SCMAinsider

SCMAinsider offers dynamic perspectives on the diverse collections and visions that shape the
Smith College Museum of Art.

We welcome contributions from all members of our community and seek to cultivate a range of
voices and experiences. If you want to contribute to the blog, please contact us at scmacuratorial@smith.edu.

Lilly standing in a black and white tile bathroom and pulling a white, amorphous full-body suit up and over their head.

Welcome Lilly Watson, Our New Assistant Museum Educator

August 27, 2025

Hello everyone! My name is Lilly Watson (they/them) and I am the new Post Baccalaureate Assistant Museum Educator here at SCMA.

Staying Inside | Art in a time of Plague

In times of despair, I have often found comfort in history. Just when you think you are living in an unprecedented moment, history teaches us that people have overcome similar situations.

Staying Inside | Staying Connected

The great picture—Milton Avery’s Surf Fisherman (1950)—hangs in a third-floor gallery in the Smith College Museum of Art. The not-so-great picture is stored on my phone. It’s one of a dozen or so that I took in a walk through the galleries on what I knew was going to be the museum’s last day open for visitors.

seated figure in on shore in center foreground pulling back on a line with fish on either side of him, three gulls overhead, calm water in central image, cloudless sky beyond

Staying Inside | Learning Something New

Staying Inside is a series on SCMAinsider, the museum’s blog, that regularly features contributions from SCMA staff and students about what we are into right now, be it a book, a work of art, a song, a podcast, a recipe, a way to get outside, a performance; anything, really, that we are holding close or that brings us comfort and connection right now. Today's post is from Aprile Gallant, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs.

Lawdy Mama (1969): Celebrating The Ordinariness of Black Women in ‘Black Refractions'

Hendricks' subject could be any black woman caught in an intimately regular moment: getting ready for work, on the way to the store, waiting for the bus, posing for a photo -- or trying to be while a friend is giggling on the other side of the lens.

How Essential Is Art?

When I started thinking about doing an exhibition on the Great American Depression a year ago I did not anticipate the exhibition being shut down because of COVID-19 and potentially reopening during an actual Recession.

Depression era cityscape; crowds of people

SCMAinsider: Staying Inside

Staying Inside is a new series on SCMAinsider, the museum’s blog. It will regularly feature contributions from SCMA staff and students about what we are into these days, be it a book, a work of art, a song, a podcast, a recipe, a way to get outside, a performance; anything, really, that we are holding close or that brings us comfort and connection right now.

Woman sitting on couch in living room with dog at her feet on the right, child looking through window at train passing by on the right

Mt. Holyoke College Professor Patricia A. Banks on Supporting African American Museums

In January 2020, Emma Chubb, SCMA’s Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art, sat down with Patricia A. Banks, Associate Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. They discussed Dr. Banks’s research into what motivates people to participate in cultural life and her new book, Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums: Black Renaissance (Routledge, 2019).

The Sublime in the Mundane

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sublime was already on the decline. In the shadow of industrialization, nature ceded itself to humanity — that, or humanity encroached on nature so that it disappeared.

Cityscape, a river in the lower right hand corner, half sky, half city

Melancholy Dominance

With sparse, barren trees surrounding the homestead in an otherwise naked field, Barkin's illustration carries that sure sense of late autumn decay and the melancholy that never fails to accompany it.

Image of November Sunlight print - black and white image of two-story house with barn behind in center of large empty lawn, surrounded by trees and open sky

Enveloped Encroachment

Paul Dougherty's Road Through Trees in Sunlight takes the human-environmental relationship to early 20th century America. The Romantic, spreading to the United States, took to a new environment, adopting new representations as human exceptionalism spread.

Reddish-brown drawing of a dirt road lined with trees, sun coming through the branches

On the Threshold

John Crome’s Wooded Landscape (included in his Norfolk Picturesque Scenery Series) depicts the edge of a forest looming over a clearing. With billowing clouds in the receding landscape, the scene depicts a period of calm before a creeping storm — a storm one could read as human encroachment.

Black and white etching of a wooded scene on right foreground with a cloudy sky in the background

The Sublime in the Mundane: Human Encroachment in the Natural Landscape

As I become increasingly aware of anthropogenic environmental destruction, I find myself drawn to nature. It is in nature, in the intertwining body of roots and branches, air and light, that I find comfort amid the stresses of human life. Nature is pure. It is awe-inspiring. It is sublime.

Triptych drawing of classical statues adorned with flowers and vines - one standing, two reclining