Wellesley College Art Department

09/30/2026

Tomorrow is October, and that means that it's time for the 2026 WINKTOBER (Wellesley Inktober) prompt list! Each word on this year's list was inspired by a different member of the Wellesley College Art Dept faculty or staff.

New to WINKTOBER? 'Inktober' is a decentralized annual challenge where participants try to make one drawing per day for the entire month of October (ideally in ink, but do what you must), loosely based on a prompt list. WINKTOBER is the same, just with a Wellesley-adjacent theme each year.

Get your drawing supplies ready, and draw along with us all month!

09/25/2026

It is with great sadness that we share the news that Professor Emeritus of Art Carlos Dorrien passed away earlier this week.

An incredible sculptor in stone throughout his career, prof. Dorrien's works frequently engaged directly with the sites where they were installed, and often incorporate the idea of the memory or remnant along with references to archaeology, architecture, and other human histories that leave traces on the land. We are lucky to have a few of his small sculptures right here on the PNW terrace, and you can see some of his larger works locally in the sculpture park at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, at UMass Boston, in Winthrop Park in Harvard Square, and at the entrance to the Porter Square MBTA station, among many others nearby and farther afield.

Prof. Dorrien taught at Wellesley for over 30 years and presided over many students' introductions to forms of art production that women were historically discouraged from engaging with: disciplines like bronze casting, woodworking, or stone carving. For his own sculptures he often preferred granite, a famously hard and uncompromising stone, and his belief was that Wellesley students could and should learn all kinds of 'difficult' sculpture. This ethos remains a guiding principle in the Wellesley sculpture program today.

Prof. Dorrien's sculptures, made of a material that endures on geological time scales, will carry his artistic vision on for a long time - and the impact he had on generations of Wellesley art students cannot be measured. We hope you'll join us in remembering prof. Dorrien and all that he did for Wellesley College and the arts.

09/09/2026

Join us on Thursday Sept. 17 for a reception celebrating Work/Shop: the making of New Impressions Print Studio!

This exhibition tells some of the story of the work necessary to build the New Impressions Print Studio in Somerville, MA from scratch. Also on display is artwork by studio co-founders Stacy Friedman and Andrew Stearns, and pieces made by community members and professional artists in the space. The show is a testament to the power of printmaking and the importance of the communities that both support it and grow up around it.

The reception will take place in the Jewett Art Gallery. The Gallery is the first thing you see when you enter through the Jewett Arts Center's front doors (the doors that face the Academic Quad). The reception is free and open to the public.

Visitors driving to campus should park in the Davis Parking Facility near the Central St. entrance to campus and walk to Jewett from there; see a campus map here: https://www.wellesley.edu/campus-map

Contact Gallery Director Samara Pearlstein at [email protected] or 781-283-2043 for instructions on where to park if you need a handicapped accessible space closer to the building, or with any other questions.

06/30/2026

Opening soon at Mass MoCA: Hacia Cuando (To When), an exhibition by Studio Art professor Daniela Rivera!

Hacia Cuando (To When) features a large, inclined platform floor comprised of handmade tiles fabricated in pre-Hispanic fresco traditions, an installation which operates simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and sonic device. The exhibition focuses on the migration of histories, materials, cultural objects, narratives, practices, and myths by addressing political, art historical, and material histories. Through her reinvigoration of craft tradition, Rivera aims to question history and address the historical, cultural, and colonial narratives present in these materials and their varied places of origin.

The show opens to the public on July 11! See Mass MoCA's website, linked below, for more details and for information on ticketing prices and policies:

Chilean-born and Boston-based artist Daniela Rivera creates a newly commissioned exhibition Hacia Cuando (To When), featuring a large, inclined platform floor comprised of handmade tiles fabricated in pre-Hispanic fresco traditions, an installation which operates simultaneously as painting, sculptur...

04/17/2026

Wednesday April 22 at 4:45 pm, join professor Jacki Musacchio and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, Italy for 'An American in Italy: Francesca Alexander,' a talk about this little-known artist who made a home and a career in Italy.

