about rap events

The Research and Academic Program has historically organized several distinct types of scholarly convenings that are typically semi-private and completely distinct from the Clark Art Institute’s own collections and exhibition programming as a museum.

Types of convenings have included colloquia; semi-private two-day gatherings of scholars and practitioners around a particular research topic; exhibition concept workshops, which offered two days for curators to bring together museum professionals and scholars in the developmental stages of exhibition planning; international seminars, in which a group of invited scholars gathered at an offsite institution abroad to present and discuss a specific theme; and the graduate student symposium, inaugurated in 2023, in which a second-year Master’s student in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art works with RAP to develop a topic and convene a day of presentations by graduate students at different stages from across the country.

The fellowship program is at the core of RAP’s activities, and the previous model of soliciting external proposals has shifted to a new approach in which RAP typically collaborates with past fellows or other former affiliates who are interested in organizing a convening.

In addition, RAP organizes the biannual Clark Conference, which has historically been a public event, in addition to the public-facing scholarly programs: lectures delivered by the fellows in residence, invited talks, and roundtables.