From the editor

In October, Emily Wei Rales ’98, director and co-founder of the contemporary art museum Glenstone, and Darren Walker, former president of the Ford Foundation, delivered the combined Caroline A. Wilson 1910 and Betsy Wood Knapp ’64 Lecture, “Urgent Witness: Why the Arts Matter for Democracy.”

Art is metaphor, Rales told the campus audience. “It’s about seeing two things that are disparate that might not have anything to do with each other. But because we are human, because we have imaginations, we can imagine, and we can visualize, and we can bring ourselves into a different reality,” she said. “And so when art opens our hearts and our minds up to metaphor, it also allows us to see possibilities in our current reality.”

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is one of my favorite places to see possibilities. Last fall, when our longtime writer Sarah Ligon ’03 pitched the idea of a feature story about Wellesley curators at the MFA (“The Curators’ Circle”), I couldn’t say yes fast enough.

On a recent visit to the MFA, I was struck by how much I’ve learned about art in my decades at Wellesley, and how it influences the way I see the world. A monumental piece constructed of bottle caps by contemporary Ghanaian artist El Anatsui brought back his retrospective at the Davis Museum at Wellesley in 2011, which explored African history, globalization, and cultural exchange. Works by John Singer Sargent reminded me of The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World, a 2022 biography by Professor of American Studies Paul Fisher, which explores the life, art, and complex sexuality of the famous painter. And the painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin called to mind my memorable 2016 visit to ARTH 316: The Body: Race and Gender in Contemporary Art, taught by Nikki Greene, associate professor of art. “Gauguin’s art consumes the brown female body and spits out the bones,” one student wrote.

Ligon’s piece reveals the careful thought that goes into exhibitions. I had some firsthand experience with curation recently. On Feb. 6, Only To Be There: Student Traditions at Wellesley opened at the Davis Museum as part of its 150th celebrations (“Row, Row, Row Your Boat”). I co-curated the exhibition with Jacqueline Musacchio ’89, professor of art, and Amanda Gilvin, interim co-director, Sonja Novak Koerner ’51 Senior Curator, and associate director of curatorial affairs at the Davis. While Tree Day programs and Float Night megaphones seem a world away from the treasures in the MFA on Huntington Ave., you could argue that for the students who created them, they were tools for imagining new possibilities.