Who We Are
Caroline Fowler
Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program
Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and a lecturer in Art History at Williams College. She is a scholar of early-modern art (1400-1800) with a focus on European art and its imbrications in histories of early capital, trade, enslavement, and creation of art history as a discipline. Her most recent book Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art (Duke University Press, 2025) demonstrates the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Her other books include The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas (Yale University Press, 2020), and Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History (Brepols, 2018). She is also co-editor of the series Art/Work with Princeton University Press, which presents thought-provoking essays on intersections between the practice of conservation and art history, and also co-edited a volume of Art History, "Political Ecologies of Paper." Currently, she is working on a family history in pictures, considering how histories of plantations and race continue into our contemporary world through images, bodies, trauma, memory, and forgetting.
Curriculum Vitae
Caitlin Woolsey
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM
Caitlin Woolsey is an art historian who focuses on the historical confluence of visual art, media, and performance from the twentieth century to the present. Her current book project examines how the integration of sound transformed intermedia artistic practices in the decades following the Second World War, focusing on the experimental sound poet Henri Chopin. Caitlin's scholarly and critical writing appears in Art Journal, Artforum, Organized Sound, Afterimage, Women & Performance, Visual Studies, Caesura, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as in the exhibition catalogue Raffaella della Olga: Typescripts (2025) and the edited volumes Verbivocovisual Eroticism in the 1960s and 1970s (2026), Engaged Visuality: The Italian and Belgian Visual Poetry Phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s (2025), and Invisible Republic: Music, the Avant-garde, and Counterculture (2024). She received her PhD from Yale University and holds an MA in Philosophy and the Arts from Stony Brook University. Previously she has held positions at the Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where she helped curate the exhibition Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry & the Avant-garde (2019). At the Clark Caitlin produces and edits the podcast In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing and organizes scholarly programs. She also teaches in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art and works closely with graduate student interns.
Shawnette smalls
PROGRAM COORDINATOR in the RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC program
Shawnette Smalls is a fashion designer, independent curator, and gallerist. Smalls received her MS in Fashion Design from Drexel University, Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. Her experience includes corporate retail work with Urban Outfitters, Perry Ellis International, John Varvatos and Donna Karren. In 2019, Smalls opened the Upper Darby Art Gallery in Pennsylvania, which she continues to own and operate along with her own private design consulting practice. Smalls has consulted on exhibitions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Williams College Museum of Art, the private collection of Danny Simmons Jr. as well as the ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Corridor ‘62. Additionally, Smalls acts remotely as curator of virtual programming for Rush Arts Philadelphia where she directs a thriving virtual art program serving elementary aged students in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
NOELLE DERKSEN
EARLY CAREER RESEARCH AND PROGRAM ASSISTANT IN THE RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM
Noelle Derksen is an emerging researcher, writer, and curator whose work critically engages with contemporary art, visual culture, queer theory, and trans studies. They hold an MA in Arts and Culture, with a specialization in Contemporary Art History, from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a BA in Museum Studies and Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. At the Clark, Noelle supports the Research and Academic Program while refining their independent research practice and preparing for future doctoral study. They also contribute to Kunstlicht, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to visual culture and based in the Netherlands, as an editor and communications assistant.