Painter Lalla Essaydi unveils new work at the Williams College Museum of Art

12:00AM / Monday, January 16, 2006Print Story | Email Story

Williamstown â€“ This week the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) unveils bold new work by contemporary artist Lalla Essaydi in which she challenges the worldview of 19th-century French painter, Jean-LÃ©on GÃ©rÃ´me. The exhibition juxtaposes GÃ©rÃ´meâ€™s iconic painting The Slave Market, generously loaned by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, with four paintings by Essaydi. Together, the works in this installation form a dialogue across space, time, and cultures. All of the paintings in the exhibition depict classically rendered figures and evocative architectural settings; while the French picture invites voyeurism and stereotypes the so-called â€˜Orient,â€™ Essaydiâ€™s paintings will not allow it. All her figures gaze right back at us and command respect, be they male, female, or hermaphrodite. Complementing the monumental photographs of women, for which she is already well known, these paintings challenge our assumptions of North Africa to foster cross-cultural awareness. Lalla Essaydi received a B.F.A. from Tufts University in 1999 and an M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in 2003. Essaydi works in a variety of media, including analog photography, oil on canvas, mixed media, and video. Her photographs have been the subject of the exhibition Converging Territories, and she has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the critically acclaimed Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World. Artist Statement: â€œIn a sense, I am a Western artist, making art in a style I was unable to use in my home country, Morocco. But I am also the slave girl of that painting, in that I am a woman from an Arab culture. And, to go a step further, I am GÃ©rÃ´me, painting nude subjects. I want in my paintings to combine all these elements, in order to engage the whole problem of myself as â€œotherâ€â€¦ In my paintings, I am hoping not only to expose the Orientalist gaze, and the facile assumptions it has engendered, but also to present my own culture as honestly as I can. Above all, I try to present myself in something like my true complexityâ€”as a woman, as an Arab woman living in the West, mediating between worlds, as an artist. It is not a fixed identity, but one that is changing as the world changes and as my life changesâ€¦â€ â€“Lalla Essaydi

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MassDOT Schedules Hearing on Passenger Rail to Albany

By Brittany PolitoiBerkshires Staff
07:30AM / Wednesday, September 30, 2026

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — As part of the East-West Rail proposal, the state wants to see how service could expand to Albany.

Next week, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation will hold a virtual meeting for a Service Development Plan to explore a passenger rail between Boston and Albany, N.Y.

The Zoom event will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 6, from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

MassDOT says this is a critical step toward advancing East-West Rail, which would connect Pittsfield and western communities to Springfield, Worcester, and Boston, and beyond. The project has been in progress for several years and was recommended in the 2018 Massachusetts State Rail Plan.

The SDP will study how passenger rail service on the Boston and Albany Corridor would operate and how to get there. It takes about two years, and the next step is preliminary engineering and environmental review.

In the SDP process, MassDOT will conduct stakeholder outreach, propose appropriate service levels, identify necessary infrastructure improvements, and establish a governance structure for service.

Planned station stops include South Station and Back Bay in Boston, Framingham, Worcester, Palmer (proposed station), Springfield, and Albany-Rensselaer, according to the MassDOT website.

Massachusetts completed the East-West Passenger Rail Study Final Report in early 2021, and in December 2023, the Boston & Albany Corridor was accepted into the Federal Railroad Administration's Corridor ID Program; MassDOT was awarded $500,000 for an SDP.