City of Ambition

Alfred Stieglitz at the Colby Museum

For [Alvin Langdon] Coburn, as for Stieglitz—a second-generation German Jewish immigrant who spent his student years in his ancestral homeland—the city of New York surfaces, symbolically, as a point of reentry, a place where the exhilaration and anticipation disintegrate, in Coburn’s words, into a “sudden . . . plung[e] into the rush and turmoil.”

A Path into the Arts

Q&A with Julia Lo

Whether you intern, give tours as a docent, volunteer for programs, attend events, or just frequent the galleries – you can make these experiences as meaningful as you want.

Senior Exhibition 2018

In this series of blogposts, my students [in the Writing Art Criticism class] revisit their interviews and share additional perspectives on the rich and compelling practices of their peers.

Immigration, Masculinity, and Motherhood

Yoshua Okón's Oracle

Okón decided to place the video in a desert, a location contrary to all female concepts. The barren terrain depicts an infertile soil with few signs of fauna or animals. The desert offers the men of the video a place where even the soil exudes hypermasculinity. Ironically, the only other animal species found in this work are the ants, which exist under a matriarchal system.

Disability Studies in Art History

Encountering Disability

In analyzing my experiences with pieces by Close and Lei, my goal is to understand the ways these artists chose to portray the disabled body through their art, how they chose to represent their own disabilities, and how this impacted my experience as a nondisabled viewer.