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Claiming Williams Day: A Lecture with Makeda Best

Claiming Williams Day: A Lecture with Makeda Best

Thursday

February 6, 2020

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Auditorium

225 South St
Williamstown, MA 01267

This event has been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience.

As part of Claiming Williams Day, Makeda Best, curator of photography at the Harvard Art Museums, presents a free lecture on photography, place, and identity. Claiming Williams Day is a campus-wide program at Williams College that focuses on building and sustaining a more inclusive community. Each year, campus organizations host panels, discussions, and events with the aim of making the college community more inclusive. Williams students are free with valid ID; no reservations required. The general public is also welcome to attend, but reservations are required.

Van transportation will be available to the Clark starting at 1:30 pm. Meet vans in the traffic circle between the ’62 Center and the parking garage. Vans will return people to the ’62 Center at the close of the event.

Makeda Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. In addition, she teaches courses related to the history of photography at Harvard and a course on curatorial practice at Tufts University. Her current exhibitions are Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art and Winslow Homer: Eyewitness. She was also curator of Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America, installed at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in fall 2018. Her forthcoming book, Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy, will be published in spring 2020 by Pennsylvania State University Press. Her recent publications include catalog essays on Ben Shahn and an article for the Archives of American Art Journal on the painter William H. Johnson. She holds a PhD in art history from Harvard University and an MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts. Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew K. Mellon Foundation, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Duke University, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.