Registration is required for all events–whether or not a charge is involved. Club members register for themselves and their guests by using our online system, by emailing us, or by calling our office at 212-697-5300. Of course, we welcome any questions about any of the events that we’ve created.
The New & Improved MoMA
Wednesday, September 11 6:30 p.m. reception, 7:00 p.m. program $10 for Club members, $20 for non-members
The Museum of Modern Art is currently in the midst of an expansion project that will open in October of this year, following a brief closure that started in June. The expansion, developed by MoMA with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Gensler, adds more than 40,000 square feet of gallery spaces and enables the Museum to exhibit significantly more art in new and interdisciplinary ways, and that will also increase the Museum’s footprint by one-third. Glenn D. Lowry, Williams ’76, has been MoMA’s Director since 1995 and will provide Club Members with an insightful program about the Museum’s transformation and reengagement.
Regarding the project, Lowry says, “We have an opportunity to re-energize and expand upon our founding mission—to welcome everyone to experience MoMA as a laboratory for the study and presentation of the art of our time…the real value of this expansion is not just more space, but space that allows us to rethink the experience of art in the Museum.”
Metropolitan Stories
Tuesday, October 15 6:30 p.m. reception, 7:00 p.m. program $10 for Club members, $20 for non-members
Hidden behind the Met Museum’s Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur, and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museum’s devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people–along with a few ghosts.
An insider’s look into this private side of the Met, Christine Coulson’s Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, and an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.
Enjoy an evening of art and stories as related by Christine Coulson (MA, Williams ’93), who began her career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991 as a summer intern.She returned in 1994, and over the next 25 years rose through the ranks of the Museum, ultimately working as Chief Advisor to the Director.
Coulson will be joined in conversation by Liz McGowan (BA Princeton ’79; MA ‘81 & PhD, ’83, NYU), Chair of Williams College’s Art History Department.Their discussion, like Coulson’s novel, will offer an insider’s look into a world that is typically hidden from the public.Join us for an extraordinary opportunity to life the institutional veil and glean insights into the inner workings of the art world, and the unsung heroes that make it all possible.
Baptized by Beefcake:
The Golden Age of Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana
Saturday, October 19, 10:30 a.m. Poster House Museum, 119 W 23rd St. FREE to attend, includes donuts, bagels, coffee/tea
Before the advent of digital printing, self-taught Ghanaian artists merged art, cinema, and practical necessity in the creation of hand-painted movie posters.These posters, uniquely painted on repurposed flour sack cloth and ultimately replaced by digital reproduction, may have never been known to the larger public were it not for the efforts of Ernie Wolfe III, Williams ’72, a dealer in African art and Los Angeles gallery owner.They represent the noble attempt by the best and brightest Ghanaian sign painters of a generation to resist the inevitable onslaught of technology and globalization that would eventually put them out of business by the year 2000.“Crowd Pullers”, as they were affectionately known in Ghana, introduced the Ghanaian public to World Cinema, and thereby, to the world at large.
Guests will enjoy a guided tour of the gallery by Ernie himself, whose decades of fieldwork and scholarship resulted in this exhibition of approximately 60 posters. It opens October 17 and ends on January 5, 2020.
