Partners in Art

The works of three Williams art professors in three different media have been the subjects of substantial exhibitions in the region this spring.

Belly of a Glacier, a newly installed show at MASS MoCA, features Ohan Breiding’s photography and experimental documentary film focused on the imminent loss of the Rhône glacier near their hometown of Obergoms, Switzerland. Breiding’s work amplifies “the current state of climate emergency while expressing the intimate entanglement of human and environmental well-being,” according to the museum’s website.

Co-curated by Susan Cross, MASS MoCA’s senior curator, and Lisa Dorin, deputy director of the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), the exhibition is on view through Dec. 14.

Amy Podmore’s exhibition Audience, also at MASS MoCA (and featured in the fall 2024 issue of Williams Magazine), includes 460 plaster cast sculptures made of wicker baskets and cornucopias, each with a motorized blinking eyeball. Curated by Meghan Claire Considine MA ’23 and on view through November, Audience showcases Podmore’s “interest in surrealist strategies of transformation and the line between stillness and motion in sculpture,” the museum’s website states.

Both exhibitions are a collaboration between MASS MoCA and WCMA, which WCMA Class of 1956 Director Pamela Franks says “exemplifies the best of what our regional arts ecosystem can provide to our visitors and local community.”

Additionally, art professor Laylah Ali’s ’91 traveling exhibition Is anything the matter? encompasses 30 years’ worth of drawings from a dozen different series. Together the more than 100 works explore Ali’s “ongoing interest in the amalgam of race, power, gendering, human frailty and murky politics,” according to her artist statement. The exhibition, which was on view through May at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst, reopens at Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, in the fall.