May 15, 2025
CLARK ART INSTITUTE’S RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM CELEBRATES TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program (RAP) celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the program with a series of events reflecting on how the writing of art history is changing rapidly, through scholarly as well as curatorial and creative practices. From Wednesday, June 25 through Saturday, June 28, past RAP Fellows, former conference conveners and participants, previous RAP and Clark staff members, and a host of other invited scholars, curators, and practitioners convene for talks, roundtable conversations, seminars, film screenings, special tours, and object sessions at the Clark.
Events are free and open to the public but registration is requested. Proceedings will not be livestreamed or recorded. To register and for details on the conference program, visit clarkart.edu/RAP25.
The Research and Academic Program supports scholarship in art history, visual culture, and interdisciplinary inquiry that challenges how art historians and scholars think about writing history and addresses the complexity of the contemporary world. One of the few institutions in the United States that combines a public art museum with research and academic programs, including a major art history library, the Clark is a leading international center for research and discussion on the nature of art and art history. Since the beginning of the program, RAP has hosted 460 leading scholars, curators, and art historians in its residential fellowship program, who come to the Clark for anywhere from two to ten months for study and research on a wide range of subjects related to the field.
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Wednesday, June 25
5:30 pm: A Conversation on RAP and Its Legacy in Art History
Auditorium
Speakers include Michael Ann Holly, Starr Director Emeritus of the Research and Academic Program, in conversation with David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Darby English, Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History, University of Chicago; Christopher Heuer, professor of Art History, University of Rochester, New York; Mark Ledbury, Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Director of the Power Institute, University of Sydney; and Mariët Westermann, director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York.
A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.
9 am–12 pm: The “Work” of Theory from the Global South
Auditorium
Resisting nativist cultural politics on the one hand and art history’s Eurocentrism in the matters of theory on the other, the panel takes off from an article titled "The Work of Theory: Thinking Across Traditions” by Prathama Banerjee, Aditya Nigam and Rakesh Pandey in 2016 published in the Economic and Political Weekly, to propose that “we move from the position of being a critic of Western theory to that being a composer and assembler of a new theory from different sources and histories.” Theorists from the global south and the global north will gather to explore writing an art history that leaves open the possibility of abstract thinking and self-reflexivity in the non-European knowledge systems and aesthetic theories.
Speakers include Parul Dave Mukherji, convener, professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Iftikhar Dadi, professor of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University, Rochester, New York, on “Abstraction and Modernism”; James Elkins, chair of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, on “Reconceptualizing Global Art History”; Prita Meier, associate professor of Art History, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, on “The Indian Ocean as Method: Beyond the ‘Cross-Cultural’ Paradigm in Art History”; Keith Moxey, professor emeritus of Art History, Barnard College, New York, on “Chronology’s Consequences”; and Sugata Ray, associate professor, History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, on “Eco Art History from the Global South: Genealogies, Methodologies, Practices”.
10–11:30 am: Hike and Tour of Ground/work 2025 Exhibition
Fernández Terrace outside Manton Research Center
Tour led by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects at the Clark.
This outdoor exhibition features specially commissioned works located throughout the Clark’s 140-acre campus. Participating artists in Ground/work 2025 are Yō Akiyama (Japan), Laura Ellen Bacon (United Kingdom), Aboubakar Fofana (Mali), Hugh Hayden (USA), Milena Naef (Switzerland), Javier Senosiain (Mexico).
12:30–2:00 pm: Nature of the Book Object Pop-up
Clark Library
Andrea Puccio, director of the Clark library, will present a selection of artists' books from the Clark’s collection featuring materials and motifs from nature.
1:30–4:30 pm: Anti-Melancholy and the Archive
Auditorium
This colloquium brings together art historians who write with different attitudes, affects, and methodologies in approaching colonial and postcolonial archives. These approaches will be anti-melancholic, oriented toward not past destruction but present construction. If art history always already acknowledges the deferment of full, replete meaning in its object of study, and has traditionally honored the unusual powers of the artwork, this colloquium hopes to push the discipline’s latent potential for writing beyond grief.