Admission is free but advanced registration is required. There is also a Zoom option, advance registration required to receive the link. Be mindful of time zones!

If you are interested in attending in person or online, click the link below:

04/01/2026

The Cole Alumnae Grant is open now for applications!

Are you an actively practicing artist who is within 5 years of graduation from Wellesley College or within 5 years of graduation from an arts-related masters program? Do you have a project to propose that is based in painting or sculpture (broadly defined)? If yes, you are eligible to apply for the Alice C. Cole '42 Studio Project Grant (aka the Alumnae Grant).

The application is open now through April 24, 2026. Details and the link to apply are at the link below. Email art at wellesley dot edu with any questions!

https://wellesleystudioart.slideroom.com/ #/login/program/88736

(artwork by Kelsey Reiman '15, one of the 2022-23 Cole Grant awardees)

03/02/2026

The Art Department is thrilled to welcome prof. Jennifer Roberts, from the dept of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, to give our 2026 Dr. Ruth E. Morris Bakwin Lecture.

In July of 1965, NASA's Mariner 4 probe captured and transmitted the first images ever sent to Earth from another planet. While the numerical data was slowly downloaded and processed photographically, the eager engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory improvised: they pinned the data strips to a wall, purchased a box of pastels, and hand-colored the image. This impromptu pastel drawing was humanity's first glimpse of Mars. The unexpected use of an eighteenth-century art medium to visualize data from cutting-edge space technology offers new ways to consider visual representation both on and off Earth.

Wednesday March 4
5:00 pm
Collins Cinema

This event is free and open to the public. More info at the link below!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/whatshappeningintheartdept/whats-happening

02/18/2026

This Friday, Feb. 20!

Members of the campus community are invited to join our gallery director and artists Olivia Gorman '22 and Ry Watkins '23 for an artist talk in the Jewett Gallery at 11:00 am.

Then everyone, including members of the public, is invited to the closing reception for 'Finding the Level' from 4:30-6:00 pm.

Grab a snack, meet the artists, and make sure you see these amazing installations before they disappear forever!

More info at the link below. See you Friday!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/whatshappeningintheartdept

01/02/2026

Congratulations to prof. Alex Brey, whose team has been selected as a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) awardee by Schmidt Sciences. His group's collaborative project, 'Seeing Through Style: Multimodal Advances in Iconographic Analysis,' also includes prof. Carolyn Anderson from Wellesley's CS dept and prof. Maeve Doyle from Eastern Connecticut State University.

Their project aims to develop new ways of studying art historical image sets at scale using Gothic manuscript marginalia as a test case. The first image in this post is an example of the kinds of material they're working on.

HAVI supports interdisciplinary teams creating new AI methods to advance scholarship across archaeology, literature, art history, linguistics, film studies, and more. This year's cohort includes 23 research teams receiving a total of $11 million to develop AI tools that deepen our understanding of human history and culture.

Read more about prof. Brey's project, and find more information about about the other funded projects, at the link below!

https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/whatshappeningintheartdept

Photos:
Slide 1: Marginal illuminations of an ape beheading a man (top), a beggar with a basket on his back containing an ape (right), and a bestiary representation of a unicorn hunt (below). Psalter for Ghent use, ca. 1315–25. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 5, fol. 74r. Reproduced according to the terms and conditions of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.

Slide 2: Prof. Brey using a colander to view the Spring 2024 solar eclipse. His teaching and scholarship span the range from ancient to contemporary, from cutting-edge high tech to old school low tech... if you think that's interesting, consider signing up for one of his classes when Fall '26 registration reopens next week...!

11/20/2025

The Jewett Arts Center and Pendleton West will both be closed to the public over Thanksgiving break: November 26-30. There will be no public access to the Jewett Gallery, Art Library, or Music Library.

Students, faculty, and staff can still access the buildings by swiping in. Both buildings will remain swipe-accessible on their standard semester hours.

The Lighting Studio and Cage are both closed to students over the break.

Contact [email protected] with any questions.