The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art
Present Artistic Crossings of the Black Atlantic
Saturday, March 1, 2008

Williamstown, Mass.— A symposium designed to catalyze dialogue across academic disciplines and focusing on contemporary artists responding to global diaspora will be held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (the Clark) and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) on March 1, 2008. Artistic Crossings of the Black Atlantic: The Migratory Aesthetic in Contemporary Art invites five acclaimed artists—sculptor Willie Cole, multi-media artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, British filmmaker Isaac Julien, photographer Hank Willis Thomas, and installation artist and MacArthur Fellow Fred Wilson—to discuss the Black Atlantic aesthetic. The symposium begins at the Clark, at 9:00 am with a reception following at the Williams College Museum of Art at 5:30 pm. The registration fee is $20 per person, $10 for members of the Clark, and free for faculty and students of Williams College.
 
Through transatlantic connections among Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, Black intellectuals and literary figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright fashioned a Black Atlantic culture that made a central contribution to the modernist aesthetic. Today this Black Atlantic aesthetic extends into the realm of the visual as international artists critically engage cross-Atlantic migration as a principal focus of their work.

"We are extremely privileged to have these important artists from Britain and the U.S. together to discuss a central issue in recent art that has resonance for artists of color internationally," says Lisa Corrin, Class of 1956 Director of the Williams College Museum of Art. "The Black Atlantic has remained a critical subject and point of reference for writers and artists for generations. This symposium will demonstrate its continued relevance for a new generation of artists working across media from painting and photography to video and installation art."
 
"The Clark is an incubator of new ideas in the visual arts and we regularly reach out beyond the borders of the collection to explore issues and provoke thoughtful discussion," says the Clark's director, Michael Conforti. "Our dialogue around contemporary African art began in 2005 with a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed us to work toward greater geographic and cultural diversity by engaging international partners for joint programs. We are happy that our discussion of this important topic can be extended to our long-time collaborative partner, the Williams College Museum of Art."
 
Symposium Participants include:

Natasha Becker, coordinator of Mellon initiatives at the Clark, who is completing her Ph.D. dissertation on international exhibitions of contemporary art in South Africa during the 1990s.
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons a Cuban artist of Nigerian ancestry, whose 2007 exhibition Everything Is Separated by Water explores issues of race, class, cultural hybridism, and African diaspora.
C. Ondine Chavoya, Assistant Professor of Art and Latina/Latino studies at Williams, who is currently working on an exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art in conjunction with the LA County Museum of Art on the 1970s multi-media collective ASCO.
Willie Cole, a sculptor and printmaker, whose exhibition Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands traveled to five U.S. museums from 2006 to 2008.
Lisa Graziose Corrin, Class of 1956 Director of the Williams College Museum of Art and Lecturer in Art, who has curated more than fifty solo and group exhibitions of contemporary art at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Seattle Art Museum, and other venues.
Peter Erickson, Visiting Professor of Humanities at Williams, who has recently published Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art and is the co-editor of Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (2000).
Isaac Julien, the British filmmaker whose parents emigrated from Saint Lucia, and who has created a series of extraordinary works that address issues of migration, including Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, Paradise Omeros, and, most recently, WESTERN UNION: Small Boats.
Kobena Mercer, a Clark Fellow and British-based cultural critic, who has edited a four-volume project, Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts (2005-2008), with a final book on Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers.
Francesca T. Royster, Associate Professor at DePaul University, who has completed a new book manuscript entitled Eccentric Sexualities: Black Popular Music and the Performance of “Strange” in the Post-Soul Era.
Hank Willis Thomas, a photographer whose themes include the staging of black male athletes as advertising icons in a global economy.
Fred Wilson, MacArthur Fellow, who presented two landmark exhibitions—Mining the Museum in Baltimore in 1993 and Speak of Me as I Am in Venice in 2003—and recently extended his global reach by mining the cultural landscape in An Account of the Voyage to the Island JAMAICA with the UN-NATURAL HISTORY of that Place at the Institute of Jamaica in fall 2007.
Leslie E. Wingard, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture at Williams, who  focuses on the tension between sacred and secular interests in black visual culture and literature.

This spring, both the Clark and the Williams College Museum of Art have organized a series of programs and exhibitions further exploring diasporic art, the Middle Passage, and the current global circulation of peoples.
 
Unchained Legacies, on view at WCMA, features the work of symposium participants Willie Cole and Hank Willis Thomas. WCMA is also showcasing a print retrospective and video work by pioneering South African artist William Kentridge. The exhibition, William Kentridge Prints, features over 100 works and is organized by the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Iowa.
 
In April, the Clark has organized Art History and Diaspora: Genealogies, Theories, Practices, a conference that invites artists, curators, and art historians to investigate the effect of diaspora studies on art historical scholarship. To open this conference, the Williams College Museum of Art has scheduled artist Julie Mehretu to discuss her exhibition City Sitings, which will be on view at WCMA and addresses some of the concepts in the Clark's conference.
 
In May, the Clark/Mellon Workshop in Contemporary African Art examines the art historical scholarship, publications, exhibitions, and cultural institutions shaping the representation of contemporary African art. For more information about these and other related events, please visit www.wcma.org or www.clarkart.edu.

The Clark
Set amid 140 bucolic acres in the picturesque Berkshires, the Clark is one of the few major art museums in the United States that also serves as a leading international center for research and scholarship. In addition to its extraordinary collections, the Clark organizes groundbreaking special exhibitions that advance new scholarship and presents an array of public and educational programs.  The Clark’s research and academic programs include an international fellowship program and regular conferences, symposia, and colloquia. Its programs draw university and museum professionals from around the world. The Clark, together with Williams College, sponsors one of the nation’s leading master’s programs in art history and encompasses one of the most comprehensive art history libraries in the world.  

In June 2008, the Clark will open Stone Hill Center, the first phase of its expansion and campus enhancement project. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Tadao Ando, the wood and glass 32,000-square-foot building will house new intimately scaled galleries, a meeting and studio art classroom, an outdoor café, and the Williamstown Art Conservation Center (WACC).
 
The Clark is located at 225 South Street, Williamstown. For more information, visit www.clarkart.edu or call 413-458-2303.

Williams College Museum of Art
One of the finest college art museums in the country, the Williams College Museum of Art houses 12,000 works that span the history of art. The museum’s principle mission is to encourage multidisciplinary teaching through encounters with art objects that traverse time periods and cultures. An active, collecting museum, its current strengths are in modern and contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is also noted for its stellar collection of American art from the late 18th century to the present. With the largest collection in the world of works by the brothers Charles and Maurice Prendergast, the museum is a primary center for study of these American artists in a transatlantic context of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
 
Special exhibitions curated by museum staff, faculty, students, and guest curators focus on new scholarship and alternative perspectives. The museum commissions new art, and also emphasizes the development of innovative exhibitions that place art in a broad cultural context, explore the connections between past and present, and raise critical questions about the interpretation of art and the writing of art history.  

The Williams College Museum of Art is located on Main Street (Route 2) in Williamstown, Mass. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the museum is wheelchair accessible. Contact: Suzanne Silitch, Director of Public Relations and External Affairs