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

08:23AM / Friday, June 24, 2022Print Story | Email Story

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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Williamstown Finance Committee Begins FY27 Budget Review

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:49AM / Tuesday, February 24, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Finance Committee last week began its review of an "unexciting" fiscal year 2027 budget while continuing to monitor an unappealing trend line that could see the town facing a Proposition 2 1/2 override as soon as FY29.

Town meeting will have the levy capacity to approve the FY27 budget as drafted and presented by the town manager on Wednesday, partly because the spending plan for the year that begins on July 1 includes just one noteworthy increase in discretionary municipal spending.

As drafted, the FY27 budget would result in a projected 7.69 percent in the property tax levy from the current fiscal year — pending the final numbers from the town's largest cost center, the Mount Greylock Regional School District, which will not finalize its assessments to its member towns until March 19.

The town hall side of spending is up by about 2.8 percent in the proposed budget. Most of that is attributable to cost-of-living increases for current employees and fixed costs, like the town's contribution for employees' health insurance.

"The one thing I would say is apologies for bringing a boring budget forward that doesn't have a lot of excitement," Town Manager Robert Menicocci told the Finance Committee. "But with this audience, it's, 'Hey, we brought something really exciting to you guys. The growth is modest given all the pressures that are out there.'

"We're maintaining services as we know them. I think that's really strong news given the pressures that are out there. There's no erosion of services. There's no erosion of staff. We haven't had to go through a cut exercise. Still, that's at the expense of relying on the taxpayer to pay more taxes this upcoming year."

Finance Director David Fierro Jr. told the Fin Comm that most of the increases in expenses are because of the town's negotiated cost-of-living adjustments. He also included an estimated 9 percent increase in the assessment from Mount Greylock and a 10 percent increase in the much smaller assessment from the Northern Berkshire Vocational Regional School District (McCann Technical School).

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