Less than two weeks until WALLS!

Calling all Ephs: Live with art this spring!

Williams College students can enliven their rooms with art from the WALLS (Williams Art Loan for Living Spaces) Collection, a special collection of 125 works of art that go out on loan every semester. WALLS Pickup Day is Sunday, Feb. 5. Lineup starts at 6 a.m. at Goodrich Hall. Selections begin at 9 a.m.

Interested in scoping out the art in person? Stop by WCMA on Saturday, Feb. 4, from 2 to 4 p.m. for a WALLS Preview, where the works will be on view awaiting their borrowers the next morning. You can also check out the full collection on Instagram @WCMAwalls.

Learn about WALLS

Students show off their selections during the Fall 2022 WALLS Pickup Day. Photo: Brad Wakoff

Close-looking at art

In Assistant Curator of Digital Learning & Research Beth Fischer's Winter Study class Past Patterns, Future Visions: Data in the Museum, a group of Williams College students had the opportunity to look closely at a few works in the WCMA collection—very closely! The course introduces students to analyzing and visualizing data with a focus on questions that are critical to the future of art museums and other cultural heritage institutions, such as: How can the format and content of museum metadata, especially collections catalogs, be used to promote works of art, and the people and cultures who created them? What more can we learn when we apply digital imaging tools such as Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), a photographic method that captures a subject’s shape and color to reveal surface information invisible under normal examination?

Fischer brought her class into our Rose Study Gallery to learn how to conduct RTI on Mary Cassatt’s Ellen Mary Cassatt in a Big Blue Hat, where they looked closely at one of the little girl’s eyes; Maurice Utrillo’s La Rue Clovis à Paris, where they focused on a patch of foliage in the center of the painting; and Marc Chagal’s The Flying Cow, where the calf inside the title heifer caught the students' attention.

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'Dance We Must' catalog published

WCMA has just published a beautiful hardcover book titled Dance We Must: The Art and Costumes of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, 1906–1940. A collaboration between WCMA, Jacob's Pillow, and the Williams College Dance Department, the book is the culmination of five years of original research by Kevin M. Murphy, our Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of American and European Art, and Caroline Hamilton, Curator of the Costume Collection at Jacob’s Pillow, with additional contributions from Artist-in-Residence in Dance Erica Dankmeyer, Assistant Professor of Dance Munjulika Tarah, and Norton Owen, Director of Preservation at Jacob’s Pillow. This project was generously supported by the Coby Foundation.

Now on sale at the WCMA shop, Jacob’s Pillow, and as well as booksellers online, this catalog reproduces artwork, sets, ephemera and especially costumes, many of which have not been seen since the 1930s. Some of the materials and costumes, as well as the choreography, borrow from East and South Asian and Native American cultures, and the publication interrogates the legacy of cultural appropriation in dance. The materials also demonstrate St. Denis and Shawn’s stylistic and personal connections to American and European modernists, broadening an understanding of American dance in early modernism.

The book’s genesis was the 2018 exhibition at WCMA titled Dance We Must: Treasures from Jacob’s Pillow, 1906-1940, co-curated by Murphy and Hamilton. The exhibition featured more than 350 objects from the Jacob’s Pillow Archives, including original costumes pulled from the antique touring trunks, photographs, props, backdrops, and artworks that offer a glimpse into the early careers of Jacob’s Pillow founder Ted Shawn and visionary modern dancer Ruth St. Denis. Founded by Shawn and Denis in 1914, Denishawn became the first important American dance company.

Dance We Must

Click Here for more information.