Wellesley College Art Department

Home
United States
Wellesley, MA
Wellesley College Art Department

Musings and doings of the Art Department at Wellesley College We remain closed to the public.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The Jewett Arts Center and Pendleton West buildings are currently open to the campus community and registered College guests only. This includes all classrooms, studio spaces, computer labs, galleries, and libraries. Updates will be posted on our main website (www.wellesley.edu/art) and this page as they become available. Please email us at [email protected] for more information.

--

Want to know what's happening in the Art Dept? We keep a running page of upcoming events here: www.wellesley.edu/art/events/whats-happening

--

Located in the Jewett Arts Center and Pendleton West, the Department of Art offers a full curriculum in Art History and Studio Art, along with majors in Architecture and Cinema & Media Studies (CAMS). These academic programs provide opportunities to construct an in-depth major or minor in active conversation with faculty advisors. Students in the department combine historical inquiry with contemporary studio investigation, theory with production, research with making. The Media Arts & Sciences (MAS) major is dually administered between the Studio Art program and the Computer Science department, so some of the classes and faculty advisors for this major are based in Jewett and Pendleton West as well.

04/17/2026

Wednesday April 22 at 4:45 pm, join professor Jacki Musacchio and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, Italy for 'An American in Italy: Francesca Alexander,' a talk about this little-known artist who made a home and a career in Italy.

Admission is free but advanced registration is required. There is also a Zoom option, advance registration required to receive the link. Be mindful of time zones!

If you are interested in attending in person or online, click the link below:

04/01/2026

The Cole Alumnae Grant is open now for applications!

Are you an actively practicing artist who is within 5 years of graduation from Wellesley College or within 5 years of graduation from an arts-related masters program? Do you have a project to propose that is based in painting or sculpture (broadly defined)? If yes, you are eligible to apply for the Alice C. Cole '42 Studio Project Grant (aka the Alumnae Grant).

The application is open now through April 24, 2026. Details and the link to apply are at the link below. Email art at wellesley dot edu with any questions!

https://wellesleystudioart.slideroom.com/ #/login/program/88736

(artwork by Kelsey Reiman '15, one of the 2022-23 Cole Grant awardees)

03/02/2026

The Art Department is thrilled to welcome prof. Jennifer Roberts, from the dept of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, to give our 2026 Dr. Ruth E. Morris Bakwin Lecture.

In July of 1965, NASA's Mariner 4 probe captured and transmitted the first images ever sent to Earth from another planet. While the numerical data was slowly downloaded and processed photographically, the eager engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory improvised: they pinned the data strips to a wall, purchased a box of pastels, and hand-colored the image. This impromptu pastel drawing was humanity's first glimpse of Mars. The unexpected use of an eighteenth-century art medium to visualize data from cutting-edge space technology offers new ways to consider visual representation both on and off Earth.

Wednesday March 4
5:00 pm
Collins Cinema

This event is free and open to the public. More info at the link below!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/whatshappeningintheartdept/whats-happening

02/18/2026

This Friday, Feb. 20!

Members of the campus community are invited to join our gallery director and artists Olivia Gorman '22 and Ry Watkins '23 for an artist talk in the Jewett Gallery at 11:00 am.

Then everyone, including members of the public, is invited to the closing reception for 'Finding the Level' from 4:30-6:00 pm.

Grab a snack, meet the artists, and make sure you see these amazing installations before they disappear forever!

More info at the link below. See you Friday!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/whatshappeningintheartdept

01/02/2026

Congratulations to prof. Alex Brey, whose team has been selected as a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) awardee by Schmidt Sciences. His group's collaborative project, 'Seeing Through Style: Multimodal Advances in Iconographic Analysis,' also includes prof. Carolyn Anderson from Wellesley's CS dept and prof. Maeve Doyle from Eastern Connecticut State University.

Their project aims to develop new ways of studying art historical image sets at scale using Gothic manuscript marginalia as a test case. The first image in this post is an example of the kinds of material they're working on.

HAVI supports interdisciplinary teams creating new AI methods to advance scholarship across archaeology, literature, art history, linguistics, film studies, and more. This year's cohort includes 23 research teams receiving a total of $11 million to develop AI tools that deepen our understanding of human history and culture.

Read more about prof. Brey's project, and find more information about about the other funded projects, at the link below!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/whatshappeningintheartdept

Photos:
Slide 1: Marginal illuminations of an ape beheading a man (top), a beggar with a basket on his back containing an ape (right), and a bestiary representation of a unicorn hunt (below). Psalter for Ghent use, ca. 1315–25. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 5, fol. 74r. Reproduced according to the terms and conditions of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.

