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.

The intro text for the show is on the far left and a portrait of a person with gilded gold frame to the right of the intro text.

Thinking Through Drawing: On View through September 7, 2025

Henriette Kets de Vries is the Manager of the Cunningham Study Center and Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs.

Eye on the Street: Garry Winogrand

Winogrand created a multitude of frank and honest photographic studies that explore how people interact with their social environment.
dark interior, men in tuxedos and bow-ties dancing, in the center is a woman in white halter dress with jeweled earrings and short blond hair

James Turrell: Deep Sky

James Turrell’s installations – sky drawings, light projections, and “skyspaces” – are artworks made for both nature lovers and stargazers.
abstract of a night sky with stars and mountain in black ink

Fred Sandback

Sandback’s yarn constructions are essentially drawings in space – free-floating lines which have jumped beyond the confines of paper.
two thin, white diagonal lines in center of blue-green paper

Walton Ford and a Trip to Wingate Studios

This past spring, my advanced printmaking class took a field trip to Peter Pettengill’s professional intaglio workshop and publisher, Wingate Studio in southwestern New Hampshire.
art studio, group of people standing around a printing press

Vija Celmins: Always on the Surface

This work is one of Celmins’ earliest attempts at printmaking and has been called “one of the finest and scarcest American prints of the 1970s.”
close up view of ocean waves in black and white

Curiouser and Curiouser

The poster features contrasting neon colors layered over one another and photographs of iconic Alice in Wonderland imagery. One does not need any drugs to feel the full effect of his hallucinogenic style.
pink, white, blue and purple, large checked floor receding into a doorway, with scattered playing cards, mushroom in lower left, bottle in lower right with DRINK ME on label, chessman at mid left and another bottle with DRINK ME on its label, white rabbit in center sitting up with pink eye, the wall around the doorway is made up of camouflage squiggles in pink and blue with KEEP YOUR HEAD in purple appearing through the pattern

Thomas Cornell's French Revolutionary Portraits

The SCMA’s Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs has in its collection a set of etchings that artist Thomas Cornell completed for the Northampton-based Gehenna Press, run by Leonard Baskin, in 1964.
Bust portrait of man with short hair, looking to his left

Munio Makuuchi

Like all of Makuuchi’s visual works, "On Boy’s Day" relates directly to his life history.
landscape with sun at upper left, large arch of water with two salmon at lower left and three at right, top one arching back toward top center image

Daumier's Bathers

Daumier produced a series entitled Les Baigneurs, which provides humorous commentary on bourgeois bathers in the nineteenth-century.
two women in a bathhouse holding glasses; public pool on the right

From our archives: The Age of Mezzotint

Mezzotint, a printmaking technique invented by the German amateur artist Lugwig von Siegen in 1642, created unprecedented capabilities for translating paintings into prints.
half-length portrait of a young woman with long curly hair, wearing a large lace collar, dark dress, a bow around her neck and a feather in her hair
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