April 8, 2005
Newsmakers
Work
of Art
The
formation of Museums10, a new collaboration among the Mount
Holyoke College Art Museum and nine other museums in the
Pioneer Valley, is attracting media attention. The new
name “will be used in the Valley and around New England
to highlight the depth and diversity of the region's museum
collections,” reported staff writer Larry Parnass
in the March 15 Daily Hampshire Gazette. “The richness
of the Valley's museums is not well-enough known, their
advocates contend. ‘You can spend a number of days
here, if not a week, just in the museums,'' said Lorna
M. Peterson, whose Five Colleges, Inc. helped lead the
creation of the new identification for Valley museums. ‘It's
great for the museums and the area in general,’ Peterson
said.” Republican staff writer Holly Angelo noted
in the paper’s March 23 edition that the effort to
establish the group “began about three years ago
when the directors of the museums affiliated with the Five
College system began meeting on a monthly basis to talk
about their needs and possible collaborations. The result
is a new name, a new logo and a $15,000 matching grant
from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Each museum provided
$1,500 to meet the grant's matching criteria.” In
addition to MHC’s museum, Museums10 includes Amherst
College’s Museum of Natural History, Mead Art Museum,
and the Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens;
the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art; Hampshire College
Art Gallery; Historic Deerfield; National Yiddish Book
Center; the Smith College Museum of Art; and University
Gallery at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Cleveland,
the Final Frontier
The March 25 edition of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer reported on Martha Ackmann and her acclaimed book,
The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of 13 American Women and the
Dream of Space Flight, about a group of women recruited in the early
1960s to become Mercury astronauts but denied the opportunity because
of their gender. Ackmann, who was in Cleveland to speak at NASA’s
Glenn Research Center
during a Women’s History Month celebration,
told staff writer Grant Segall that the women’s dreams
were grounded by opposition from John Glenn and Lyndon Johnson,
among
others. But the women were not the only ones who lost out. “Society
pays a very high price for discrimination. The price is the loss
of talent,” Ackmann told Segall. “Progress is never
linear. We’re in one of those moments when it’s going
backward. We’ve made many steps in the right direction,
but there are many more steps that remain to be taken.”
All’s Elle that
Ends Well
A March 23 reception in New York City hosted by Elle magazine
and Mount Holyoke College—and featuring nationally syndicated
columnist Liz Smith and public relations maven Leslee Dart—garnered
not one, but two New York Times mentions. The event was the second
in the collaborative Uncommon Women series, hosted by the magazine
and the College and moderated by prize-winning playwright and author
Wendy Wasserstein ’71. On Friday, March 25, the gathering,
which included alumnae and other movers and shakers from the city
that never sleeps, was written up in the Times’s Boldface
column. Then, on Monday, the Times business section foregrounded
the confab in a portrait of Liz Smith's lengthy career as a gossip
columnist in a field that is now being changed—perhaps even
threatened—by the Internet.
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