2023-24 Alice C. Cole '42 Fellow Artist Talk: Kaitlyn Jo Smith
Join the Art Department for an artist talk by Kaitlyn Jo Smith, the 2023-24 Alice C. Cole '42 Fellow. Her interdisciplinary studio research considers the implications of automation on labor and religion in relation to America’s working class. Through the implementation of automated technologies and machine learning, her work questions the authority of algorithms while promoting a dialogue around future applications of artificial intelligence.
The Cole Fellowship is awarded to an outstanding early-career painter or sculptor (broadly defined), providing funds to support one year of unimpeded time and space to experiment, develop a body of work, and focus on future artistic goals. Cole Fellowships are based on nominations from prominent members of the national artist community. The fellowship is made possible by the generous bequest of Wellesley alumna Alice C. Cole '42. Aware of the burdens that may face recent graduates of art programs, Ms. Cole makes it possible for an artist to have 'a limited time free of economic necessity'-- an immensely valuable gift.
Remember a Place Not Here: the 2023 Thesis and Senior Exhibition
Join the Art Department for the 2023 Thesis and Senior Exhibition, Remember a Place Not Here!
This year's show features work in media like oil painting, traditional printmaking practices, and weaving alongside digital film, virtual reality, and 3D rendering, made by over 40 students in more than 15 different majors. Making and meaning are at the center of what we do in the Art Department, and students majoring in the arts engage with the field in a deeply meaningful way. But this year's incredibly diverse exhibition is evidence of the importance of the arts all across campus-- from the Studio Art majors who've taken a class in almost every art discipline to the students majoring in something like Neuroscience or Economics, who still dedicate long hours to advanced studio art classes and find themselves making beautiful, nuanced, conceptually complex artworks.
Artwork is on display in the Jewett Art Gallery, Jewett Hallway Galleries, Jewett Sculpture Court, JAC 255, PNW 2nd floor lobby, PNW 203, PNW 205, and the PNW 1st floor De Hoyos Lobby.
The show is on view May 5 through the morning of May 20. This year's show is open to the public 10 am - 5 pm, 7 days a week, May 5 - May 18.
Please note that May 19 and 20 are graduation ceremonies on campus, so the show will be viewable to members of the campus community and invited guests attending graduation only on those dates.
The opening reception is Friday May 5, 4:30 - 5:30 pm.
Contact Gallery Director Samara Pearlstein with any questions about the show, or for directions from visitor parking to the art buildings.
FRI-SAT APRIL 28 - 29: Friedman Fête, a Symposium in Honor of Alice T. Friedman
The Art Dept is honored to present Friedman Fête, a celebration of Alice T. Friedman's teaching and scholarship. Professor Friedman is retiring after 43 years with Wellesley College, and this two day event will offer an opportunity for former students, colleagues, friends, and members of the campus community to come together in celebration of her incredible work as a teacher, researcher, writer, and inspiration to generations of students studying architecture and art history.
A reception will be held in the Davis Plaza tent at 5:00 pm on Friday April 28.
A symposium in honor of Prof. Friedman will be held from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm on Saturday April 29 in Collins Cinema. The program for the symposium may be found here.
Both events are free to attend and open to the public.
Guest should park in the on-campus garage and walk to the Davis Plaza/Collins Cinema. A map of the route to walk may be found here. Enter campus via the Central St/Route 135 entrance and park in the garage to the right. Exit the garage and follow the dotted red line past the student center, past the physical plant (building with a 'smokestack'), then come up behind the Davis Museum. You can take the stairs up underneath the Davis (red), or come around it on either the left or right side (green lines). The Davis Plaza and Collins Cinema are between the Davis Museum and the Jewett Arts Center.
Contact Martha McNamara with any questions.
The 2023 Boston Cinema & Media Studies Lecture: Amanda Phillips
The 2023 Boston Cinema & Media Studies Lecture will be by Amanda Phillips, giving a talk titled "Video Games and the Pornography of Death."
