•
Favorite Small Museum
•
Fantastic
•
Excellent
•
Diversity
•
Breadth
•
Beautiful
•
Amazing
•
Appreciated
• Wonderful • Informative • Helpful • Gem • Friendly • Favorite Small Museum • Fantastic • Excellent • Diversity • Breadth • Beautiful • Amazing • Appreciated
Exhibitions
EMBODIED WORDS
Embodied Words: Reading in Medieval Christian Visual Culture is a thematic reinstallation of works from the museum’s medieval collection that brings together new and long-treasured objects from the WCMA with a selection of stunning illuminated manuscripts from Williams College’s Chapin Library curated by Elizabeth Sandoval, Assistant Curator.
“Elizabeth’s reinterpretation of medieval art in WCMA’s collection through the lens of visual culture, and the fundamental role of the written and spoken word, has breathed new life into the gallery space, we are delighted to collaborate with the Chapin Library to bring these remarkable objects together for museum visitors to appreciate in new ways.”
—Lisa Dorin, Deputy Director for Curatorial Engagement
SWEATY CONCEPTS
Feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed describes a sweaty concept as “one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world.” Consisting of works in all media drawn from WCMA’s collection, this exhibition explored the difficulty and labor of, in Ahmed’s words, “coming up against ... and trying to transform a world.”
The works in Sweaty Concepts describe a range of experiences across gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and ability, that involve making a place for oneself where it does not already exist.
STRICT BEAUTY
Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s printmaking to date, including single sheets and print series, for a total of over 200 individual prints.The exhibition highlights the essential role of printmaking in LeWitt’s oeuvre, deepening the understanding not only of the variety of LeWitt’s output but of the genealogy of his distinct geometric and linear formal language.
"The world is full of disorder and confusion, with inexplicable twists and turns that constantly shake things up. But perhaps what LeWitt pursued with his art, with his ideas and his directions, is a chance to perceive beauty in a language that we speak. Using lines, arcs, circles, colors, and shapes — all basic visual vocabulary that we comprehend clearly — he constructed complex and alluring images that are at once programmed and uncontained. It is a process we all struggle through in life, trying to make sense of a world that constantly evades our comprehension. LeWitt’s brilliant prints at Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints, like Robert Frost once attributed to poetry, are “a momentary stay against confusion.”
—Yuchan Kim '24, “Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints presents a new facet of LeWitt,” Williams Record, March 9, 2022
REPRO JAPAN
“In a recent review of Japanese prints at the Clark I suggested that we are all waiting for an exhibition to explore the “descendants of Japanese ukiyo-e imagination, like manga comic forms leading to anime.” Well, here it is: Repro Japan: Technologies of Popular Visual Culture. . . . And it’s wonderful: Kimono print design, individual cels from anime movies, photographs from cosplay performances, vintage ukiyo-e prints, and much more ferment in a tightly packed gallery with enough layers and associations to keep your head turning.”
—William Jaeger, “Japanese anime cross-currents at Williamstown exhibit,” Times Union, February 1, 2022
Christopher Bolton on Repro Japan
FRANTZ ZÉPHIRIN
Organized by guest curator and artist Tomm El-Saieh (b. 1984, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; lives and works in Miami) in conjunction with the exhibition of his paintings, Tomm El-Saieh: Imaginary City on view at the Clark Art Institute, Frantz Zéphirin: Selected Works, is an exhibition of ten paintings by the renowned Haitian artist, whose work is also featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. The selection of paintings on view offer a window into the deeply mystical and spiritual nature of Haiti (Ayiti), the land of many mountains.
“Look closely, in every person there is an animal; a monkey, an elephant, a crocodile, a giraffe... I see them in a gesture, an attitude, a character trait, and immediately fix them on the canvas.”
—Frantz Zéphirin
Remixing the Hall:
WCMA’s Collection in Perpetual Transition
This ongoing exhibition reinterprets the museum’s encyclopedic collection through thematic groupings, highlighting new research, new acquisitions, and new curatorial voices.
“At its heart, Remixing the Hall is about interrogating the collection as well as our institutional history. Ideally, each iteration increases the transparency of WCMA’s values as we ask questions such as: How do we build a collection that reflects a range of identities and cultures, which speaks to the full spectrum of our campus community as well as to a global audience? How can permanent collection rotations illuminate connections within and among objects, foster critical conversations, and encourage visitors’ own meaning-making?”
