Williams College Museum of Art: 2008
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Frank Jackson, Okwui Enwezor in Schedule of Exhibitions and Events
By: Charles Giuliano - Jan 02, 2008
The Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts is planning a richly diverse schedule of exhibitions and special events for the Spring semester. The programming has an emphasis on Hispanic, African American, and African exhibitions and critical thinking.
Recently, while attending the Venice Biennale, we viewed and reported on an installation of work by the late artist Felix Gonzales-Torres in the American Pavilion. It was only the second time that a deceased American (in this case Cuban born) artist was so honored. The previous example was an exhibition by the Earth Works sculptor, Robert Smithson. In response to the critical interest and prestige of representing the U.S. at Venice there have been two prominent projects in the past months, one at Harvard University, and a second "Untitled" (Placebo) which remains on view at WCMA through March 23.
The conceptual piece which relates to the loss and the impact of AIDS, to which the artist and his life partner succumbed, was expressed as a grid of wrapped, hard candies which visitors are invited to take away. So there is a kind of 'hands on' attrition during the length of the project that symbolizes both depletion and replenishing when the work, according to instructions of the artist, is reinstalled. It is a powerful metaphor of physical and spiritual loss as well as an aesthetic enrichment through its transmutation as an intangible and transient sculpture. The work has been loaned for this occasion by the Museum of Modern Art. It was inslatted as an expression of the museum's commitment to World AIDS Day when it opened during that occasion on December 1, 2007.
Nancy Spector, the Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the U.S. Commissioner for the recent Venice Biennale, will offer a lecture on the artist at 4 pm on Wednesday, February 20. It will be followed at 5 pm by a reception celebrating the vernissage of several special exhibitions.
The exhibition "Unchained Legacies," January 26-June 29, highlights two, new acquisitions including "Stowage," 1997, by Willie Cole and "Absolut Power," 2003, by Hank Willis Thomas. The works and others in the exhibition respond to the famous 1808 diagram of how the human cargo was distributed in the "Brookes" slave ship diagram. It is one of the most enduring and grim documents of the "Middle Passage." Numerous artists have used this historical image in their work.
A symposium related to the "Unchained Legacies" exhibition will be held from 9:30 am to 6 pm "Artistic Crossings of the Black Atlantic: The Migratory Aesthetic in Contemporary Art" on Saturday, March 1. The day long symposium will include presentations by the sculptor, Willie Cole, multi-media artist, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, the photographer, Hank Willis Thomas, and the installation artist/ MacArthur Fellow, Fred Wilson. The symposium will be held at the Clark Art Institute and costs $20 per person, $10 for members of the WCMA and the Clark. It is free to Williams students and faculty. A reception follows the symposium at the museum from 6 to 8 pm.
There will be two exhibitions featuring different aspects of the work of the South African artist "William Kentridge Prints," February 9 through April 27, and a video projection "History of the Main Complaint" (1996) from February 2 through April 27. The projects were organized by Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa.
Other exhibition on view during the spring semester include "Frank Jackson: Echo," January 12 to April 20 and "Julie Mehretu: City Sitings," April 19 to July 27. A talk by Mehretu, a MacArthur Fellow, will be introduced and moderated by a Clark Fellow, Chika Okeke-Agulu, on April 24 at 6 pm followed by a reception.
Okwui Enwezer, the Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute and Adjunct Curator at the International Center of Photography, and a past organizer of Documenta, in Kassel, Germany will present a lecture "(Un) Civil Engineering: Williams Kentridge's Allegorical Landscapes" on Saturday, April 12, at 2 pm in the Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall, of Williams College. He will discuss the role of landscape as an archival structure of memory and narrative in Kentridge's work and in the context of post-apartheid culture.