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 Associate Curator and Manager of the Cunningham Study Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs.

Japanese Stencils

Contrary to what one might expect, the tools used to create an artwork can be just as beautiful and impressive as the finished works themselves.
detail of leafy foliage

Juxtapositions

In "Juxtapositions," Smith students find unusual and exciting connections between works of different media and periods.
woman with straight dark hair tied behind head, parted at center, wearing dark square necked dress with beld standing with hands behind back and feet together on wood floor near wall wiht door visible at her proper right

The Art of Mindfulness

Slowing down and losing myself in a single work of art is a deeply rewarding experience, especially when faced with such a rich array of complex, beautiful, and moving works such as those on exhibit.
sketch of a single large tree

David Becker Day 2012

December 11 is David Becker Day, presenting the perfect occasion to interact deeply with a work of art and particularly a work of art that speaks deeply to your personal values or beliefs.
cloudy sky, crowded city of elaborate buildings near a river that moves down toward center front image, small rowboats filled with people at lower left, rowboat and larger sail craft filled with people moving up right side image, men, women and children on shore at left before tall column with statue holding shield and long staff

French and Italian Drawings: Renaissance through Romanticism, Part I

Six students who enrolled in the colloquium, French and Italian Drawings: Renaissance through Romanticism, developed an installation of French and Italian Drawings from the SCMA collection. Students wrote their own wall labels for the installation, a selection of which are shown below.
Maggie examines a work of art on a table in the Cunningham Center gallery.

Cass Bird: I Look Just Like My...

Cass Bird '99 works as both a fine art and commercial photographer in Brooklyn, NY. While her magazine work sensuously portrays celebrities, models, and pop culture icons, her photographs of friends, acquaintances, and inspirational figures are far more personal, challenging, and moving.
exterior, city rooftops, young woman, nude from waist up, with numerous tattoos on her body, both hands over her face, wearing baseball cap with "I look just like my daddy" on it

Monsters

We all have a relationship to the monsters we create in our subconscious or the ones we find in newspaper headlines.
cloaked personification of death on the left looking down to a group of frightened soldiers; a tree on the right

Romare Bearden: Brilliant Ambiguity

Bearden’s "Untitled" watercolor drawing, which entered our collection this year, was produced during a transitional moment in the artist’s career.
two abstracted figures of a man and woman dancing with arcs representing their movement in heavy black lines colored in with orange, red, yellow, green and brown
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