Categories
Podcast Archive

Art in Focus Podcast: “Carrie Mae Weems” with Annabel Holland and Allison Wojciechowski

The McMullen Student Ambassadors are pleased to present the newest season of our premiere podcast, Art in Focus. This season, we’ve decided to feature both professor and student conversations about our Fall 2018 exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement.

For this episode of Art in Focus, we have invited Allison Wojciechowski and Annabel Holland, two students in Professor Robin Lydenberg’s “Race and Gender in Visual Culture” course. Allison and Annabel have spent the semester learning about Weems from one of the two exhibition co-curators and have a great deal to say about the artist and her work.

 

Categories
McMullen Updates Museum Events

In Case You Missed It: Open Mic Night with SLAM! + The Laughing Medusa

By Katherine Oksen

On Thursday, October 11th, the McMullen Museum collaborated with SLAM! and The Laughing Medusa to host an open mic night.

With the room filled with the smell of hot coffee and tables laden with macarons, pastries, and baked delicacies, a gorgeous night of poetry and prose began. SLAM! (Soul, Love, and Music) is Boston College’s own spoken word group, and The Laughing Medusa is BC’s only women’s literary and arts journal (striving to bring feminism to a publication near you.)

IMG_6801

Members of each group performed at will, showering us with poems and pieces about love and life and hurt and hate. Despite the rainy weather, providing those darling melancholy vibes, the atrium of the museum was filled with students there to perform, support their friends, and listen to what their fellow peers had to say. The McMullen provided an open, safe space for students to share their words with a kind of fervor, intensity, and passion that cannot be replicated in the typed or written form. Snaps were heard all around in response to beautiful and powerful lines woven from experiences pulled from the full spectrum of human emotion, including abuse, racism, misogyny, ignorance, and heartache.

IMG_6796

Miya Coleman, president of SLAM!, and Taylor Puccini, editor-in-chief of The Laughing Medusa, did an incredible job both performing their own works while also facilitating the entire event and encouraging the audience to to speak their minds.

IMG_6804

The McMullen is hoping to continue hosting events like this, perhaps collaborating with these student groups again in the spring and even making this an annual event each fall. Thanks to everyone who came out to support all of our aspiring poets!

 

Categories
Museum Events Uncategorized

In Case You Missed It: Fall 2018 Student Opening

By Annabel Steele

The McMullen Museum kicked off the new year with an Art After Dark event on Friday, Sep. 7. Students enjoyed refreshments and participated in activities while learning about the semester’s exhibitions, Strategies of Engagement by Carrie Mae Weems and Not There, Not Here by Boston College professor Hartmut Austen.

DSCF7408

Weems’s work encourages us to critically examine American society and identify and acknowledge imbalances of power and miscarriages of justice. Accordingly, many of the activities touched upon themes of social justice and American identity.

In the first floor conference center, students were able to take selfies of themselves and write down what America or American identity means to them on the photos. The photos were then clipped up in a room while one of Weems’s videos played in the background. Meanwhile, the button-making station proved to be highly popular, as students designed buttons from templates and from scratch. One of the most popular slogans from the evening was “Bring Back Late Night.”

DSCF7407

DSCF7415

On the third floor, students identified the topics they are most passionate about by putting stickers on posters, creating a visual representation of the issues that concern the student body. On the terrace, students enjoyed the late-summer golden hour over Boston and watched Dear White People and Random Acts of Flyness.

DSCF7495

Throughout the night, students enjoyed performances from groups such as the Beats, Sexual Chocolate and F.I.S.T.S in the museum lobby. They also wandered through the second floor gallery, observing Weems’s works as the exhibition officially opened for the semester.

BEATS

DSCF7385.JPG