'Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone' at WCMA

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) announced "Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone," a project consisting of a retrospective survey on view from July 15 through December 22, 2022, as well as a publication. 
 
Organized by Horace D. Ballard, former Curator of American Art at WCMA and currently the Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. Associate Curator of American Art at Harvard Art Museums, the exhibition and catalog offer the first curatorial assessment of the entirety of Unger's practice and highlight key works as culminating examples of her material experimentation.
 
According to a press release, rising to prominence in the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s and 1990s, Mary Ann Unger (1945–1998) was skilled in graphic composition, watercolor, large-scale conceptual sculpture, and environmentally-responsive, site-specific interventions. An unabashed feminist, Unger was acknowledged as a pioneer of neo-expressionist sculptural form. 
 
"To Shape a Moon from Bone" reexamines the formal and cultural intricacies of Unger's oeuvre, as well as the critical environmental themes suffusing her monumental installations. The exhibition repositions Unger within and against the male dominated New York sculpture scene in the last decades of the twentieth century.
 
"To Shape a Moon from Bone" is Unger's first solo museum presentation in more than twenty years since the McDonough Museum of Art at Youngstown State University (Ohio) presented a fifteen-year retrospective in 2000. 
 
The artist's monumental homage to prehistoric migration, Across the Bering Strait (1992–94), will be on view in concert with previously unseen works on paper and other sculptural works from the Mary Ann Unger Estate, as well as special loans from the Whitney Museum of American Art and Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute.
 
Works by Unger's daughter Eve Biddle, artist and co-founder of the Wassaic Project, bring two generations of a family of artists—which includes Unger's husband, noted photographer Geoffrey Biddle—into conversation around memory and material evidence.

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Clark Art Hosts Opening Lecture for Bernice Abbott's Modern Lens

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Saturday, July 12, at 11 am, the Clark Art Institute celebrates the opening of its newest exhibition Berenice Abbott's Modern Lens with a free lecture. 
 
Grace Hanselman, exhibition curator and curatorial assistant for works on paper, introduces the work of Berenice Abbott, a pioneering documentary photographer known best for her portraits of the Parisian avant-garde and striking snapshots of twentieth-century New York.
 
The talk takes place in the Manton Research Center auditorium.
 
In the 1920s, American-born Abbott worked as an assistant to Man Ray in Paris before her career as a portraitist solidified in its own right. In a major artistic pivot, she returned to the United States in 1929 to undertake her most celebrated project: documenting New York City's rapid urban transformation. Lesser-known but equally accomplished is her body of work photographing other cities and towns in the American Northeast. 
 
This exhibition showcases selections from a 2007 gift of over 400 Abbott photographs, some iconic and rarely if ever exhibited, highlighting her enduring impact on modern photography.
 
Free. Accessible seats available. Advance registration required at clarkart.edu/events or call 413 458 0524.
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