黑料不打烊

Sweaty Concepts will be on view for Williams College students and faculty by arrangement during the spring semester. We eagerly anticipate opening the exhibition to the public in summer 2021.

Feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed describes a sweaty concept as 鈥渙ne that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world.鈥� Consisting of works in all media drawn from WCMA鈥檚 collection, this exhibition explores the difficulty and labor of, in Ahmed鈥檚 words, 鈥渃oming up against 鈥� and trying to transform a world.鈥�

Sweaty Concepts includes works by Nancy Spero, May Stevens, and Ida Applebroog who explicitly claimed feminism as a central tenet of their practice. Sherrie Levine and Dotty Attie appropriate works by famous male 鈥渕asters,鈥� and posters by the Guerrilla Girls draw attention to the ingrained biases and inequities in an art world that decided masters were male in the first place. Visceral, figurative works by artists such as Laylah Ali, Kara Walker, and Chitra Ganesh, and text-based works by Adrian Piper, Zoe Leonard, and Glenn Ligon, embody and describe the struggle of forging a path within and against societal power structures that are encoded to keep certain bodies out. Not all artists represented in the exhibition identify as women nor are all concerns strictly feminist. Rather, the works in Sweaty Concepts describe a range of experiences across gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and ability, that involve making a place for oneself where it does not already exist.