The Williams College Museum of Art features African Americans & the American Scene,1929–1945

Written by Beatrice Tanquery Sunday, 08 January 2012 22:42

Williamstown, Massachusetts.– The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is pleased to present "African Americans and the American Scene, 1929–1945", on view from January 14th through April 22nd 2012. "African Americans and the American Scene" explores the role of African Americans in the visual and performing arts during the Great Depression. On Thursday, February 16th there will be a Multidisciplinary Gallery Talk at 4:30 pm followed by a public reception from 5:30–7:30 pm. These events are free and all are invited to attend. "African Americans and the American Scene" focuses on the Depression era. Shaken by the economic collapse, the country experienced a profound crisis of national identity during the Great Depression.  Artists began to picture the “American Scene,” subjects culled from daily life such as farms, labor, picnics, and landscapes.

African American culture was used as source material for depicting the American Scene. Furthermore, federal funding for the arts during the depression provided opportunities for white and black artists alike. Through visual art, dance, and film, African Americans and the American Scene endeavors to sift though the complexities of racial representation in art and the social inclusion and exclusion that affected black artists and performers' access to their medium of choice. Artists featured in this exhibition include Thomas Hart Benton, Walker Evans, Robert Gwathmey, Dorothea Lange, Aaron Siskind, and Marion Post Wolcott. Artwork by African American artists Samuel Brown, Jacob Lawrence, and William H. Johnson will highlight the ways that black artists engaged with the American Scene movement.  The visual art from the 1930s and 40s will be paired with Barbara Morgan’s photographs of African American modern dancer Pearl Primus and artistic storyboards from the film Emperor Jones, starring Paul Robeson.

Widely considered one of the finest college art museums in the country, the Williams College Museum of Art is a department of Williams College. The mission of the Williams College Museum of Art is “to advance learning through lively and innovative approaches to art for the students of Williams College and communities beyond the campus.” The museum was accredited by the American Association of Museums in 1993 and re-accredited in 2004. WCMA houses nearly 13,000 works that span the history of art. The museum encourages multidisciplinary teaching through encounters with art objects that traverse time periods and cultures. An active, collecting museum, its strengths are in modern and contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is especially known for its stellar collection of American art from the late 18th century to the present. With the largest collection in the world of works by the brothers Charles and Maurice Prendergast, the museum is a primary center for study of these American artists in a transatlantic context of the 19th and early 20th centuries. WCMA’s signature exhibition style is to place art within a broad cultural and historical context. Special exhibitions curated by museum staff, faculty, students, and guest curators focus on new scholarship and encourage multiple perspectives. The museum’s catalogues are consistent with this mode of presentation, in that they typically include writings from a range of scholars, and it is characteristic to find art historians and artists writing alongside historians and political scientists. WCMA has received recognition from the International Association of Art Critics for the following four exhibitions: Introjection: Tony Oursler, mid-career survey, 1976–1999; Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1906–1913; Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1890–1910; Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Prendergast in Italy. The year 2011 saw the reinstallation of ten of the museum’s galleries with Reflections on a Museum, an ambitious project that stresses the importance of the museum’s collection as the heart of this teaching museum. Visit the museum's website at ... http://wcma.williams.edu

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