We will be celebrating the opening weekend of Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem by offering free admission all weekend, January 17–19, 2020.
The opening weekend will also feature our annual Free Community Day on January 18 (details below)
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem will be on view at SCMA from January 17–April 12, 2020
All Ages Welcome!
Free Admission ALL DAY
Activities from 11am to 3:30pm
Featuring...
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Smith College Museum of Art.
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SCMA is recognized as a leading academic museum, contributing meaningfully to Smith College’s mission to educate women of promise for lives of distinction and purpose. We welcome about 35,000 visitors a year, including Five College students, staff and faculty, and visitors from the region and around the world. The museum’s collection now comprises more than 27,000 objects, representing the diversity of art and material culture across periods and geographies.
The Smith College Museum of Art is a leader among academic museums, setting the standards for how a museum can support teaching and learning on a college campus, nurture lifelong learners and contribute to the life of its community and society at large. When you support SCMA, you help make this vision a reality.
In 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt needed to generate enthusiasm for his New Deal. The challenge was to find support for investments into programs and services directed primarily to the recovery of rural America, which most city folk had not experienced firsthand. Roosevelt’s conversational and intimate fireside radio chats brought him into people’s homes. His straight talk promised hope and comfort to an ailing nation and highlighted what the government was doing to remedy the country’s ills.
Clarissa Tossin’s Ch’u Mayaa questions the forms of cultural appropriation in modernist architecture. Tossin focuses on Mayan Revival style as it manifested in Los Angeles during the early 20th century and sets the work in the Hollyhock House (built 1919–1921), a private home in Los Angeles designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Working with the choreographer and performer Crystal Sepúlveda, Tossin based Ch’u Mayaa’s choreography and movements on the gestures and poses represented in Mayan ceramics and murals.