Slide 2: Prof. Brey using a colander to view the Spring 2024 solar eclipse. His teaching and scholarship span the range from ancient to contemporary, from cutting-edge high tech to old school low tech... if you think that's interesting, consider signing up for one of his classes when Fall '26 registration reopens next week...!

11/20/2025

The Jewett Arts Center and Pendleton West will both be closed to the public over Thanksgiving break: November 26-30. There will be no public access to the Jewett Gallery, Art Library, or Music Library.

Students, faculty, and staff can still access the buildings by swiping in. Both buildings will remain swipe-accessible on their standard semester hours.

The Lighting Studio and Cage are both closed to students over the break.

Contact [email protected] with any questions.

11/17/2025

On view now in the Jewett Art Gallery! 'Borrowed Worlds' features fabric collages and art garments exploring urban landscapes by Ingrid Henderson '19, 3D printed and ceramic sculptures that question the ownership of art historical and cultural objects by Korina Hernandez '20, and techno-organic sculptures made with the collaboration of slime mold colonies that respond to live data streams by X.S. Hou '21. All 3 artists are recent recipients of the Alice C. Cole '42 Studio Project Grant.

The show is free to visit and on view now through December 12, 10 am - 5 pm daily. The gallery will be closed to the public November 26-30 for Thanksgiving break, although members of the campus community may still swipe into the building to view it over those dates.

See the exhibition website below for more details!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/art-dept-exhibitions/exhibitions/borrowed-worlds

11/06/2025

Friday, Nov. 14, the Art Department welcomes Venetia Dale as our Fall 2025 Frank Williams Visiting Artist in honor of M. Rachael Arauz '91.

Venetia Dale (b. 1981) is an artist, mother and educator living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. Dale pieces together fragments of mundane objects into sculptural works; these range from food leftover from her children's meals to incomplete embroidery and hooked rugs she sources online. The material histories of embroidery, pewter, and rug hooking – as well as the anonymous stewards who keep things clean, fixed, and loved – are translated through her work as intimacies of domestic life that remind us of the generative potential of the everyday.

Dale has participated in exhibitions at institutions including Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Villa Terrace Museum, and the Racine Art Museum, amongst other museums and galleries. Her work has been shown at 92nd Street Y Tribeca Gallery, Proof Gallery, and SOIL Gallery and others.
Dale was recently honored as a James and Audrey Foster Prize Finalist in 2023 and the 2019 Polly Starr Thayer Visiting Artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Prior, she was a resident artist at the Kohler Factory in 2013 and at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2010. Dale exhibits nationally and her work is included in the permanent collections of the Metal Museum in Tennessee and John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin. Her most recent acquisition was by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2022.

FRIDAY NOV. 14
11:00 am
JEWETT AUDITORIUM

This event is free and open to the public. Visitors driving to campus should plan to park in the campus parking garage and walk to Jewett (see campus map here: https://www.wellesley.edu/campus-map ).

Contact Meghan Murray at [email protected] or 781-283-2042 with any questions.

10/16/2025

Join the Wellesley Architecture program and Art Department on Thursday Oct. 23 for the 2025 Harry Halverson Lecture on American Architecture.

This year Julia Walker, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Binghamton, SUNY will present 'Lust for Life: Brigitte D'Ortschy, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Drama of Domesticity'.

Thursday Oct. 23
5:30 pm
JAC 450

This talk is free and open to the public. If you are visiting from off campus, please plan to park in the campus garage and walk to Jewett from there.

Additional information about the talk and speaker are on our 'What's Happening in the Art Dept?' page. Scroll down to Oct. 23!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/whatshappeningintheartdept/whats-happening

10/06/2025

It's the last full week to see 'a question of imagination and taste: the Jewett Arts Center, then and now.' Join us this Thursday, Oct. 9, for a midday gallery talk!

We'll look at what it takes to make a show like this happen from an exhibition creation/design perspective, and we'll talk about some of the other stories (and dramas) behind the construction and life of the building. Even if you've already seen the exhibition, this talk will cover stuff not immediately visible in the gallery - there's more to learn!

Thursday Oct. 9
12:45-2 pm
Jewett Art Gallery

This event is free and open to the public as well as the campus community. If you are coming from off campus, you should plan to park in the garage (see campus map here: https://www.wellesley.edu/campus-map ) and walk to Jewett. Contact gallery director Samara Pearlstein ([email protected]) with any questions.

See you there!

Address

Jewett Arts Center/Wellesley College/106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA
02481

Website

http://www.wellesley.edu/Art/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Wellesley College Art Department posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The University

Send a message to Wellesley College Art Department:

Shortcuts

Want your university to be the top-listed University in Wellesley?