—Kevin M. Murphy, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of American and European Art
Acquisitions
This year we were able to expand the breadth and depth of our encyclopedic collection through strategic purchases and outstanding gifts from Williams College alumni and friends of the museum. Our current collection priorities are focused on meaningfully diversifying our holdings by Black, Indigenous, female and femme artists, and artists whose work address issues of inclusion especially around the LGBTQI experience and ability and disability. Our FY22 acquisitions are especially strong in the area of contemporary art—including large-scale sculptures, paintings, and video installations—which complement our robust holdings of modern and contemporary works on paper. Contemporary artists whose works are entering the collection for the first time include: Theaster Gates, Carolyn Lazard, Jésus Mari Lazkano, Marina Rheingantz, Yu Youhan, and Andrea Zittel. Here is a selection of highlights:
“Carolyn Lazard’s Crip Time is extraordinarily nuanced in its approach to the complex topic of living with disability in an ableist, capitalist society. It is political without being didactic. It is colorful, poetic, lyrical, and meditative, while not shying away from tough truths about what it takes for some folks to simply get through the day.”
—Lisa Dorin, Deputy Director for Curatorial Engagement
Carolyn Lazard (American, b. 1987, Upland, CA), Crip Time, 2018. HD video (still). Museum purchase, Wachenheim Family Fund. On view in Sweaty Concepts, Williams College Museum of Art, August 30–December 22, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham / Essex Street
Milo C. Beach, distinguished art historian and former chair of the Williams College Art Department, gave WCMA eight Rajasthani preparatory drawings to complement the museum’s holdings of Indian miniature paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, which are frequently used for teaching.
Study for image of a priest worshipping at a shrine, early 19th century, Kota Maker(s) unknown by WCMA. Rajasthan (present-day India). Ink, lac red, and opaque white pigment on paper. Gift of Robin and Milo Beach.
Assistant Professor of Art Murad K. Mumtaz discusses a painting on view at WCMA for his studio course Tasvir Khana: Practicing Indian Drawing and Painting, in spring 2021. Mumtaz plans to use the drawings from Robin and Milo Beach to enhance instruction of how to make preparatory studies.
Andrea Zittel is an artist born in Escondido, CA and based in Joshua Tree, CA whose practice encompasses spaces, objects and modes of living in an ongoing investigation that explores the questions of how to live and what gives life its meaning.
Andrea Zittel’s A to Z Living Unit (Customized for Patti and Frank Kolodny) (1994) on view in Remixing the Hall: WCMA’s Collection in Perpetual Transition, a gift of Johanna Reinfeld Kolodny, Class of 2001.
A portfolio of 34 prints by the Basque artist Jésus Mari Lazkano (b. 1960, Bergara, Spain) was acquired as a gift from the Susan and Herbert Adler Collection. The etchings and color intaglio prints comprised part of Lazkano’s dissertation project titled "The distance between the formal in the architecture and the architecture like image." Rather than depictions of actual places, the prints are the result of the artist reckoning with histories of western architecture and human interventions on the landscape—real and imagined, utopian and heterotopian, from the Renaissance to the 20th century and from Rome to New York.
Images courtesy of the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York
With its tension between representation and abstraction, moments of ethereal lightness and thick, messy interventions, Vavale finds synergy with paintings in WCMA’s collection by Joan Mitchell, Monika Baer, and Sue Williams, as well as the recently gifted Larry Rivers, Three Weeks, 1957.
Marina Rheingantz (Brazilian, b. 1983, Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil), Vavale, 2020. Oil on canvas. Museum purchase made possible by the Sweeney Family in memory of John G. Sweeney '71.
Exploring
A New Home
Building a new home for WCMA is a focal point of the college’s strategic plan with the goal of opening a new building to celebrate the museum’s centennial in the 2026-2027 academic year. In June 2022, President Maud Mandel announced that SO-IL architects had been chosen to develop a conceptual design for the new building. We’re excited to move into the design process and beginning to truly envision the future of WCMA.
Above: The new museum, to be located on the former site of the Williams Inn in Williamstown, will offer substantial gallery space for exhibiting more of the 15,000 works in the museum’s collection, as well as facilities for easy access to collections for student, faculty and visiting scholar requests.
SO–IL co-founders Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg
"This is great news for Williamstown, Williams College, the Northern Berkshire museum corridor and art-lovers everywhere. This strategic move to a spot that’s much more visible and accessible — especially to those driving by on a journey to The Clark or Mass MoCA — will serve to solidify and better connect the Northern Berkshires’ vital museum corridor. Each of these institutions are highly valuable on their own; together they offer something even greater than the sum of their parts for the cultural economy of a region that needs every bit of revitalization and collaborative growth it can get.
-Berkshire Eagle, “Our Opinion: Williams College Museum of Art's planned move offers a more solid frame for Northern Berkshire cultural corridor,” June 3, 2022
“With SO-IL, we have a firm that perfectly matches the profile of our museum: deeply engaged with the arts and academics, committed to collaborating with students, connected to the Berkshires community, and sensitive to the beloved natural landscape of our region.”
—Pamela Franks, Class of 1956 Director
