Take a deep dive into Object Lab

Object Lab is in full swing this semester! Learn all about this hybrid gallery-classroom, which visualizes the Williams liberal arts curriculum through the museum collection, with a series of videos available on our YouTube channel. Here, in a special playlist, you can watch Elizabeth Gallerani, Curator of Mellon Academic Programs, describe how professors utilize works of art in the Object Lab galleries through close-looking assignments and digital projects. 

You can also hear directly from two professors. Dan Barowy speaks about how students in Computer Science 334, Principles of Programming Languages, observe works of art—including their shape, color, size, and texture—in preparation for a final project in which they design a programming language capable of generating artwork in the style of an artist in the exhibition. Bethany Hicok explains how students in English 113, The Feminist Poetry Movement, will be composing poetry inspired by art in Object Lab.

Object Lab on YouTube

Five weeks left to see Mary Ann Unger exhibition

There are only a few weeks left to see the critically acclaimed exhibition Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone. The exhibition, which is a full reconsideration of the multidisciplinary practice of Unger, one of the twentieth century’s great artists, has received accolades in the art world, including most recently a piece by Jackson Davidow in Artforum magazine that you can read here.

Join us for a tour on Friday, December 2, at 2 p.m., as artist and Unger's daughter, Eve Biddle, whose work is also featured in the show, guides visitors through the exhibition, which closes December 22. Stay afterward for hot cider in the museum lounge, where copies of the exhibition catalog as well as beautifully designed commemorative postcards and notebooks will be available for purchase in our shop.

To Shape a Moon from Bone

WCMA coast to coast

Experience little tastes of WCMA from Connecticut to California! Maurice Prendergast’s mosaic Fiesta Grand Canal, Venice (ca. 1899) is on display in Sargent, Whistler and Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano through Feb. 27, 2023, at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut. Diego Rivera’s Hombre Fumando (1937) can be seen at the exhibition Diego Rivera’s America, on view through Jan. 3, 2023, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And Kameelah Janan Rasheed's show Worshipping at the Altar of Certainty: 1985, the first iteration of which debuted here at WCMA in August 2021, is on view through Dec. 18 at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Fiesta Grand Canal, Venice, ca. 1899. Glass and ceramic tiles in plaster. Williams College Museum of Art, Bequest of Mrs. Charles Prendergast.