Past Exhibitions

vanessa german* (b. 1976) is an artist, activist, performer, and poet. THE RAREST BLACK WOMAN ON THE PLANET EARTH is german’s response to the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum, an early 20th-century cabinet of curiosities at Mount Holyoke. For the exhibition, german began with a question: "How do we decolonize a thing, a museum, a collection?" Her answer turned into an emancipatory endeavor: to touch every object in the Skinner collection.

Ranging from portraits to fragmented figures, the works in this exhibition serve as meditations on physical and psychological states of being. The suggested presence—and sometimes absence—of the human figure evokes a tension between the mysterious and the concrete, the real and the imagined.

This exhibition series celebrates the landmark bequest of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum to the College in 1946.

Explore an interactive 3D model of the exhibition as part of our 3D Museum Spring 2022

Alternate Endings: Conversations on Climate Change puts objects from the Museum’s collection in dialogue with new student-created artworks. Student work was on view in the Hinchcliff Reception Hall from January 29 - February 28, 2020, while a selection of artwork from the Museum's permanent collection was on display in the Carson Teaching Gallery from January 29 - February 2, 2020.

A beach in De Haan, Belgium, might seem like an unusual place to think about money and exchange. Yet for nearly a century, French and Flemish speaking boys and girls have gathered here each summer, creating an economy of paper flowers, paid for with handfuls of shells gathered from the shore. The children use shells because, as one of them calmly observes, “children don’t give each other real money . . .

Mount Holyoke Afire examines three devastating blazes that had a significant impact on the College in 1896, 1917, and 1922. This show looks at the photographic record of the original Seminary building, Williston Hall, and Rockefeller Hall before, during, and after the fires and uses objects to reconstruct what daily life was like in these buildings and contextualize what was lost.

Life/Like presents works from two recent series by emerging artist Martine Gutierrez (American, b. 1989) that consider themes of transformation, intimacy, identity, and reality. A nuanced exploration of gender roles lies at the heart of much of Gutierrez’s work. Her interest in boundaries—especially artificial boundaries—often leads Gutierrez to play with the viewer’s expectations and perception of reality.

This spotlight features works by photographer and member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation, Zig Jackson (b. 1957) in conversation with early 20th-century photographs by Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and Adam Clark Vroman (1856-1914). In his work, Jackson challenges deeply ingrained popular concepts of Native Americans and encourages viewers to embrace the narratives that people tell us about themselves.

Curated by Mac Chambers ’19

African American painter and printmaker Curlee Raven Holton reinvents Shakespeare’s Othello in this series of ten etchings, created during an artist residency at the Venice Printmaking Studio in 2012. At once aesthetically decadent and psychologically raw, Holton’s sepia-toned prints explore the inner life and public persona of the Moor of Venice, bringing to his story contemporary ideas about race, identity, and love.

The central link in three generations of quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1935) is celebrated for her bold compositions and improvisational quilting style.

Mary Woolley accomplished many feats in her 36-year term as president of Mount Holyoke College. Today, she is remembered for laying a foundation for LGBTQ inclusiveness at the College.

South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) is internationally-recognized for his film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance. For more than three decades, his work has explored contentious political systems such as colonialism, totalitarianism, and apartheid through powerful allegorical imagery and theater.

Presenting more than a dozen statuettes from the Museum’s collection, this exhibition invites viewers to experience a century of European and American sculpture, dating from 1890 to 1990. The works have been selected and researched by Dr. Gülru Çakmak and her students in the seminar “Modernizing Sculpture from Canova to Duchamp,” offered at UMass Amherst in fall 2016.

In 57 BCE, the philosopher and politician Cicero described the Roman home as “the most hallowed place on earth…the center of worship, religion, and domestic ritual.” While many people today are familiar with the Olympian gods and goddesses and the monumental, marble temples of ancient Rome, the religious practice that took place in the privacy of Roman domestic spaces is new to most.

The fall of 2016 marks the 140th anniversary of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum—a milestone shared by only a handful of collegiate art museums in the United States. Since its founding, visionary donors have given countless works of extraordinary beauty and cultural significance to the Museum’s collection. The recent past has been no exception.

Curated by Lynda Teller Pete, a fifth-generation weaver from the Newcomb and Two Grey Hills areas of the Navajo Nation, this collection spotlight focuses on a ca. 1935-1940 Navajo weaving of Yei figures.

In the text to his 1985 photo-essay A Summer’s Day, Joel Meyerowitz describes his photographs as “fragile paper timeships dusted with information.” A master of color photography for more than four decades, Meyerowitz catches fleeting sensations in his images, rather than just objects or observations. The source information “dusted” across his prints is often as intangible as his metaphor suggests.

Arnaldo Pomodoro is known for his imposing bronze sculptures in public sites like Vatican City in Rome and the United Nations Plaza in New York. Born in 1926, he began his career in the wake of World War II, as a consultant for the reconstruction of damaged public buildings in his native Italy.

