Photo Caption: Left: Gallery, Wellesley College Farnsworth Art Museum, undated, Courtesy of Wellesley College Archives; Right: Dorothy Johnston Towne Gallery, Davis Museum at Wellesley College 2016, Courtesy of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

9:00 AM - 6:00 PM, Thursday, March 26, 2026

9:30 AM - 4:30 PM, Friday, March 27, 2026

Davis Museum Galleries and Tishman Commons

In this hybrid, bilingual symposium hosted by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in English and French, students, scholars, and alumni around the world will extend Wellesley’s legacy of learning directly from works of art. Held in Tishman Commons and live-streamed, the symposium will propose new strategies for the ethical stewardship of artworks collected by the College since 1875. In collaboration with the Wellesley Club of France, Centre International de Recherches André Malraux, Pluralism Initiative, French House, and French, Francophone, and Italian Studies Department, the symposium pays special attention to the influence of novelist, politician, and cultural critic André Malraux on Wellesley’s museum in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Register here to attend in person: Day One, March 26, 2026

Register here to attend in person: Day Two, March 27, 2026

Register here to attend panels via livestream. 

This symposium is supported by the Mary Hammond Norton ‘54 Endowed Fund for the Davis Museum and co-sponsored by the Pluralism Initiative, French House, Art Department, Religion Department, Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, and Africana Studies.

Schedule: 

Thursday, March 26, 2026

9:00 AM - 9:30 AM: Coffee, Tishman Commons

9:30 AM - 10:00 AM: Opening Remarks, Tishman Commons

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Session One: Imagination at Non-Imaginary Museums, in collaboration with the Art Department, Tishman Commons

Chair: 

David Teng Olsen, Art Department, Wellesley College

Panelists: 

Semente, Davis Museum at Wellesley College

Hannah Goodwin, Institute for Human Centered Design

Theodore Ducas, Physics Department, Wellesley College

Sara Brown, Wellesley College Class of 2025

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Lunch Break 

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Session Two: Malraux in 2175, in collaboration with the Centre International de Recherches André Malraux, Wellesley French House, and Wellesley French, Francophone, and Italian Studies Department, Tishman Commons

Chair:

Venita Datta, French and Francophone Studies, Wellesley College

Panelists: 

Michaël de Saint Cheron, Centre international de recherches André Malraux

Recommended reading: 

Andre Malraux, Museum Without Walls (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967)

3:00 PM: Tours and Discussions in the Galleries, Davis Museum

4:00 PM - 6:00 PM: Reception, Tishman Commons

4:15 PM: Brief Remarks Celebrating Wellesley’s 150th Anniversary, Tishman Commons

Speaker: Courtney C. Coile, Office of the Provost, Wellesley College 

Friday, March 27, 2026

9:30 AM -10:00 AM: Coffee, Tishman Commons

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Session One: What’s in a Word?: Repatriation, in collaboration with the Pluralism Initiative, Tishman Commons 

Chair:

Amanda Gilvin, Davis Museum at Wellesley College

Panelists: 

Erica P. Jones, The Fowler Museum at UCLA 

Kwasi Ampene, Tufts University 

Ashley Thompson, SOAS-University of London

Sokunthyda Long, Yale University 

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Lunch Break 

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Session Two: Gandharan Arts at the Davis, in collaboration with the Art Department, Tishman Commons

Chair:

Yuhua Ding, Davis Museum at Wellesley College

Panelists: 

Angela Chang, Harvard Art Museums

Liza Oliver,  Art Department, Wellesley College

Dessislava Vendova, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

2:30 PM - 3:00 PM: Closing remarks, Tishman Commons

Speaker: Amanda Gilvin, Davis Museum at Wellesley College

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM: Tours and Discussions in the Galleries, Davis Museum