Art meets curriculum

We’ve passed the halfway point of the fall 2023 semester at Williams, and we are excited to report that we have had more than 1,000 student visits to the museum this fall along with 37 courses visiting in 56 class sessions!

Many students are engaging with the eight course installations in Object Lab. Three classes—American Studies 146: Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies; Dance 103: Historical Research in Dance and Performance Studies; and French 213: Francophone North America in the 21st Century: Revendications, réparations et retrouvailles—have studied Cara Romero's photograph Coyote Tales No. 1, on view through Dec. 17. Other classes have had sessions in our Rose Study Gallery for close-looking sessions, including three sections of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies 101 discussing performance and theatricality. Each section did an image annotation before class, had a class discussion with art objects, and did a follow-up assignment with a StoryMap.

We’re looking forward to welcoming 41 more sessions from 29 different courses for the remainder of the semester, including anthropology, Arabic studies, computer science, music, and more! Meanwhile WCMA’s Curator of Mellon Academic Programs Elizabeth Gallerani is working with faculty to plan the spring 2024 installation of Object Lab, which opens in January 2024.

Object Lab

WCMA in the world

We are so excited to give you a sneak peek at an exhibition coming to WCMA in the fall of 2024: Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, the first museum retrospective dedicated to Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), a central figure in Los Angeles’s queer and Chicanx artistic circles who was an active participant in both U.S. and international avant-garde movements. This expansive survey assembles works by the artist across many media, with particular attention on his printmaking, drawings, mail art, and xerography. In the spirit of collectivity suggested by the "school of art," this exhibition includes works by other queer, Latinx, and Latin American artists who share similar graphic sensibilities, approaches to media, or thematic interests, including WCMA’s own 1967 Poster for “Paris Review” by the one-of-a-kind Marisol.

Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art opened on Oct. 21 at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California. This traveling exhibition is curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz and produced by Independent Curators International, New York, in collaboration with both VPAM and WCMA. WCMA visitors might remember our last collaboration with Chavoya, Evans and ICI: Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., which was here in the fall of 2019.

Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art

Architect to give Plonsker Lecture

Florian Idenburg, co-founder of SO-IL, the architecture firm selected to design and build WCMA’s new home in Williamstown, will present the 2023 Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art on Thursday, Nov. 16, at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance. A reception will begin at 5 p.m., followed by the lecture at 6 p.m. 

The presentation will include a historical overview of the museum’s evolution as a building, and Idenburg will share thoughts about how to design a museum for the future. Idenburg also will discuss some of SO-IL’s previous work.

The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, established in 1994 by Madeleine Plonsker, Harvey Plonsker ’61, and their son, Ted Plonsker ’86, examines current issues in contemporary art.

Plonsker Lecture