Exploring themes of absence and abundance, entropy and energy, this new installation brings together highlights from the Museum’s continuously expanding holdings in contemporary art.

Ellen Lanyon (1926-2013) was a celebrated artist associated with a movement of representational painters known as the Chicago Imagists. She created fantastical works throughout her sixty-year career, including the series on view, titled Beyond the Borders, which captures Lanyon’s fascination with both design and the natural world.

Henri Matisse drew constantly, and his direct, elegant draftsmanship has become a hallmark of modern art. This exhibition features Matisse drawings from across 50 years:  1900-1950. We thank Ellsworth Kelly for making a brilliant and discerning selection and for conceiving a stunning presentation of these drawings.

An installation of Carrie Mae Weems’s I Looked and Looked to See What So Terrified You (2006) continues the Museum’s series of permanent collection spotlights this fall. In this diptych, the artist portrays herself wearing a beautifully quilted dress as she looks into a handheld mirror. Each panel is the mirror image of the other. Typical of Weems’s conceptual photography, the images operate on several levels simultaneously.

Inside/Outside explores the contrasting photographic sensibilities of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson in the middle of the twentieth century. Although the two men knew and respected each other and even exhibited together, they could not have been more different in their ways with the camera. For Evans, a bookish Midwesterner, photography was a deliberate art.

This collection spotlight features an iconic piece of early 18th-century Massachusetts furniture, the Museum’s “EK” Hadley chest. This examination of the object explores the design and construction that defines this furniture tradition, the provenance of the Museum’s example, and the significance of these objects that were commissioned for young Western Massachusetts women.

TO BE AT THE FARTHER EDGE: Photographs along the New England Trail/Barbara Bosworth is presented by the National Park Service in cooperation with the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Connecticut Forest & Park Association.

Using pictures she finds in books, magazines, and catalogues as raw material, the artist Lorna Bieber transforms images through copying and cropping, expanding and contracting, until she has individual elements that fit into her vision for a completed work. Her multi-paneled montages rely on the relationships between the parts to create complexity.

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and Streaming Museum have collaborated to produce an exhibition entitled Brave New Perspectives: This World Through the Lens of New Media Art. The exhibition superimposes four new media works with questions designed to encourage visitors to critically engage with new media art. An accompanying blog, accessible via an iPad mounted in the exhibition space, further encourages dialogue.

Andy Warhol once pinpointed the ideal condition for taking a good picture. Thinking of paparazzi out to catch “a famous person doing something unfamous,” the artist perversely suggested that the key to photography was “being in the right place at the wrong time.

This exhibition features a selection of outstanding works on paper by prominent African American artists, all produced at the acclaimed Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. On view are a range of printmaking processes including serigraphs, relief prints, color etchings, and lithographs by eight internationally renowned artists: Emma Amos, David C.

The contemporary relief sculptures brought together in this exhibition are of many descriptions. Though relief is probably not the first form that comes to mind when we think of contemporary art, it is actually quite prevalent.

World Documents brings together the work and ideas of important, thoughtful, and eloquent contemporary photographers. Presenting their work as competing approaches to the practice of documentary photography, it places their projects in a global setting and meditates on the possibilities and limitations facing the socially concerned photographer today.

“All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle Ingenia of people in foreign lands.”

From the tilling of the soil to the washing of the dishes, nearly every step in food's journey from production to consumption has been represented in the visual arts. Whether planted or hunted, cooked or purchased, eaten as basic sustenance or in celebration, food has worked its way into numerous prints, drawings, and photographs, as the focus of a composition or as an accessory.

In 1930s America, a newly defined mode of photographic expression, “documentary,” tried to address the extraordinary trauma visited upon common people, who were daily struggling with poverty and hunger, disenfranchisement and displacement. Documentary photography, then and in subsequent generations, helped Americans understand the Great Depression and, at a time when the promises of industrial capitalism seemed in doubt, helped them interpret

The expressive power of visual art to articulate important religious values as well as complicated spiritual beliefs has been utilized by artists throughout the ages. From elaborate sculptures representing important deities, to paintings of sacred spaces, to small vessels that mediate contact between the earthly realm and the divine, devotional artwork has served an essential function for those pursuing spiritual understanding.

Lisette Model and Her Successors brings together for the first time a selection of 120 vintage works by Lisette Model, one of the last century's most significant photographers together with 12 of her illustrious students who went on to leave their own marks on American photographic history: Diane Arbus, Bruce Cratsley, Elaine Ellman, Larry Fink, Peter Hujar, Raymond Jacobs, Ruth Kaplan, Leon Levinstein, Eva Rubinstein, Gary Schneider,

How do our particular memories, histories and traditions inform us as individuals and shape the marks we leave on the world? For more than 40 years, Faith Ringgold has been formulating answers to this question in the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and—perhaps most famously—quilts in which she documents her experiences as an African-American woman, mother, daughter, and artist.