Past Events

Join visiting artists and members of our campus and local communities for a conversation about Indigenous arts, land acknowledgments, and more. 

From Requiem to Solace: Artwork Inspired by the Ashokan Reservoir. Artist Kate McGloughlin will speak about how the devastation endured by her ancestors during the creation of the Ashokan Reservoir influences and inspires her work. Sponsored by Late Night at the Loeb and the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

An exhibit of artwork by Kate McGloughlin depicts the beauty and sorrow inherent in the Ashokan Reservoir. Kate’s family lost both land and community to reservoir construction. There will also be an artist talk in the second week of the festival during Late Night at the Loeb. This exhibit is sponsored by the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

Join us in kicking off this year’s festival with exciting exhibitions in three different gallery spaces on campus. Enjoy refreshments in the Loeb and Palmer Galleries to celebrate the wide range of visual art offerings for MODfest 2023. 

This rotation of the Loeb’s In the Spotlight will feature a small selection of prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs depicting water in New York State

How do artists help us see or shape the past and future? Works ranging from Matthew Vassar’s initial bequest in 1864 to the Loeb’s most recent gifts and acquisitions will cluster in visual dialogues thematizing past, present, and future as categories in constant states of flux and transformation.

This illustrated lecture by a Wesleyan University professor of art history and East Asian studies will focus on visual narratives spun by the Kumano nuns in early modern Japan for fundraising purposes and the paintings they used, called sankei mandara or “pilgrimage mandalas.”

Explore the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center while listening to music sung by the Vassar College Women’s Chorus and Choir at 6:30 p.m.

Art historian Dora Apel considers the dynamic nature of memory, how it can be mobilized for social justice, and how memory is embodied, including through her own experience as a daughter of Holocaust survivors and a cancer survivor. A reception for Dora Apel and artist Buzz Spector will precede the lecture.

The Loeb Art Center hosts a public reception celebrating the exhibition On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print, followed by a conversation featuring visiting artist Aaron R. Turner, founder/director of the Center for Art as Lived Experience and the Photographers of Color Podcast at the University of Arkansas School of Art.