Speakers include Jennifer Nelson, convener, associate professor of Art History, University of Delaware, Newark; Mia Bagneris, associate professor of Art History and Africana Studies and director of the Africana Studies Program, Tulane University, New Orleans; Allison Caplan, assistant professor of History of Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, on “Feathers in the Archive”; Ximena A. Gómez, assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on “Generative Possibilities of Erasure”; David Young Kim, professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and visiting faculty at the University of Zürich, on “Found in Translation: Vasari, Life-Writing, and Art History”; and Shawon Kinew, assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts on “St. Paul & Me”.
5:30–7 pm: Curating & Writing American Art in the Museum
Auditorium
Horace Ballard, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. Curator of American Art, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, will be in conversation with Layla Bermeo, Kristin and Roger Servison Curator of Painting, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, about their experiences curating and writing about American art in museum contexts.
A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.
Friday, June 27
9 am–12 pm: Case Histories
Auditorium
This panel aims to think broadly about the largely unacknowledged medical models underpinning the writing of art history and perpetuating harm within it. The diagnostic basis and disciplinary power of the interpretive act will be explored. By incorporating perspectives of disability studies, the history or sociology of medicine, and critical medical humanities, among others, the panel considers new ways of writing that either account for these origins or seek ways in practice, to repudiate them.
Speakers include Suzanne Hudson, co-convener, professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California; Victoria Papa, co-convener, associate professor of English and Visual Culture, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams; Amanda Cachia, assistant professor, Arts Leadership, Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts, University of Houston, Texas, on “Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism”; Fiona Johnstone, assistant professor in Visual Medical Humanities, Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, United Kingdom, on “Art History and Critical Medical Humanities”; Raphael Koenig, assistant professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut, Storrs, on “Hans Prinzhorn: Between Medical Case Studies and Art Historical Style”; and Hannah Zeavin, assistant professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, on “Composite Cases”.
11 am–1 pm: Print Room Pop-up: Recent Acquisitions
Manton Study Center for Works on Paper, Manton Research Center
Led by Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, this pop-up display features “Clark classics” (Albrecht Dürer, J.M.W. Turner, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) alongside recent acquisitions by Marie Bracquemond, Doris Ulmann, James Van Der Zee, and much more.
1:30–4:30 pm: The Self in Art History
Auditorium
How has art historical writing shifted in recent years to account for the author’s lived, embodied experience? How have scholars borrowed from autobiography, creative nonfiction, life-writing, and auto-theory to open the discipline to new ways of writing art history that emphasize an author’s positionality––their groundedness in history, class, sexuality, gender, race, time, space, and place? This session seeks to uncover the wide-ranging possibilities, risks, and potential shifts to thinking about the art object when art historical writing asserts a self.
Speakers include Sarah Hamill, convener, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College, New York; J. Vanessa Lyon, professor of Art History, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, on “Blackness Thirteen Ways: On Finding Myself in Art History”; Iris Moon, associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on “The Bluest I: Writing Melancholy Wedgwood”; Ren Ellis Neyra, associate professor of English, Wesleyan University, Hartford, Connecticut on “A Disturbance that Does Not Yield”; Jordan Reznick, assistant professor of American Studies, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa, on “Looking with the Ancestors”; and Jennifer Stager, assistant professor of Art History, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland on “Casting Knucklebones, Conducting Clouds”.
1:30–4:30 pm: Form: Self and Experience
Auditorium
This seminar asks: What would it mean for form to “tell us enough, or even, at times, what we most need to know?” In other words, what ways have questions of form (be they visual, narrative, conceptual, etc.) modeled ways of being and living?