Amanda Phillips (they/he/she) is an Associate Professor of English, Film and Media Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and American Studies at Georgetown University. They are the author of Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture, as well as co-editor of the Queer/Trans/Digital book series with NYU Press. He writes about sex, death, identity, and politics in video games, with a particular emphasis on centering the insights of queer women of color and feminism in the study of technology. Her interests more broadly are in issues of racial and gender justice in and around technoculture, popular media, and the digital humanities.
This year's talk will be a hybrid event, taking place both in-person and on Zoom. The in-person viewing will take place at Collins Cinema, with a reception to follow.
This event is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required to attend via Zoom. Click here to register for Zoom attendance.
The 2023 Dr. Ruth Morris Bakwin Class of 1919 Art Lecture - Drs. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard
This year's Bakwin Art Lecture will feature eminent feminist art historians Dr. Norma Broude and Dr. Mary D. Garrard.
Dr. Broude is a specialist in 19th century French and Italian painting. She has offered critical scholarship and reassessments of Impressionist painters, including Degas, Cassatt, and Seurat. Dr. Garrard focuses on the Italian Renaissance-Baroque period in her own research. In addition to their numerous publications seperately, together they co-edited four books on feminism and art history that created the basis for feminist art historical education in America. The first of these, Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, was originally published in 1982, at a time when conservative art critics and historians were still questioning whether contemporary feminist art had any place at all in the canon, let alone whether already-canonical works could be interpreted through a feminist lens.
Authors of what would become some of the most essential and foundational feminist art history texts, Drs Broude and Garrard forever changed the conversation around art history and feminist thought in the US.
Tuesday, April 4
5:15 pm EDT
The lecture will take place on Zoom, advance registration required. Register online here!
Members of the campus community and invited guests have the option of watching the talk together in JAC 450, where refreshments will be served.
Email Meghan Murray with any questions.
The Spring 2023 Frank Williams Visiting Artist: Emily Hass
Friday, March 24, 2023, 11:00 am, Jewett Auditorium
The Spring 2023 Frank Williams Visiting Artist will be Emily Hass, a New York-based contemporary artist. Hass holds degrees in design and psychology from Harvard University. Much of her work is structured around the topics of forced migration and exile, looking at the destruction of Jewish homes and neighborhoods in WWII and current mass displacements in Syria and elsewhere. Experiments in architectural mapping intersect with installation and sculpture to explore concepts of home remembered and lost. Hass has been a Howard Foundation Fellow and a MacDowell Fellow. She was awarded the McCloy Fellowship in Art and has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally and in the US, and is in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin.
For this event Hass will be in conversation with curator Rachael Arauz '91 in the Jewett Auditorium.
This event is open to the campus community and invited guests only.
The 2023 Wellesley/Deerfield Symposium
The Digital Image as Material Object: Archaeologies of Computer Graphics
The computer is not a visual medium, and yet computation as we know it today has been fundamentally shaped by computer graphics. It was the desire to make computation legible and accessible to human users that drove researchers to develop systems for graphical human-machine communication, and while visual representation is in no way essential to the theory of computing or the practice of procedural calculation, computer graphics played a significant role in the development of the computer as a technical medium, and for shaping our modern understanding of what computers are for and can do. This talk engages this seventy year history, arguing that computer graphics mark a transformation in the very notion of what computing is through the imposition of a formal logic tied to a theory of the world as a structure of visible, interactive objects.
The 2022 Dr. Ruth E. Morris Bakwin Class of 1919 Art Lecture: Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles
A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ALHAMBRA
An historian of Islamic art and architecture, Dr. Ruggles’ research examines the medieval landscape of Islamic Spain and South Asia and the complex interrelationship of Islamic culture with Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism and the precise ways that religion and culture are often conflated in the study of these. She is the author of two award-winning books on gardens: Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (2000), and Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (2008). Additionally she has edited or co-edited numerous works, including Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (2000), the award-winning Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (2007), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (2007), Intangible Heritage Embodied (2009), On Location (2012), and Islamic Art and Visual Culture: An Anthology of Sources (2011).
