Curious where artworks hang out when they’re not on view? Join us for an SCMA Open House just for SCMA Friends, including Smith Students, and get a behind-the-scenes peek at our collections storage. Tour the climate-controlled spaces where thousands of works live and hear from the Collections Management team about handling, housing, and conservation.
Coco Fusco’s The Empty Plaza/La Plaza Vacía (2012) layers sound and image as a way to reflect on Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución and its shifting meaning in Cuban public life. Combining contemporary footage with archival recordings, still photography, and poetic narration by Cuban journalist Yoani Sánchez, Fusco traces the plaza’s transformation from a symbol of revolutionary optimism to a site associated with surveillance, repression, and unfulfilled promises.
On view in the New Media Gallery on the Lower Level.
Selected by eight Smith College faculty members, these 35 Japanese woodblock prints invite viewers to consider how works of art can speak across disciplines. Faculty participants came from art history, East Asian studies, History, and Chemistry. Their choices reflect a wide range of personal, scholarly, and teaching perspectives.
Register by emailing: museduc@smith.edu for more information and to RSVP for individuals or groups.
Register by October 1. SCMA is a registered PD Provider for the state of Massachusetts.
What can plants and artworks teach us about ourselves and our communities? How do artists play a role in helping us to understand the natural world and our place in it?
Data Consciousness and Luminous Abstraction
Public reception to follow.
This lecture brings W.E.B. Du Bois's pioneering data visualizations into dialogue with Alma Thomas's luminous abstractions, tracing a shared commitment to visualizing Black life beyond statistical reduction or representational constraint. Together, Du Bois and Thomas reveal how data can function as both evidence and imagination, expanding the possibilities of aesthetic practice, historical interpretation, and collective liberation.
A special visit for caregivers and children under two. Meet other grown-ups, enjoy conversation about art and activities led by art museum and Northampton Public Schools Early Childhood Center staff. We'll be the only ones in the galleries during these special hours, with no worries about gurgles, gagas and crying over the art -- from the adults or the little! This tour will focus on the new SCMA exhibition, Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.