Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Clark Art Institute announces its summer 2025 season, featuring a robust program of exhibitions, events, and activities.
“Summer 2025 promises to be a dynamic season with an exciting line-up of exhibitions that will bring our galleries and our grounds to life,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “Outdoors, we are looking forward to bringing the second presentation of our Ground/work exhibition to our campus and to introducing our visitors to six remarkable contemporary artists. Indoors, we are offering a rich program that will offer a wide array of exhibitions featuring many artists whose works will be shown here for the first time.”
The Clark’s summer exhibitions open on a staggered schedule, beginning in May. The program includes:
Paginations—Bold by Design: Mid-century Modern Graphic Art
Manton Research Center
May 20–September 21, 2025
Paginations is a series of year-round public installations featuring works drawn from the Clark library’s extensive holdings and presented in the Manton Research Center’s reading room. Bold by Design: Mid-century Modern Graphic Art brings together visually striking book covers, illustrations, and advertisements to showcase the clean lines and bright colors of the mid-century modern design aesthetic in print.
This display, free and open to the public, is drawn from the Clark Art Institute library’s collection and curated by members of the library staff.
A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945
Clark Center lower level
June 14–September 14, 2025
In her essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf argued that women need their own physical space, as well as sufficient income, to write fiction. Woolf exhorted women to find their creative voice, to pave the way for an imagined “Shakespeare’s sister,” an artist of genius whose work would build on the accomplishments of the creative women that came before her. Woolf also believed that this imagined poet’s creativity existed in every woman.
A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945 features paintings, drawings, prints, stained glass, embroidery, and other decorative arts made by twenty-five professional women artists in Great Britain who were, in fact, answering Virginia Woolf’s call during her lifetime. The exhibition explores the spaces these women claimed as their own and which furthered their artistic ambitions, including their rooms, homes, studios, art schools, clubs, and public exhibition venues. Their roles in creating change and opportunity—whether through art education, marching for women’s suffrage, protesting World War I, or creating networking opportunities for fellow artists or members of their community—is also highlighted in this presentation.
This exhibition is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Alexis Goodin, Associate Curator.
Generous support for A Room of Her Own is provided by Carol and Bob Braun, Richard and Carol Seltzer, and The Tavolozza Foundation.
Ground/work 2025
Clark Campus
June 28, 2025–October 12, 2026
In 2020 the Clark opened Ground/work, a one-year exhibition of monumental sculpture by six artists that was situated in the landscape surrounding the museum. Ground/work 2025 once again features specially commissioned works located across the Clark’s campus. This sequel exhibition focuses on global conceptions of craft, defined as the physical process by which artists transform the world around them. Each of the six international artists participating in the exhibition exemplifies how artisanal traditions can be reinvented to generate contemporary form and meaning. The Ground/work 2025 artists are: Yō Akiyama (Japan), Laura Ellen Bacon (United Kingdom), Aboubakar Fofana (Mali), Hugh Hayden (United States), Milena Naef (Switzerland), and Javier Senosiain (Mexico).
Ground/work 2025 is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by independent curator Glenn Adamson.
Ground/work 2025 is made possible by Denise Littlefield Sobel. Major funding is provided by the Edward and Maureen Fennessy Bousa Fund for Contemporary Projects, Karen and Robert Scott, and VIA Art Fund, with additional support from Girlfriend Fund.
Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens
Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper, Manton Research Center
July 12–October 5, 2025
Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) was one of the most important American photographers of the twentieth century, known for her pioneering documentary style, unpretentious compositions, and technical innovations. A woman photographer working in the relatively early days of the medium, Abbott demonstrated that women could hold a prominent place in cutting-edge artistic communities. The Clark marks the 100-year anniversary of Abbott’s first photographs with an exhibition examining the relationship between her portraits of people and her “portraits” of places.
Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens begins with Abbott’s earliest portrait photography, taken in 1920s Paris while working as an assistant in the legendary Man Ray’s studio. Writers, musicians, artists, publishers, and socialites—many of whom lived visibly queer lives, like Abbott herself—all found themselves looking through her discerning lens as she captured a sense of the rapidly changing social landscape. The exhibition also highlights Abbott’s pivot from photographing people to photographing architectural and urban subjects. Her celebrated images of New York City, taken after returning from Paris, document the fleeting essence of an urbanism in flux. Much less well-known are Abbott’s photographs of tidy row houses in Albany and proud old mansions in the suburbs of Boston. Viewed alongside her Parisian portraits, Abbott’s skill in capturing the authentic character of these places is apparent.
In 2007, the Clark received a large gift of Berenice Abbott photographs from the A&M Penn Photography Foundation. Printed under Abbott’s supervision in 1982, the majority of these photographs have not yet been on view. Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens displays them at the Clark for the first time.
This exhibition is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Grace Hanselman, curatorial assistant for works on paper.
Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time
Michael Conforti Pavilion, Clark Center
July 19–October 13, 2025
“[Y]ou know one shifts–I do–backwards and forwards. Sometimes I think I’m part of this world today. Sometimes I feel that maybe I belong in history or in prehistory, or that there’s no such thing as time.”
Acclaimed Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) made this statement in a 1972 taped interview in his studio in Queens, New York. There, surrounded by a collection of the most modern industrial tools, and with a silver watch on his wrist, he ruminated on the messy nature of time. He continued, “[I]f you [can] escape from that time constraint, then the whole world…[becomes] someplace where you belong.” This powerful notion of escaping time’s constraints, of moving fluidly through past and present, ran as an undercurrent throughout Noguchi’s prolific and varied six-decade career, during which he created sculptural works with a broad range of materials, from stainless steel to stone, in addition to designing gardens, playgrounds, plazas, furniture, lighting, and stage sets. All of this activity fell within his broad definition of “sculpture.” Noguchi did not approach time as a straight line, but instead cut pathways between disparate temporal points, looking back to prehistory at one moment, gazing towards the future at the next, and attempting to synthesize his findings in the present in a manner both urgent and meaningful.
This non-chronological survey of Noguchi’s work across media presents some of his most compelling engagements with time. The exhibition traces Noguchi’s interventions in the long march of geologic time, his explorations into the life cycles of natural and industrial materials, his meditations on memory and the relationship between the enduring and ephemeral, and his fluid traversals between the Stone Age and Space Age. These explorations follow Noguchi’s timeless search for belonging.
Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time is co-organized by the Clark Art Institute and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, and curated by the museum’s Curator and Director of Research Matthew Kirsch and Curator Kate Wiener.
Mariel Capanna: Giornata
Clark Center and Manton Research Center
February 15, 2025–January 25, 2026
Mariel Capanna (b. 1988) plays what she calls “games of remembering” as a way of reckoning with loss. Working from home videos and family slideshows, whose runtime is her constraint, the artist races to record fleeting memory images in oil paint. She scatters these flat, pastel forms like confetti across deep, atmospheric surfaces, creating compositions that are at once jubilant and wistful. For the Clark, the Philadelphia-based artist presents two new, site-specific oil paintings as well as a monumental, two-sided fresco. The fresco process is also defined by time constraints: since the time of the Italian Renaissance, the term giornata has referred to the area of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day. Mariel Capanna: Giornata marks the artist’s first museum solo exhibition.
This year-long installation, free and open to the public, is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects.