Siddhartha V. Shah Named Director of The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College

Amherst College News | August 10, 2022

Image
A photo of Siddhartha V. Shah
Siddhartha V. Shah comes from the Peabody Essex Museum, where he was Curator and Director of Education and Civic Engagement

Amherst College announced today that Siddhartha V. Shah, director of education and civic engagement and the curator of South Asian art at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), has been named the John Wieland 1958 Director of the College’s Mead Art Museum. In his new role, Shah will oversee the museum’s collections, acquisitions, exhibitions and programs, as well as a variety of initiatives aimed at deepening engagement with the community both on and off campus.

Mead Art Museum introduces “Mead on the Move”

The Reminder | August, 26, 2022

Image
A group of children playing outside

In April of 2022, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College announced a “Mead on the Move” initiative, a program that brings art education from the museum’s galleries into pre-K through 12th grade classrooms.

“Mead on the Move” draws from the Mead’s core teaching themes designed to complement Massachusetts state learning guidelines. The themes include representing the self and others, stories in art, and playing with process, which pays homage to the artist’s known or unknown work in making and creating.

Mass Humanities awards The Mead Art Museum as a recipient of its Expand Massachusetts Stories grant program initiative

Mass Humanities | September 22, 2022

Image
A photo saying Expand Massachusetts Stories 2022
The Mead Art Museum is a recipient of the Mass Humanities' Expand Massachusetts Stories grant program initiative. The Mass Humanities announced it has awarded $713,876 in Expand Massachusetts Stories grants to 42 cultural nonprofit organizations across the Commonwealth. The funded projects will surface new narratives about the people and ideas that shape Massachusetts. 

The Mead was selected as one of the recipients for this initiative to support its upcoming exhibition, Boundless: Indigenous Art and Stories Across Massachusetts.

When the avant-garde met E=mc2: the story behind Dimensionism

The Art Newspaper | November 7, 2018

Image
A painting of a woman painting
Cubism. Futurism. Constructivism. Dadaism. Surrealism. Amid the maelstrom of artistic “isms” that swirled in the first decades of the 20th century, an obscure Hungarian poet saw a clear and unstoppable logic. Charles Sirató had begun composing “planar” poems in the 1920s that freed words from their lines and gave them pictorial form. As an émigré in Paris, he felt the shock of Modern art: paintings with depth, and sculptures with inner voids and moving, even motorised, elements. In 1936, he wrote a manifesto declaring that all these avant-garde tendencies were offshoots of the same movement: Dimensionism.

Groundbreaking Exhibition Examines the Role of Science in Mid-century Art

ArtDaily | November 7, 2018

Image
The Mead Art Museum with a large wall that says Dimensionalism
This fall, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents the premiere of a nationally touring exhibition that explores the influence of scientific discovery on some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists. Organized by the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein is the first exhibition to highlight the untold story of the “Dimensionist Manifesto”—a proclamation authored by Hungarian poet Charles Sirató in 1936 and endorsed by such artistic luminaries as Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, László Moholy-Nagy, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and others—which called for an artistic response to the era’s groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Featuring nearly seventy artworks by the Manifesto’s signatories and their contemporaries, the exhibition illuminates remarkable connections between the scientific and artistic revolutions that shaped the twentieth century.

Mead Art Museum Acquires Installation by Yinka Shonibare

Artforum | June 30, 2018

Image
A colorful model ship in a large bottle
The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts has acquired a large-scale installation by the Britain-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. Titled the American Library Collection (Activists), the work comprises 234 books wrapped in Dutch wax print fabric.

Inscribed in gold foil on the spines of each book are the names of first or second generation American activists and writers from across the political spectrum, such as Grace Lee Boggs, Cesar Chavez, and Sonia Sotomayor.

Mead Art Museum Appoints Emily Potter-Ndiaye Head of Education, Curator of Academic Programs

ARTnews | June 26, 2018

Image
A photo of Emily Potter-Ndiaye
The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College announced that Emily Potter-Ndiaye has been named its new head of education and curator of academic programs, effective August 20. Potter-Ndiaye will be responsible for helping the college’s faculty and students engage with the museum’s nineteen-thousand-work collection.

Potter-Ndiaye comes to the Mead from the Brooklyn Historical Society, where she has been director of education since August 2013. During her tenure, Potter-Ndiaye has grown the organization’s programs across all three of its sites—its flagship building at 128 Pierrepont Street and its satellite spaces in DUMBO and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—so that it could serve more than fifteen thousand students and teachers annually through free school programs, teacher workshops, and other initiatives.

Artist Unravels Confederate Flag, As Metaphor And Performance

NEPR | April 4, 2018

Image
Two people standing in front of a confederate flag that is unraveling
A performance artist at Amherst College on Thursday uses the threads of a confederate flag to draw attention to the United States' history of racism.

Sonya Clark, an Amherst College alumna, has gained national attention for publicly unraveling a confederate flag she bought online.

As part of a series of performances at different locations, she invites audience members to undo the cloth alongside her over the course of a couple hours.

Collectors Sue and John Wieland Give $3 M. to Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum

The Reminder | January 11, 2018

Image
A room in a museum with a giant model house in the middle of the room
The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts has received a $3 million gift from the collectors Sue and John Wieland. (John is an Amherst College alumnus, having graduated from there in 1958.) Their gift will endow the director and chief curator position, which is currently held by David E. Little, and support the acquisition of artworks.

In conjunction with the gift, the Mead will host “HOUSE: Selections from the Collection of John and Sue Wieland,” an exhibition that features 60 pieces from the Wielands’ 400-work collection. Included in that show will be works by Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Louise Bourgeois, and Ai Weiwei, with a specific focus on the way that homes structure people’s lives. The exhibition will open on February 8 and run through July 1.