In an octagonal room at the Williams College Museum of Art, abstract forms ring the walls like astral bodies, like baby stars half visible in a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust.
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Women (artists) about town …
I walked through WCMA on Monday afternoon, with the work of women artists around me, and wondered where else have I seen work by women in the Berkshires this summer … And I’m finding the answer more challenging than I expected.
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Kameelah Janan Rasheed weaves a room of all possible stories
I’m standing in a round room at the top of the Williams College Museum of Art and seeing it transformed through Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s eyes.
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She can turn a library into a labyrinth (Sept 1 newsletter)
WCMA has reopened, after more than a year closed in the pandemic, and I am transfixed by Amalia Mesa-Bains’ Library of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz.
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Axis Mundo at WCMA rediscovers an artistic community in Los Angeles in the 1970s
A group of artists grew together in Southern California. They were kept out of galleries and museums and mainstream media, so they made their own spaces. And they are gathered together again now in Axis Mundo at the Williams College Museum of Art — an exhibit that has won national attention.
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Hawaiian past and present converge at Williams College Museum of Art
A young man is singing in a low and carrying voice. He holds long phrases on a breath. He is chanting a Hawaiian oli, and the words are his. Nālamakū Ahsing is a Williams student, class of ’21, and he wrote these verses calling to the people who came before […]
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A collage shows the first statewide Artweek festival in images
Get behind the scenes, get muddy, get up close to paper and paint and clay. ArtWeek crossed the state to the Berkshires in April and May 2018 with dozens of events, most of them free …
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Seeds of Divinity explores Mexican and Central American art at WCMA
A serpent leans its head through an opening in the stone. In its open mouth, a man’s head is floating with closed eyes, as though he is asleep. A maize god looks down from above, wearing a headdress of corn husks. At the center of a gallery at the Williams […]
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A Mughal artist tells the story of the Magi in Persian perspective
On a winter afternoon afternoon, a painting stands at a meeting of worlds – an Adoration of the Magi inspired by Persian and Mughal miniatures at the Williams College Museum of Art.
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WCMA rediscovers a lost medieval gallery
The Williams College Museum of Art has recovered a vanished room. It feels like a kind of mythical medieval place, with a floor of handmade tiles and dark plaster walls, oak beams and diamond-paned windows with inset stained glass. It was designed almost 80 years ago, walled away and almost […]
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