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Newsletter - Spring 2001
Current Exhibitions

Seeing Mount Holyoke College
9 March - 27 May 2001

In conjunction with President Creighton's initiative to launch a comprehensive campus master-planning process, Mount Holyoke College invited photographer Michael Jacobson-Hardy to engage students in an examination of the campus environment using photography as a tool. The project was comprised of two primary components. During the fall semester, Mr. Jacobson-Hardy conducted a six-week-long workshop to introduce the concepts, techniques, and materials of photography, as well as developing black and white prints. For the fifth and sixth weeks of the project, Mr. Jacobson-Hardy lived on campus as an artist-in-residence, working intensively with students in the darkroom and also taking his own photographs. The workshop served to introduce and review photography techniques in general, and the subject of the students' photographs was the Mount Holyoke campus. Under Mr. Jacobson-Hardy's direction, they used the camera as a research tool and worked to create portraits of Mount Holyoke, their fellow students, and the campus as an environment for living and learning.

The second component of the project takes place during the latter half of spring semester: an exhibition that includes selected photographs produced by the students and by Mr. Jacobson-Hardy during the workshop, as well as 19th- and early-20th-century photographs of the campus. Since the Art Museum remains closed for renovation and expansion throughout the year 2001, the exhibition will be installed in locations outside the art building - the Weissman Center, the Blanchard Campus Center, and the Streeter Lounge in Kendall Sports & Dance Complex. Historical photographs of the campus, drawn from the holdings of Archives and Special Collections, selected by Elise Karas Kenney (class of 1955), will be on view in an area adjacent to the main reading room of the Mount Holyoke College Library. Crazy for Egypt: Egyptomania in Europe and America March 5 - May 27, 2001

Crazy for Egypt: Egyptomania in Europe and America
5 March - 27 May,2001

The "Micro-Museum"-a single exhibition case, installed in the Mount Holyoke Library courtyard-is the home of a series of exhibitions that will be installed over the next year to pique the curiosity of viewers until the real art museum reopens in February 2002. The newest incarnation of this "cabinet of curiosities" will investigate items from the Art Museum and the Skinner Museum that demonstrate the apparently insatiable taste of later cultures for things Egyptian. As early as the 2nd century, the emperor Hadrian looked back at Egyptian architecture in the design of his famous villa at Tivoli, but it was in the Italian Renaissance that the revivalist trend took off. Inspired by accounts of European travellers, Pinturicchio, Raphael, and others began to include obelisks and sphinxes in their paintings. By the 18th century, the fascination with Egypt took a two-pronged course, in one case fueled by the imaginative fantasies of theologians and architects, and in another by the more scientific studies of travelers and archaeologists. The Egyptian revival was brought to its full flowering in the Neoclassical era which looked back to the historical styles of ancient civilizations.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a central figure of the movement, designed a highly original interior in the Egyptian taste for the Caffè degli Inglesi in the center of Rome (see illustration). One of his prints showing a fantastic Egyptianizing wall-scene for this much-frequented cafe forms the backdrop for the current micro-exhibition.

Fast-forward to the late 19th century in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where Mount Holyoke College's art department and museum (then one entity) had enrolled as members of the Egypt Exploration Fund, supporting archaeological exploration at various sites along the Nile. In exchange for their funding, members were given a certain number of excavated artifacts, and these objects form the core of Mount Holyoke's Egyptian collection today.

Interestingly, both the Art Museum and the Skinner Museum also contain works that are more reflective of the revivalism that today we call "Egyptomania," ranging from ancient objects reused or retooled in the modern era (like a series of genuine scarabs mounted in a late-19th-century gold necklace setting) to souvenir items made for the tourist trade (an alabaster desk-sized Sphinx, the original charmingly misunderstood by its maker). Joseph Skinner, whose multifaceted collection was opened to the public in 1936, had himself traveled East and succumbed to the lure of Egypt. While there, he commissioned Mr. E. Hatoun of Cairo to create a copy of a famous wood and ivory stool that had been discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun. This unusual item now resides in the early American church building that is the Skinner Museum, and is on display in the current show.

A New View of New Work
6 - 26 May, 2001

The art museum's closing for construction this year brings with it an interesting change of venue for the annual senior art majors' exhibition. From May 6 through Commencement, 12 seniors will show their work at the Blanchard Campus Center, where museum wall panels will be installed on the balcony to create a kind of "Guggenheim" effect for passers-by on the lower level. One positive effect of the temporary site may be to expand the visitorship of the exhibition to the casual campus-center visitor. Next year, the show will return to the art museum where it will be seen in the new expanded galleries.

Studio faculty members have expressed enthusiasm over the forthcoming exhibition because of the exciting progress of the advanced classes in the fall semester. Work done during that period naturally leads into the independent phase of work in the spring which itself results in the art for the final exhibition. Working in media ranging from printmaking and drawing to sculpture and painting, the students are investigating new approaches and new combinations of media as well.

Mount Holyoke faculty members Nancy Campbell, Bonnie Miller, Carleen Sheehan, and Joe Smith have provided constant support for the senior majors throughout the year, and museum staff members Marianne Doezema, Linda Best, Debbie Davis, Bob Riddle, and Wendy Watson have advised them on issues of selection, preparation, and installation for the exhibition itself.