WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute announces its summer 2023 exhibition schedule, featuring a program of exhibitions, events, and activities. 

 

Leading its summer exhibition schedule is a presentation of works by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch featuring more than eighty-five paintings, prints, and drawings. The Clark is the only U.S. venue for this international exhibition that explores new themes in the artist's landscapes. 

 

"This will be a summer that shows the Clark at its best—introducing new scholarship, celebrating nature, and exploring art from the Renaissance through today," said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute. "We are eager to share these exciting programs with our visitors."

 

The Clark's summer exhibitions open on a staggered schedule, beginning in June. The program includes: 

 

Edvard Munch: "Trembling Earth"

June 10–October 15, 2023

 

Edvard Munch: "Trembling Earth" is the first exhibition in the United States to reveal how Munch (1863–1944) animated nature to convey meaning. Regarded primarily as a figure painter, Munch's most celebrated images are connected to themes of love, anxiety, longing, and death. Yet, a large portion of his works feature landscape. This ambitious presentation considers his iconic art from a new perspective, revealing a lesser-known aspect of Munch's career. The exhibition is organized thematically to reinforce how Munch used nature to express human psychology, celebrate farming practice and garden cultivation, and question the mysteries of the forest even as his Norwegian homeland faced industrialization. Many of the themes in the exhibition resonate profoundly with modern-day concerns around climate instability. The exhibition also explores how Munch developed his own pantheistic views of nature and how this philosophy influenced the way he captured his surroundings.

 

"Trembling Earth" features brilliantly hued landscapes, stunning figure portraits, and an impressive selection of prints and drawings including a lithograph of the artist's most celebrated work, The Scream. The exhibition includes thirty-five works from the Munchmuseet's world-renowned collection and more than forty paintings and prints drawn from private collections and rarely exhibited publicly.

 

Jay A. Clarke, Rothman Family Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, led the curatorial project for the Clark. Clarke began early work on the exhibition when she served as the Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Clark from 2009–2018. The exhibition is co-organized by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany; and Munchmuseet, Oslo, Norway. The exhibition is on view at the Museum Barberini from November 18, 2023–April 1, 2024, and at Munchmuseet from April 27, 2024–August 24, 2024.

 

A catalogue published by the Munchmuseet accompanies the exhibition.

 

Major funding for Edvard Munch: "Trembling Earth" is provided by the Asbjorn Lunde Foundation, Inc. and Carol and Richard Seltzer, with additional support from Robert D. Kraus, and the S & L Marx Foundation. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

 

Humane Ecology: "Eight Positions"

July 15–October 29, 2023 

 

"Humane Ecology: Eight Positions" features a group of contemporary artists who consider the intertwined natural and social dimensions of environmental questions: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Carolina Caycedo, Allison Janae Hamilton, Juan Antonio Olivares, Christine Howard Sandoval, Pallavi Sen, and Kandis Williams. Not all of these artists exemplify "eco art," in subject matter or materials, but all of them think in relational, ecological terms. The artists included here explore themes such as the extraction and exploitation of both places and people; the emancipatory potential of alliances with the more-than-human world; and ancient traditions of relation to the land that take on new urgency and form. The exhibition, which includes sculpture, sound installation, video, and plantings, is presented in outdoor and indoor spaces at the Clark, including both the Clark Center and Lunder Center at Stone Hill.

 

"Humane Ecology: Eight Positions" is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects. A catalogue by the same title accompanies the exhibition and is distributed by Yale University Press.

 

This exhibition is made possible by Denise Littlefield Sobel. Major funding is provided by Maureen Fennessy Bousa and Edward P. Bousa, with additional funding from Girlfriend Fund.

 

 

"Printed Renaissance" 

July 29–October 22, 2023

 

When Italian Renaissance artists such as Raphael Sanzio, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Andrea Mantegna were laboring in their studios around the year 1500, they could not have imagined how printed images and texts would shape the reception of their art in centuries to come. With the proliferation of printed matter in early modern Europe, the demand for accessible printed images grew and a vibrant culture of art criticism arose, which together forged a collective narrative of Italian art.

 

Filled with lush illustrations, "Printed Renaissance" explores the relationship between art writing and graphic reproduction, books, and prints in Italy between 1500–1800. Just as with reprints of texts, enterprising publishers retouched and reprinted copperplates and woodblocks for later collectors—demonstrating both a market interest in art of the past and a more broadly developing consciousness of a history of art. The exhibition includes more than thirty prints drawn from the Clark's extensive holdings of works on paper.

 

"Printed Renaissance" is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Yuefeng Wu, 2022 graduate of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.

 

Elizabeth Atterbury: "Oracle Bones"

Through January 21, 2024

 

The latest installation of the Clark's program of presenting art in public spaces, Elizabeth Atterbury: "Oracle Bones," brings the work of the Maine-based artist to the Clark Center and Manton Research Center buildings. Atterbury (b. 1982, West Palm Beach, Florida; lives and works in Portland) works in a variety of media, making vibrant geometric prints using chine collé and embossment; textured monochrome reliefs in raked mortar; and wood and stone sculptures that enlarge objects of personal significance.

 

Atterbury considers questions of legibility and opacity, improvisation and play, and object-making and remaking as ways to think through her family histories and Chinese American heritage. The exhibition's title, "Oracle Bones," refers to pieces of ox bone or tortoise shell that were traditionally used in late Shang Dynasty China (second millennium BCE) for pyromancy—a practice of divining supernatural instruction through the use of fire. Diviners (the oracles) would submit questions to deities by carving them onto the bone or shell using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied to the bone until it cracked due to thermal expansion. The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks to provide answers to the questions asked. 

 

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. 

 

 

CATA AT THE CLARK

 

In addition to its busy exhibition program, the Clark continues its collaboration with Community Access to the Arts (CATA), presenting "I Am a Part of Art." The exhibition is a celebration of creativity and inclusion, featuring paintings, drawings, and sculpture created by artists with disabilities who participate in CATA's regional programming. "I Am a Part of Art" opens on July 15 in the Hunter Studio at the Lunder Center at Stone Hill and is on view through October 29, 2023.

 

 

SUMMER EVENTS

 

A variety of free activities is planned throughout the summer, including outdoor films and performances; the ever-popular Community Day; outdoor walks and talks; lectures; art-making activities; a book club event; and a Labor Day weekend musical celebration with The Knights Orchestra returning to the Clark for two days of concerts.