Speakers include David Getsy, co-convener, professor of Art History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Rachel Haidu, co-convener, professor of Art History, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York; Jennifer Doyle, professor of English, University of California, Riverside; and Joan Kee, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director, Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), New York University.
2–3 pm: Tour of A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945
Alexis Goodin, associate curator at the Clark and curator of the exhibition A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945, leads a tour of the paintings, drawings, prints, stained glass, embroidery, and other decorative arts included in the exhibition that were made by twenty-five professional women artists working in Great Britain who answered Virginia Woolf’s call to find their creative voice, as outlined in her essay A Room of One's Own (1929). The exhibition explores the spaces that these women claimed as their own and which furthered their artistic ambitions, including their homes, studios, art schools, clubs, and public exhibition venues. Their roles in creating change and opportunity—whether through art education, marching for women’s suffrage, protesting World War I, or creating networking opportunities for fellow artists or members of their community—is also highlighted in this presentation.
6–7:30 pm: Art History x Cinema
Images Cinema, 50 Spring Street, Williamstown, Massachusetts
A screening of short films at Images:
The Desert and the Lagoon: A Film Essay on Giovanni Bellini (2020), dirs. David Young Kim and Amelia Saul, 21 minutes
You Hide Me (1970), dir. Nii-Kwate Owoo, 16 minutes
Art Isn’t Fair (2012), dir. Allan Sekula, 5:16 minutes
Hubert Damisch: Thinking Aloud (2011), dir. Mieke Bal, 20 minutes
Saturday, June 28
Auditorium
9:30 am–12:30 pm: Poetics
This series of papers takes seriously the contemporary turn towards poetics to address aesthetics and the history of art from eco-poetics to Kevin Quashie’s aliveness. Poetics has emerged to challenge the limits of works created in relationship to an art market, the accumulation of capital, property, and the role of museums within histories of colonialism In this series of papers, scholars and poets will reconsider the encounter that is possible between historical bodies of work and the resonant bodies of poetics as a discourse in sound, rhythm, and language that allows a reimagining of history and art.
Speakers include Caroline Fowler, convener, Starr Director, Research and Academic Program, Clark Art Institute; Sora Han, professor of Criminology, Law & Society, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, on “Open Field Notes”; Jeremy Melius, lecturer, Department of the History Art, University of York, York, England, on “Fugitive Tiepolo!”; and Roberto Tejada, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of English, University of Houston, Texas, on “Triangular Attending.”
2:30–5:30 pm: Sonic Interventions
Over the last two decades, art history has experienced something of a “sonic turn.” This session gathers scholars from a variety of disciplines to think together about sonic practices, methods, and theories. We will consider what these interventions might offer to art history, particularly as it relates to the writing of visual art and time-based media as well as museum practices.
Speakers include Caitlin Woolsey, convener, Assistant Director, Research and Academic Program; Erica Moiah James, associate professor of Art History, University of Miami, on “Sonic Visualities and Gestures of Caribbean Modern Form”; Cash (Melissa) Ragona, associate professor of Art History and Theory, Carnegie Mellon University, on “AFTERSOUND: Frequency, Attack, Return”; and Dylan Robinson, associate professor in the School of Music, The University of British Columbia, on “qwà:l ye thqát / Hailed by Trees: Public Art’s Interpellation of Settler Subjectivity”.
6–9 pm: Closing Celebration
Moltz Terrace, Lunder Center
A celebratory party, including live music and light bites.
ABOUT THE CLARK
The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of nearly 300,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
The Clark, which has a three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide, is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its 140-acre campus includes miles of hiking and walking trails through woodlands and meadows, providing an exceptional experience of art in nature. Galleries are open 10 am to 5 pm, Tuesday through Sunday from September through June and daily in July and August. Admission is free to all from January through March and is $20 from March through December; admission is free year-round for Clark members, all visitors age 21 and under, and students with a valid student ID. Free admission is also available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; and EBT Card to Culture. For information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.
Press contact: [email protected]