News & Upcoming Events

The Spring 2023 Frank Williams Visiting Artist: Emily Hass

studio work table with clamped light; tan grid behind with thin lined diamond shapes laid on top

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 Dr. Ruth Morris Bakwin Class of 1919 Art Lecture - Drs. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard

 

Bakwin poster

This year's Bakwin Art Lecture will feature eminent feminist art historians Dr. Norma Broude and Dr. Mary Garrard.

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 2023 Wellesley/Deerfield Symposium

WELLESLEY/DEERFIELD poster

 
Saturday March 4, 2023
Collins Cinema (in person) and on Zoom
9:00 am - 5:00 pm
 
Join the Art Department and the Wellesley College Architecture Program for the 2023 Wellesley/Deerfield symposium, Homemaking: Race, Place, & Ethnicity in the New England Household.
 
This one-day symposium will explore the visual and material cultures of race and ethnicity in New England's domestic sphere from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Cultural and racial diversity have long characterized New England's domestic environments, and symposium participants will present research on the varied ways in which the region's households were shaped by perceptions of, ideas about, and attitudes towards race and ethnicity.
 
The symposium will be a hybrid event this year, where attendees can choose to come in person to see the talks in Collins Cinema, or can watch remotely on Zoom. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance. Register here to attend!
 

 

 

Fall 2022 Events Update
 
The Art Department hosted a number of fantastic visitors and events in Fall 2022. See below for details!
 
September 6 - October 28: Gospel of Three Dimensions
Massachusetts-based artist Mika Obayashi was on campus for the closing reception of Gospel of Three Dimensions, her installation in the Jewett Art Gallery. The day before she ran an indigo dyeing workshop for students in ARTS 112 Introduction to Book Studies in the quad tent, where students learned how to use this natural, ancient technique to dye paper that they had made themselves earlier in the semester.
 
October 31: Art Dept Halloween Party
The Art Department hosted an outdoor Halloween party this year. OK, technically it was our Spring Course Preview event, where students can hang out with professors and ask questions about the various Art Dept majors, minors, and courses on offer in the coming semester. But this year it involved pizza, candy, and so many great costumes!
 
November 2: McNeil lecture, Memoryscapes of Slavery
Brown University's Renée Ater gave the first McNeil lecture of the year, titled Memoryscapes of Slavery, followed by an on-stage conversation with professor Nikki Greene.
 
November 4: Fall 2022 Frank Williams Visiting Artist
The Fall 2022 Frank Williams Visiting Artist was internationally renowed multidisciplinary artist Liliana Porter. The College was lucky to have the opportunity to welcome her back to campus, where she gave a talk and met individually with advanced senior studio art students.
 
November 17: McNeil lecture, The Materials of Shame: Decoration, Masculinity, and the Birth of Modern Interior Design
Concordia University's John Potvin, in conversation with Vanderbilt University's Kevin Murphy, gave the second McNeil lecture of the year.
 
November 18: INNER PEACE
Students in ARTS 307 Advanced Sculptural Practices opened INNER PEACE, a transformative installation in the Jewett Art Gallery. The artwork featured all reclaimed materials from campus building projects.
 
December 8, 3...2...1...
Students in ARTS 321 Advanced New Media opened 3...2...1..., an exhibition of their final projects. The works on display feature a wide range of materials, from video art to traditional stained glass, traditional embroidery to hand-sewn vinyl gloves, inkjet-printed digital compositions to traditional painting and ceramics.
 

 

 

The Digital Image as Material Object: Archaeologies of Computer Graphics

The Cinema and Media Studies program invites you to 
 
The Digital Image as Material Object : Archaeologies of Computer Graphics
 
presented by Professor Jacob Gaboury, Film & Media, UC Berkeley
Tuesday, March 14, 2022 [add to gcal]
 
questions? please reach out to Prof Nick Gutierrez [ng102@wellesley.edu]
 

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.

 
Jacob Gaboury is an Associate Professor of Film & Media at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in the history of digital image technologies and their impact on our contemporary visual culture. His work has appeared in a range of popular and academic publications, including Grey Room, the Journal of Visual CultureCamera ObscuraDebates in the Digital HumanitiesRhizome, and Art Papers, and has been supported by a number of fellowships and organizations in the history of science and technology, including the ACM History Fellowship, the IEEE Life Members Fellowship, the Charles Babbage Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His first book is titled Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press 2021), and it traces a material history of early computer graphics through a set of five objects that structure the production and circulation of all digital images today.
 
This presentation is a part of the Boston Cinema/Media Seminar Series. 
 

 

 

The 2022 Dr. Ruth E. Morris Bakwin Class of 1919 Art Lecture: Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles

The 2022 Ruth Morris Bakwin Lecture, a picture of the Alhambra set in a mountainside landscape


A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ALHAMBRA
presented by D. Fairchild Ruggles,  Debra L. Mitchell Chair in Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 
28 FEBRUARY 2022 | 5:00 PM | REGISTER VIA ZOOM
 
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).

 


 

Slade Graduate Applications Now Open

The Slade Graduate Fellowships provide financial aid for graduating seniors and alumnae to pursue graduate studies in Art History and Studio Art. At her death, Mary Clothier Slade (1865-1953) left funds to a variety of charitable and philanthropic institutions. She included Wellesley as a recipient because her son, Bernard Heyl, was Kimball Professor of Art at Wellesley from 1931 to 1965. According to Professor Heyl, through art “our powers are expanded, our enjoyment enriched, our understanding of the world and its people broadened and deepened.”

A committee comprised of Art Department faculty will name a recipient in Art History and Studio Art, based on merit and need. Applicants may be either graduating seniors or alumnae of Wellesley College, and must have been Art History or Studio Art majors or minors. Applicants must be enrolled in a degree-granting graduate program during the 2022-23 academic year to be eligible for this fellowship. Prior Slade Graduate Fellowship recipients are not eligible to apply again. The fellowship can be used to offset graduate school expenses or to fund specific research or projects related to an applicant’s degree, and will be approximately $6,000 each. Incomplete applications will not be considered; please follow up with your recommenders well ahead of the deadline to make sure they will submit letters on your behalf.

 

LINK TO APPLICATION. DEADLINE APRIL 15 2022

 


 

NEWS + EVENTS

FREQUENTLY UPDATED:

What's Happening in the Art Dept?

2023
Friday March 24, 2023 at 11:00 am in the Jewett Auditorium
 
Tuesday April 4, 2023 at 5:15 pm on Zoom and in JAC 450
 
Saturday March 4, 2023 from 9 am - 5 pm on Zoom and in Collins Cinema
 

ARPIL 2022

Slade Graduate Applications due April 15

MARCH 2022

The Frank Williams Visiting Artist Series: Johanna Unzueta 
Friday, March 5, 2022 - Open to the Wellesley Community only

The Digital Image as Material ObjectJacob Gaboury
Monday, March 14, 2022 at 5:00 pm

FEBRUARY 2022

The 2022 Dr. Ruth E. Morris Bakwin Class of 1919 Art Lecture: Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles
Monday, February 28, 2022 at 5:00 pm

>> See Older Events

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

Jewett Art Gallery
Jan. - March 19, 2023
 
3...2...1...
students in Advanced New Media
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all Art Dept exhibition spaces
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N.E. Brown, Megan Hinton, Brooke Henderson Stewart
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