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.
Staying Inside | Learning Something New
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, 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. Today's post is from Aprile Gallant, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs.
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.
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.
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.
Melancholy Dominance
With sparse, barren trees surrounding the homestead in an otherwise naked field, Barkin's illustration carries that sure sense of late autumn decay and the melancholy that never fails to accompany it.
Enveloped Encroachment
Paul Dougherty's Road Through Trees in Sunlight takes the human-environmental relationship to early 20th century America. The Romantic, spreading to the United States, took to a new environment, adopting new representations as human exceptionalism spread.
