Clark Art Lecture On Native American Burial Mounds

08:00AM / Friday, May 03, 2024Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Tuesday, May 7 at 5:30 pm, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents "Putting The Mounds In Perspective," a lecture by Michael Gaudio (University of Minnesota/Clark Professor 2023–2024).

In it he explores a much-discussed feature of the nineteenth-century North American landscape: Native American burial mounds.

The talk takes place in the Clark's auditorium, located in the Manton Research Center.

According to a press release:

In 1899, the art historian Alois Riegl declared that the content of modern art, and of landscape painting in particular, was a scientific "mood" in which the chaotic world, seen from a distance, resolves into a sense of perspectival harmony. As elevated points in the landscape, burial mounds were frequently treated as ideal viewing platforms—sites from which to survey and understand the surrounding country—but as objects of a nascent archaeological discipline that placed the Indigenous inhabitants of North America into historical perspective, the mounds proved elusive. Belonging to none of the established categories for historical evaluation, the mounds disrupt the contemplative mood of both landscape art and nineteenth-century academic science.

Michael Gaudio is Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. His research interests focus on the intersections of artistic practice, science, religion, and cultural contact in the Atlantic world. He has written on topics including early modern costume studies, early American natural history illustration, and thirteenth-century cartography. He is the author of three books: Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (2008), The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England (2017), and Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World (2019).

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A reception at 5 pm in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Tags: Clark Art,

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Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:57AM / Tuesday, August 25, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.

The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.

That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.

"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.

"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."

For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.

"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."

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