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.

A Look at SCMA's Digitization Project

The Smith College Museum of Art has just completed a two-year digitization project, funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
man sitting at a desk with a bookshelf behind him. to the right are two large box lights projecting onto an easel with an artwork on it. man stands with a camera in front of the easel.

Native American Tribe Culture in Psychedelic Art

In my research for the current exhibition Summer of Love: Psychedelic Posters from the SCMA Collection, I came across an interesting undertone motivating counterculturists in 1960s America: tribe culture.
brown ground, black text around central photo of young man with long hair, feather in hair, wearing three bead necklaces

Mary Cassatt: The Fitting

European collectors and artists alike became fascinated by what they viewed as the novelty of Japanese art.
woman with hair in a bun, wearing a dress and reflected in a mirror behind her

Animal Locomotion

Muybridge’s work revolutionized the way scientists studied locomotion and physiology.
two rows of images of man riding horse; each image is at a slightly different stage in the horse's run

Paper + New People

Big news for the Cunningham Center: Julie Warchol, our 2012-2013 Curatorial Fellow, has started her M.A. in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago!
girl with brown hair and bangs standing in front of an Italian cathedral

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
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