Down the Rabbit Hole:
Artists and Writers in Wonderland
Opens July 1, 2000

" How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1863, he created a children's story that addressed some very grown-up anxieties held by society in the midst of the industrial age. It was also a work that reflected the perspective of a shy Oxford don who, it is said, never felt entirely at home among adults. "Down the Rabbit Hole: Artists and Writers in Wonderland," a new exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), features approximately 25 works by Carroll and other artists and authors from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries who have, for an assortment of reasons, taken their own journeys into the stranger territories of the imagination.

From the mystical visions of poet William Blake, who was considered mad by some of his contemporaries, to the "mindscapes" of French surrealist Yves Tanguy, to the gentle fantasies of American painter Charles Prendergast, the works in "Down the Rabbit Hole" depict worlds beyond the rational--worlds within us, and the sometimes mysterious and absurd nature of reality. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and prints from WCMA's permanent collection, as well as selections from Williams' Chapin Library of Rare Books. A highlight of the show is Chapin's 1969 limited edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Salvador Dali. Dali felt surrealism grew out of the work of English artists and writers like Carroll, Blake, and the symbolists--all represented in the exhibition.

"Down the Rabbit Hole" was organized by Tess Mann, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art '00, under the supervision of Nancy Mowll Mathews, WCMA's Eugénie Prendergast Curator.