Future Exhibitions

Mount Holyoke Encounter:
The Artists of Pontigny-in-America
30 September - 14 December 2003

Marc Chagall Fiddler

Prior to World War II, leading figures in the arts and humanities in Europe met at the Abbey of Pontigny in the Burgundy region of France every summer to discuss matters of intellectual and cultural importance. With the outbreak of war and the flight of Jewish and other intellectuals from Nazi-occupied Europe, these annual gatherings, of necessity, came to an end.

However, in 1942 under the leadership of French professor Helen Patch, Mount Holyoke College became the center of European intellectual life as the Pontigny Colloquia were reinstituted on its South Hadley campus. This quiet sanctuary in western Massachusetts provided a setting in which refugee intellectuals could continue the conversations begun before the War. For the Europeans, participation in the Pontigny Colloquia constituted an act of resistance to Nazi ideology and its Vichy handmaidens. While the earliest of the South Hadley gatherings hosted mostly those who had participated in the original discussions in France, subsequent meetings brought the Europeans together for the first time with their American counterparts in a dialogue on the future of Western civilization in the face of Fascism and world crisis.

Participants in these dialogues over the years included leading figures such as philosophers Jean Wahl, Rachel Bespaloff, and Suzanne Langer; social scientists Claude Levi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt; composer Roger Sessions; poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore; critics Lionello Venturi and Robert Goldwater; and many artists. Marc Chagall, André Masson, Robert Motherwell, Stanley William Hayter, Ossip Zadkine, and Mount Holyoke's own Henry Rox all attended the gatherings on campus and presented papers or led discussions. Contemporary works of these artists from the Five College collections and friends of the Museum are featured in the exhibition.

Mount Holyoke's commemoration of the Pontigny encounters also features a scholarly symposium (November 6-8, 2003) and other events sponsored by the Weissman Center for Leadership. For more information, see www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/programs/wcl/

Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms
29 January-12 March 2004

A deep-seated curiosity and profound sense of wonder link contemporary Boston artist Rosamond Purcell and 17th-century Danish physician and naturalist Olaus Worm. Although Worm died in 1655, he maintains an important place in history because of his remarkable book, Worm's Museum, or History of Very Rare Things, Natural and Artificial, Domestic and Exotic, Which are Stored in the Author's House in Copenhagen, published by his son in the year of his death. A spectacular engraving in that volume provides a view of Worm's collection with its both rigorous and helter-skelter juxtaposition of naturalia (stones, shells, marine specimens, samples of earth) and artificialia (ethnic clothing, weapons, ancient Roman and contemporary North Atlantic artifacts). He amassed this "cabinet of curiosities" in an attempt to catalogue and explain his world. Using a scientific approach, he tested boundaries between myth and fact.

The engraving that documents Worm's museum took hold of Rosamond Purcell's psyche early in her career as a photographer and masterful collagist. "Purcell has long been a digger, an arranger, and a collector," writes Lisa Melandri in the show's catalogue. "These impulses to alternately unearth, mask, and display have formed the basis of her rich and complex artistic oeuvre. From well-known exquisite photographs to an unruly, breathtaking studio, she has been most interested in pointing out where meaning is layered and ambiguous-and where objects avoid definition. In prints, constructions, and large-scale installations, Purcell features things that have come out from under wraps-from museum storage, from beneath decrepit floors at the junkyard, from a forgotten collection." Unlike Worm's room, though, Purcell's accumulation is organized according to the artist's internal aesthetic logic.

In Two Rooms Purcell brings her own personal microcosm face to face with its own historical model. Recreating Worm's museum in a nine- by twelve-foot room, she both explores this historical model and its taxonomic basis. Her own "room"-a free recreation of her jam-packed Somerville, Massachusetts, studio-contains things found, recombined, and created from her excavations in a modern world. Since the 1980s, Purcell has been mining a junkyard in Owl's Head, Maine, owned by William Buckminster, which is filled with, as she terms it "things that look like things but are not." Scrap metal, decaying objects of all kinds, petrified books, fragments of rubber, marble, and glass have been removed from Buckminster's junkyard and recontextualized in the artist's own cabinet of curiosities.

Melandri notes, "Culled from an inventory of over 2,000 objects, Purcell's room features pieces that…have become unique through exposure to the elements. Metal has taken on an extraordinary patina of vibrant color….Books dug out of the junk pile-some with semi-visible titles, some petrified, bent, or stuck together-exist in a realm between nature and culture and mark another important parallel with 17th-century cabinets. Purcell herself has taken on the role of the scientist in the field, discovering, excavating, capturing, and isolating each piece before bringing these specimens into the catalogued world of her studio."

This exhibition has been organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and curator, Lisa Melandri.

The Sporting Woman
13 April-31 July 2004

Yearbook illustration, 1925

To coincide with the 2004 U.S. Women's Open Championship, which will be held at Mount Holyoke's Orchards Golf Course, the museum is organizing a special exhibition on the history of American women in sports. The installation will present a broad array of visual materials, including prints and photographs related to women's participation in exercise and sport from the mid-19th century to the present. In addition, a small but carefully selected group of paintings will include Winslow Homer's Croquet Players (1865) and George Bellows's Golf Course, California (1917). Both paintings eloquently detail women's entry into the sporting world. Croquet, one of the new sports introduced after the Civil War, was among the first acceptable athletic activities in which women could participate. By the turn of the century, genteel women participated in a wider variety of athletic activities, including bicycling and tennis, but women golfers typically were not allowed to use public courses during prime playing hours.

Mount Holyoke College is an appropriate setting for presenting this innovative show, as the college played a key role in developing sports programs for American women. When the school opened in 1837, founder Mary Lyon was adamant that exercise would be an integral part of every student's curriculum. Her vision was extremely progressive, indeed radical, during the mid-19th century when the prevailing attitude discouraged physical exertion for women.

In addition to loans from other museums, the exhibition will draw on two important collections at the college, both of which demonstrate how the history of exercise for women in the United States is interwoven with the history of women's education. The Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections holds a fascinating and revealing treasure trove of photographs of students participating in athletic activities of all kinds, dating from the 1860s to the present. One rare photograph taken in the late 1880s, for example, shows the Mount Holyoke Nines outfitted in their baseball uniforms. Patricia Warner, professor in the theater department at the University of Massachusetts, notes, "They…are, more than likely, wearing one of the first team uniforms for women in the United States." Warner will curate the exhibition section that will draw from Mount Holyoke's important historic collection of athletic wear.

Mount Holyoke College continues to play a prominent role in the area of women's collegiate athletics. In September 2000, Sports Illustrated for Women named Mount Holyoke the number one liberal arts college for women athletes.

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