For Immediate Release
December 9, 2024
CLARK ART INSTITUTE OFFERS
FREE ADMISSION FROM JANUARY–MARCH 2025
Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Clark Art Institute will offer free admission for all visitors from January through March 2025. In its third year, the “Free for Three” program is part of the Institute’s ongoing effort to expand awareness of its programming and to welcome new visitors.
During the free admission season, visitors will have the opportunity to tour the Clark’s noted permanent collection and to see two ongoing special exhibitions, Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable (open through February 17, 2025) and Wall Power! Modern French Tapestry from the Mobilier national, Paris (open through March 19, 2025). In addition, the Clark presents three special installations during this period. David-Jeremiah: I Drive Thee (open through January 26, 2025) and Mariel Capanna: Giornata (opens February 15, 2025) are featured as part of the Clark’s ongoing series of contemporary art in its public spaces. A–Z: Alphabetic Highlights from the Library’s Special Collections (opens January 21, 2025) is the inaugural presentation in a new, revolving installation, Paginations, showcasing works from the Clark’s library.
David-Jeremiah: I Drive Thee represents an overview of and conclusion to the artist’s cycle of large circular reliefs (or tondos), rendered in enamel and rope on wooden panel, and titled, collectively, I Drive Thee. The installation of contemporary art explores David-Jeremiah’s fascination with the Lamborghini sports car as a kind of muse whose morphology and mythology evoke themes of power, performance, and agency in relation to Black masculinity and ritualized violence.
This year-long installation, free and open to the public, is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects.
Generous support for David-Jeremiah: I Drive Thee is provided by Agnes Gund.
Wall Power! Modern French Tapestry from the Mobilier national, Paris
Beginning in the 1930s, artists, government officials, art dealers, and entrepreneurs sought ways to modernize the ancient tradition of tapestry-making in France to reassert its role as an independent art form available to contemporary artists. Several decades of intense production and experimentation followed that brought international attention to a renewed tradition of French tapestry, as well as new opportunities for the historic manufactories of Gobelins and Beauvais, now overseen by the Mobilier national of France, and the private tapestry workshops in and around Aubusson. Drawn from the celebrated collection of the Mobilier national from the 1940s to the present day, this exhibition explores tapestries by such artists as Joan Miró, Jean Lurçat, Henri Matisse, and Le Corbusier, who were central to the rapid resurgence of tapestry production; mid-century abstraction by artists including Sonia Delaunay and Victor Vasarely; and more recent productions including works by Gilles Aillaud and Kiki Smith.
Wall Power! Modern French Tapestry from the Mobilier national, Paris is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Kathleen Morris, Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Collections and Exhibitions and curator of decorative arts.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by George W. Ahl III, the Coby Foundation, and Robert D. Kraus. The exhibition catalogue is made possible by Denise Littlefield Sobel.
Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable
In recent years, Cuban-American photographer Abelardo Morell (b. 1948, Havana; lives and works in Boston) has used his signature Tent/Camera technology to capture the places where leading nineteenth-century landscape painters Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) and John Constable (English, 1776–1837) made their iconic works. Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable showcases over a dozen of the artist’s large-scale photographs.
Walking in the paths of Constable and Monet to make pictures in their spirit, Morell has traveled to locations in England and France with a Tent/Camera, a device that allows him to unite in a single photographic image the features of a landscape view with whatever happens to be underfoot—leaves, blades of grass, pebbles, cobblestones, and so on. Combining picturesque vistas with ground-level natural details, Morell’s luscious color photographs reflect on one’s relation to art as well as nature through their complex fusion of the historical and the contemporary, the transitory and the lasting, the pictorial and the photographic.
Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Troob Family Foundation.
Paginations is a new series of year-round public installations featuring works drawn from the Clark library’s extensive holdings and presented in a newly-designed area of the Manton Reading Room. The initial display, A–Z: Alphabetic Highlights from the Library’s Special Collections, celebrates the building blocks of type and text, the letters of the alphabet, and showcases examples from 1488–2024 in which the letters themselves take center.
Mariel Capanna: Giornata
Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, where she lives and works) has developed a distinctive painting practice defined by its subtle chromatic effects, its mixture of stylized figuration with gestural abstraction, and its ambivalent mood—caught between childlike jubilation and a melancholic sense of belatedness and loss. Capanna paints quickly from films, home videos, and family slideshows, whose runtime is her constraint in making a single work. By mixing marble dust and wax into her oil paints and using a palette of desaturated colors in low-contrast compositions, Capanna makes works that appear to change over the course of the day and the seasons. For the Clark, the artist will produce two site-specific oil paintings in addition to a monumental, two-sided fresco mural. The fresco technique also depends on a time constraint, as pigments must be applied while the plaster is still fresh. Giornata marks the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.
Free and open to the public, this year-long installation is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects.
Generous support for Mariel Capanna: Giornata is provided by Margaret and Richard Kronenberg.
The Clark’s grounds, which are always open free of charge, provide miles of walking trails. In winter months, the Clark’s popular Project Snowshoe program offers visitors the opportunity to borrow free snowshoes to explore the beauty of the campus in winter. Snowshoes are available in adult and child sizes on a first-come, first-served basis.
The Clark also offers a wide array of free public programs, concerts, and other activities. Details on January through March 2025 programming are available at clarkart.edu/events.
ABOUT THE CLARK
The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of some 300,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
The Clark, which has a three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide, is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its 140-acre campus includes miles of hiking and walking trails through woodlands and meadows, providing an exceptional experience of art in nature. Galleries are open 10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Sunday from September through June, and daily in July and August. Admission is free January through March and is $20 from March through December; admission is free year-round for Clark members, all visitors age 21 and under, and students with a valid student ID. Free admission is also available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; and EBT Card to Culture. For information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.
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