Williams College Museum of Art Continues Its Reinstallation Project With "Expressions"

Written by Hank Calhoun Sunday, 20 May 2012 21:18

Williamstown, MA.– The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is proud to present "Expressions", the current installation in The Gallery of Crossed Destinies from July 16th through Sunday, September 11th. Featured as one of the centerpieces of the museum’s Reflections on a Museum reinstallation project, The Gallery of Crossed Destinies invites us to consider how our perceptions of objects change in the museum setting. The museum invited four guest curators — a florist, a group of high school students, a theater festival director and an athletic coach — to create their own narratives from a miniature “collection” of 25 artworks. Each curator has responded to the same objects to conceive a distinct exhibition, determining every aspect of presentation from art placement to wall text. Each exhibition explores how objects evoke stories and how these narratives change depending on how they are presented and who presents them.

The current installation, "Expressions", is by Jenny Gersten, Artistic Director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF). Gersten approached the exhibition by connecting to the art through the medium of theater. She was interested in how artworks express themselves and wanted to endeavor to give the artworks a voice. Gersten reached out to  theater artists, specifically playwrights, and showed them particular images of art selected for the exhibition and asked them if they would either write something for it, or choose something already written that might accompany the work in some way.

The result will culminate with readings by actors from the WTF’s non-Equity company on Tuesday, July 19th at 2:00 p.m. Actor/director/MacArthur Recipient Bill Irwin will direct the performance of works by Samuel Barclay Beckett, Liz Flahive, Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, Howard Korder, Donald Margulies, Itamar Moses, and Bess Wohl. When asked about the connection between the visual art and the written art Gersten responded, “There are very few chances to exercise one’s imagination anymore. In the digital age when we can look up anything at any moment, it can be very limited. This is one of the great opportunities to exercise your imagination.” The Gallery of Crossed Destinies is a project inspired by a text that Williams Professor Mark Haxthausen assigned to his students to encourage critical thinking about museum practice. In Italo Calvino's fantastical novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, a group of travelers meet at an enchanted castle where guests must communicate with only a set of tarot cards. Continually shuffled, these cards—like the art objects in The Gallery of Crossed Destinies—tell new stories with each sorting. The artwork presented in The Gallery of Crossed Destinies features an eclectic mix of some of the museum’s finest treasures.

The collection includes such items as oil paintings by Edward Hopper and George Inness, artifacts from ancient China and Egypt, and sculpture by Louise Nevelson and Claes Oldenburg. The ongoing exhibitions are on view in the Class of 1935 Gallery, where three large windows have been reopened after having been covered for almost 20 years. This new, dramatic influx of light has had a transformative effect on the gallery space. The windows act as a metaphor for the project as a whole, visually connecting the museum with the outside community. The previous projects of The Gallery of Crossed Destinies were Light Affects by local florist Chad Therrien and The Art of Emotion by 9th graders at Mt. Greylock Regional High School.  Aaron Kelton, the head football coach at Williams College, will curate the gallery this coming fall.





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 actively publishes catalogues to accompany our self-organized loan exhibitions, many of which travel nationally and internationally. Some of these exhibitions include: Introjection: Tony Oursler, mid-career survey, 1976–1999 (1999); Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project (2000); Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1906–1913 (2002); Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (2003); Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1890–1910 (2005); Jackson Pollock at Williams College: A Tribute to Kirk Varnedoe ’67 (2006); Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2006); Drawing on Hopper: Gregory Crewdson/ Edward Hopper (2006); Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy (2007); Liu Zheng: The Chinese (2008), and Prendergast in Italy (2009). 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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