Past Events

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.

Explore the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center while listening to music sung by the Vassar College Women’s Chorus, Chamber Singers, and Choir. Short performances at 6:00 p.m., 6:30 p.m., and 7:00 p.m.

Chacon, the first Native American awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music, will join Loeb curator John P. Murphy for a conversation about art, music, and Indigenous cultural expression. Their dialogue will be followed by a performance of the experimental composition Horse Notations. Registration required.

Video

With Ariana Maki, guest curator of Beyond the Threshold: Tibetan Contemporary Art at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and artists Gonkar Gyatso, Nyema Droma, and Marie-Dolma Chopel.