Sculptor Kelly Akashi Commissioned

For New Williams College Museum of Art

By: WCMA - Apr 29, 2026

 

Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) announced today that artist Kelly Akashi has been selected to create a site-specific artwork on the grounds of the new museum, set to open in the fall of 2027.

This commission will create a new moment of welcome, signaling WCMA’s relationship to its natural surroundings, the campus community, and its collections and exhibitions. The commissioned artwork will be installed in the east meadows, facing toward campus, in late 2027. Akashi will visit Williams throughout 2026 to collaborate with the building’s architects and landscape architects and meet with the campus community.

“I'm looking forward to developing my new sculptures over this next year in close dialogue with the wooded and diverse landscape and the new building's design,” Akashi said. “The project centers on works that are at once botanical, geological, and sculptural. Their placement and scale invite museum visitors to create new relationships with the forests and plants in their daily environment. I’m excited to share more as the work begins.”

Akashi’s work emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording moments in time alongside personal and social histories. Her practice is characterized by a rigorous approach to research, deft manual skill, a reverence for process and materials, and formal play. Akashi is perpetually studying new ways of making, such as glass-blowing, casting, candle-making, and stone carving. Her works range across intricate glass-blown flowers and bronze casts of plantlife, to lifesize sculptures of her body made in polished travertine and animations of shells of extinct species.

"From her first site visit, Kelly has been asking good questions about the region's ecology and natural history and immediately reached out to college biologists and forestry experts to inform her proposal,” said Pamela Franks, the Class of 1956 Director of WCMA. “We are excited that her developing project engages such a wide array of disciplines, from biology, botany, ecology, and environmental studies to scientific imaging, public policy, migration, and history."