Animating the Object
Art professor Amy Podmore’s sweeping new exhibition at MASS MoCA explores stillness, movement and the boundary between.
Visitors to Amy Podmore’s new sculpture exhibition at MASS MoCA might get the feeling they’re being watched.
Audience, on view through November 2025 in the museum’s expansive Building Six, features 460 white plaster casts of baskets mounted on an oversized wall, each with its own unique shape and countenance. In what Podmore calls an “element of surprise,” each has one eye, some of which blink periodically.
Podmore, the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe ’67 Professor of Art at Williams, says she has long been drawn to questions about how we physically engage with sculpture, especially the boundary between stillness and movement. As a sculptor, she says she “utilizes sensations of stillness, pause and anticipation to create a larger paradoxical experience where lifeless, sculpted, corporal form can reverberate with familiarity.” In earlier works, such as Finding Elsa (2017) and Lana (2014), she utilized video and sound to animate the sculptural object or imply its animation.
Podmore created the plaster casts in Audience from found wicker baskets and cornucopias, many of them gathered from tag sales in the North Adams, Mass., area. Drawn to the weave of some baskets she used to store objects in her studio, she decided to experiment with lining them with plaster and then peeling off the exterior.
“I loved the texture,” she says. “You’re seeing a basket, transformed into a different rigid material and without its skin.”
Podmore describes these baskets as shapes of reversal, inside-out impressions of a once-hidden interior, all of them uniquely flecked with their original colors and fiber patterns. The basket casts bring pieces of their history with them, bearing witness to the domestic work of weaving.
She continued experimenting with the plaster basket casts in her studio over several years. After tipping one vertically, she found that it “instantly became a mask.” She later decided to add some spare dolls’ eyes, which bestowed the forms with an anthropomorphic presence.
Audience has been exhibited twice before, at much smaller venues in Brooklyn and at the Albany International Airport Gallery in 2017. The MASS MoCA exhibition is by far the largest to date, both in terms of scope and the space devoted to the piece.
Meghan Clare Considine MA ’23, who curated the exhibition in its current form at MASS MoCA, describes Audience as “materially innovative and physically rigorous.” She adds that Podmore’s attention to the “warp and weft of each weave” is a strikingly feminist contribution to surrealist art, as attuned as it is to the textures of the everyday.
Podmore, meanwhile, says she hopes Audience will invite viewers into new considerations of interiority, as well as the stakes of communication and reciprocal exchange.
She credits the Williams art department, as well as the vibrant culture of the Berkshires, for her inspiration as an artist, adding, “It’s a gift to have a teaching job with a community that is inspiring and generative, as well as an institution that is invested in and supportive of my practice.”
Podmore first started teaching at Williams in 1993 as a visiting professor and has regularly taught studio classes and tutorials on drawing and sculpture. On sabbatical for the fall 2024 semester, she spent November at the MacDowell Fellowship artists’ residency program in New Hampshire. This spring she’ll teach “Introduction to Sculpture” and a tutorial, “The Empowered Object,” in which students examine a found object through art practice, readings and presentations.
“It’s delightful to introduce [students] to new techniques that allow them to communicate in a visual language and build objects where they can surprise and impress themselves,” she says.
And her students have made their own imprints on her work. Supported by the Class of 1975 Summer Research Program, Javier Robelo ’22, Anna Miklas ’23 and Annie Scott ’25 spent three summers working alongside Podmore in her studio as assistants on Audience. Meanwhile, Rebecca Gross ’25 helped with exhibition-related components of the installation as a MASS MoCA summer intern.
Williams student contributions are physically present in Audience, too, in a different way. As studio art majors prepared for their own end-of-year exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art last spring, Podmore’s students gifted her a basket filled with mementos from their own senior projects. She cast the basket in plaster and included it in the installation at MASS MoCA, telling the students, “Now you have to go find it when you visit.”
Watch a video of the exhibition. Videography by Dave Simonds at MASS MoCA.
