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Future
Exhibitions
What
Can a Woman Do?: Women, Work and Wardrobe 1880-1940
3 February- 31 May 2009
Images of women portrayed as professionals, athletes and intellectuals are
common today, but until the late nineteenth century, such representations of
strong self-reliant women were virtually absent from the visual arts and literature.
What Can a Woman Do?, provides an engaging and informative window into the
ways that women’s identities and attitudes are forged on the stage of
visual culture.
Inspired by a book entitled What Can a Woman Do?, written by Mrs. M. L. Rayne
in 1893, the exhibition examines women’s career options and shifting
perceptions of women between the Civil War and World War II, and how clothing
fashions changed in response to women’s changing roles and attitudes.
In response to the transformation in female lifestyles, women’s clothing
became less restrictive and confining, resulting in more freedom in their physical
movements. Fine and popular art, along with clothing of the era will be included
in the exhibition.
This exhibition is curated by Lynn Zacek Bassett (Class of 1983), an independent
scholar specializing in New England’s historic costume and textiles.
Faith
Ringgold: Works on Paper
7 February-31 May
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.
This exhibition focuses on Ringgold’s work on paper of the last three
decades, a lesser known aspect of her extensive and multiform oeuvre. The show
includes almost twenty-five prints and small paintings, echoing the themes
of protest that characterized her early paintings with narrative subjects like
Tar Beach #2 (see illustration) familiar from her quilts, as well as examples
from her recent series on Jazz musicians. Several prints were executed at the
Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College in Easton, P.A., a
program dedicated to bringing undergraduate students and professional artists
together—a mission that chimes perfectly with Mount Holyoke College’s
longstanding commitment to promoting such interactions in the classroom and
the Museum.
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