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.

Charcoal drawing on cream paper of a woman with bobbed dark hair sitting cross-legged in a chair. She wears a button-up shirt, tie, knee-length skirt, and heeled boots with tiny buttons up the side.

Art as Archive: Curating Germany, 1918-1945

Rebecca McClung is a Ph.D. student in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Spotlight on Jiha Moon

By using hanji paper, elements of contemporary Asian pop culture, and Western art techniques, Moon’s pieces become a blend of East and West, reflecting her own background.
Swirling red, pink, and gray; clouds, bits of dragon bodies, blossoming trees, and wind. On the left, the words "impure thoughts / but paintings impure / it is the adjustment of impurities / which forges paintings continuity" is written in small, vertical, all-capitals.

Welcome, Colleen!

Hello! I’m Colleen McDermott, and starting this week I’m taking over as the new Brown Post-Baccalaureate Curatorial Fellow.
Image of Colleen smiling in the Cathedral of Saint Denis.

Teaching with Paper

Every afternoon for three weeks, sixteen enthusiastic 4th-6th graders come to the Museum to connect with art. Our students spend time in the galleries, investigate artists in the museum’s collection, and go behind-the-scenes with museum staff.
Young students in the Cunningham Center gallery looking at works of art on tables; from behind.

Introducing SCMA’s IFPDA Intern

We’re pleased to be joined this summer by Nicole Viglini, '04J, who will be working in the Cunningham Center this summer as the IFPDA Intern.
Nicole, sitting at a table in the Cunningham Center gallery with a laptop, smiling at the camera.

Tolman Collection: Hiromitsu Takahashi

Hiromitsu’s beautifully vibrant and slightly playful prints are a modern take on ukiyo-e, a type of Japanese woodblock printing developed during the country’s Edo period.
Kneeling warrior in black robe holding a black and white umbrella aloft in his proper right hand.

Never Exhausted

Over the course of his life, Paul Landacre became a master of wood engraving, and a standard for those exploring this printmaking medium.
Nude woman with long hair holding onto mane of a rearing black horse, dark clouds in sky, dark spiky grass below horse.

Standing Turk

The French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme is known for his hyper illusionistic style, which he used to create detailed paintings of life and culture in the newly discovered East during the nineteenth century.
Standing man facing left in coat and turban with hands pressed together at his waist.

Buzkashi from the series Musharraff

An integration of Persian and Indian influences, 'Buzkashi' by Saira Wasim resonates with early Mughal ruler portraits and painting traditions.
man with four arms seated on a cushion surrounded by clowns in uniform carrying an upside-down goat

Figure and Image

The collection of Selma Erving is comprised of 540 drawings, 74 prints, and 100 illustrated books, the majority of which come from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Needless to say, picking less than twenty objects to hang was a Herculean task, especially for someone as interested in the time period and style that Ms. Erving seemed to favor as I am.
yellow and white silhouette of a woman looking over her right shoulder, against a light blue and white sky. small purple flower in top right corner.

Building and Survival

Dr. Kurt Lang and Dr. Gladys Engel Lang, distinguished scholars 
in the fields of communication,
 media, and public opinion, and emeriti professors of sociology 
at the University of Washington, Seattle, have promised their collection of prints, watercolors, and
 drawings to SCMA.
Shoreline with pier extending toward the left and city beyond

Now You See Me

Portraiture, a seemingly biographical and documentary genre, is often more farce than fact.
three quarter length portrait of an older man in long white wig, coat, vest, breeches and white stockings, seated legs crossed, hands together on proper left thigh, a small stand to his proper right holding paper, three ink wells and feather pen, curtain behind to his proper right
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