Clark Art Lecture on Compromised Art of Parasitical Resistance

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Friday, April 5 at 5:30 pm, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents a lecture by Anna Watkins Fisher (University of Michigan) who examines artistic resistance in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent are co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce powerful systems. The talk takes place in the Clark's auditorium, located in the Manton Research Center.
 
According to a press release, this lecture weighs the gambit of artists who willfully abandon the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism to embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within dominant structures. The talk explores their irreverent and often troubling artworks and what they tell us about the conditions for resistance and critique today.
 
Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A reception at 5 pm in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event. 

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Williamstown Dog Owners to Select Board: 'Let Us Deal with It'

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday was told that it should let the people who walk their dogs in the Spruces Park decide how the 114-acre town-owned park is managed.
 
A resident who self-described as a representative of "dog park parents and their little friends" told the elected officials that her feelings were hurt because it appeared the board was not paying enough attention to an email she drafted on the issue of whether to designate areas of the park available for off-leash dogs and require leashes in other areas.
 
"Our bottom line, as I put in my email this morning, was: Bike trail for leash, everything else off-leash," Avie Kalker told the Select Board. "And everyone who wants to walk on the grass and the fields and roam through the corn fields knows that this is the off-leash area and that dogs, for the most part, are trained.
 
"We're responsible people."
 
Monday marked the latest in a series of meetings during which the board has discussed whether and how to regulate use of the park by domestic animals and their owners.
 
The issue started to percolate in the spring of 2023, when a member of the board brought an bylaw proposal to the May town meeting by way of citizens' petition that would have amended the town's bylaw to require dogs to be leashed when not on an owner's property in the General Residence zoning district — which includes the Spruces Park.
 
This winter, the Select Board focused on the park itself, land that the town acquired about a decade ago under terms of a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant to close the flood-prone mobile home park on Main Street.
 
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