A new mix in ‘Remixing the Hall’

Happy New Year! Our ongoing permanent collection exhibition Remixing the Hall has been remixed for 2023.

Visitors will encounter several new additions to the Class of 1935 Gallery, including Sam Gilliam’s 1972 monumental polypropylene drape Situation VI-Pisces 4, and George Segal’s 1977 Couple in a Doorway, which features two life-sized painted-blue human figures that encroach provocatively into the space of the viewer. 

In the adjacent gallery, a selection of preparatory pencil studies for one of WCMA's collection highlights, the 1945 painting Point O’View by Paul Cadmus, demonstrates a deep intimacy between the artist and his sitters. Visitors can compare the loose informality of the drawings with the precise rendering, detailed brushwork, and use of the unforgiving, Renaissance-era medium of egg tempera in the painting

Remixing the Hall

Sam Gilliam’s 1972 Situation VI-Pisces 4, left, is joined by George Segal’s Couple in a Doorway, right, as two of the many new additions to the Remixing the Hall exhibition. Photo: Brad Wakoff

I/O Fest at WCMA

Following up on their extraordinary performances last March in our Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints exhibition, the I/O New Music Ensemble will be back at WCMA to perform in the galleries as part of I/O Festival 2023 on Friday, Jan. 13. The afternoon will feature original compositions written by Raven Chacon, Myriam el Haik, Kazuo Fukushima, Julius Eastman, Sarah Hennies, Williams students, and more, all performed by Williams students and community members. The event kicks off at noon with a participatory sonic meditation, open to all, and will include sound art pieces and acoustic explorations of the galleries through 4 p.m.

Directed by Matthew Gold, Artist in Residence in Percussion and Contemporary Music Performance at Williams College, I/O New Music is a contemporary music ensemble open to all instrumentalists, singers, composers, conductors, and musicians interested in making immersive and adventurous music. I/O programs feature cutting-edge new music by composers representing diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and musical practices

I/O New Music Festival

The I/O Ensemble performs in the Strict Beauty exhibition in March 2022. Photo: Brad Wakoff

‘Sonance for the Precession’ reimagined

In the fall of 2019, WCMA engaged composer, saxophonist and transdisciplinary artist Neil Leonard to create a site-specific sound installation for the neighboring Berkshire quad titled Sonance for the Precession. The electroacoustic composition, which played for 30 minutes each day half an hour before sunset from the roof of the historic Hopkins Observatory, explored ancient ideas connecting the precession, or movement, of the equinox with the harmonic series. 

Three years later, Sonance has been reimagined as part of the Elevator Music series at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.  Running through March 12, Elevator Music 45: Neil Leonard—Sonance for the Precession presents a 60-minute quadraphonic sound installation based on alto saxophone recordings and electronic sounds that advances in circular motion around the listener and encourages reflection on the variant rates of planetary orbits around the sun and on our ever-changing place in the universe.

Sonance at Skidmore