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.

interior with posters depicting nurses and calls to action on easels

Staff Picks: Wood Gaylor's "Posters"

July 22, 2021

Jessica Nicoll, Director and Louise Ines Doyle ’34 Chief Curator, shares the history and present-day activity of a painting by Wood Gaylor.

The Tryon Prizes for Writing and Art, 2020

Each year, two juries award monetary prizes to current Smith students for outstanding writing and art related to the collection at the Smith College Museum of Art. Writing may take any form, including a thesis, essay or poem. Art submissions may be an installation, performance, video, sound, digital, internet, and interactive art. Jurors seek a high level of artistic expression and presentation.

Unrecorded Kota artist; Gabon Reliquary Figure (Mbulu Ngulu) Late 19th-early 20th Century SC 2000.12.4 Gift of Cecilia (Cecilia Sahlman, class of 1950) and Irwin Smiley

A simple process one can do while social distancing inspired by the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins

Working from home when you’re an art preparator is a complicated proposition. I should start by clarifying because many people don’t even realize my job exists.

"Fukagawa Susaki Jūmantsubo”: ukiyo-e culture, viewing the city of Edo, and the emergence of commercial art in the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate

Guest blogger Hannah Goeselt is a former Cunningham Study Center student assistant, Art History Major, and a graduate of the Class of 2020.

Utagwa Hiroshige, Japanese (1797-1858). Fukagawa Susaki Jumantsubo from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1857, woodcut printed in color on paper, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James Barker (Margaret Clark Rankin, class of 1908) "The Margaret Rankin Barker - Isaac Ogden Rankin Collection of Oriental Art", SC 1968.467

Staying Inside | Present Preoccupations

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 ...

Still from Hopinka's "Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer": slightly cloudy blue sky filling top of frame with ocean water below the horizon line.

Remembering the Images of Rome

Guest blogger Margaret Adams Groesbeck is a retired Amherst College librarian and enthusiastic member of the Smith College Museum of Art. She is a longtime student and sometime translator of Italian.

La pianta grande di Roma (The Large Plan of Rome)

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

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