Williams College Museum of Art
May 26, 2023 – May 12, 2024
The Portals is an exhibition in multiple locations that explores alternative genealogies of Williams College. The three outdoor components located on Main Street attend to omissions and erasures in the built environment of the campus. Inside the museum, in the Rotunda, the immersive sound installation interrogates the stories that we selectively tell, those we remember, and those we choose to forget. In the adjacent Stoddard gallery, the artist’s steel structures offer an embrace to two objects that came into WCMA’s collection against their will.
Stitching together different voices that inhabited the landscape, the installations invite viewers to coexist with various people who have believed in equality, justice, curiosity, diversity, and freedom in the area where Williamstown was created, and also to imagine the cyclical dimension of these struggles that seem to repeat themselves in a nation plagued by inequality.
Speculative Speech by Lucy Terry Prince (2022-23)
8-channel 4:47 minute audio loop created in collaboration with
Marcella Baietto
Jordan Benton
José Luis Blondet
Phillip Byrne
Dahlia Carranza
Douglas Carranza Mena
Montserrat Carranza
Elena Castro Morán
Young Chung
Laura Copelin
Beatriz A. de Cortez
Benjamin Cortez
Daniel Cortez
Jaime A. Cortez
Jaime B. Cortez
Kari Cortez
Nicolas Cortez
Ricardo Cortez
Lisa Dorin
Alba Escalón
Guillermo Escalón
Justine di Fiore
Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens
Telma Gamez
Igor de Gandarias
Eduardo González
Lila González
Patricia González
Tatiana Guerrero
Vanessa Guerrero
Valeria Grinberg Pla
Andre Keichian
Kibum Kim
Liana Krupp
Paulina Lara
Kang Seung Lee
Nelson Lemus
Benin Lemus
Daniela Lieja Quintanar
Arnulfo Martinez
Lashelle May
Julia Medina
Nina Menjivar
Hope Okere
Elizabeth Pérez Márquez
Yansi Y. Pérez
Kari Reardon
Freya Rojo
Jennyfer A. Rodriguez
Annabeth Rosen
Christian Tedeschi
Antonieta Urrutia Gamez
Ricardo Urrutia Gamez
Kelvin Villalta
Carlos Somoza
Taken as an infant from Africa and enslaved for over two decades, Lucy Terry Prince (born ca. 1730 West Africa–died 1821 Sunderland, Vermont), became a free woman, a landowner, poet, storyteller, and orator. She made several official addresses including a successful argument before the Vermont Supreme Court over a land dispute. She is believed to have delivered a speech to the college’s founding trustees as an appeal to gain admittance to Williams College for her son Festus, which was denied on the basis of his race. Black students would not be admitted to Williams until 1885. As there is no written record of the original speech, Speculative Speech by Lucy Terry Prince is imagined by the artist, and is given life by a chorus of voices belonging to her collaborators, students, friends, and family. Such a plea for equality remains as relevant today as it was in Prince’s time. Of the total student population at Williams, only 8 percent identifies as African American and less than 1 percent identify as Native American.
In this gallery Cortez invites us to think critically about the collection of objects WCMA stewards. Her work intervenes in a space dedicated to two Neo-Assyrian relief fragments, which were procured from a British excavation site in present-day Nimrud, Iraq, by Williams alum and missionary, Dwight Marsh, who gifted them to the college in 1851.
Similarly, the two Maya tenons placed on top of the artist’s steel columns were obtained by Williams students on an expedition to Honduras and Belize in 1870-71 as part of The Lyceum of Natural History, a student run organization that resulted in large collections of objects being removed from their cultures of origin and brought to the college as treasures and curiosities, often with little or no contextual information about them.
Recalling the abstracted geometries of ancient Maya architecture, Cortez’s handmade steel structures provide the tenons an alternative dwelling place to WCMA’s storage cabinets and engage with the idea that they are not mere art objects or archaeological artifacts, but that they hold cultural and spiritual value for contemporary as well as ancient Maya communities.
Gift of the Artist to the Ancient Object Labeled as Human Head Emerging from Monster Jaws, One Migrant to Another, in Memory of your True Name and your Land (2022-23)
Steel
____________________
Human Head Emerging from Monster Jaws
Maya lowlands (present-day Corozal, Belize)
Late Classic, 600–900 CE
Limestone coated with stucco with traces of blue and red polychrome
Maker(s) not known by Williams College Museum of Art
Williams College Museum of Art
1870.1.2
Gift of the Artist to the Ancient Object Labeled as Human Head Wearing a Peaked Headdress, One Migrant to Another, in Memory of your True Name and your Land (2022-23)
Steel
___________________
Human Head Wearing a Peaked Headdress
Maya lowlands (present-day Corozal, Belize)
Terminal Classic, 800–900 CE
Limestone
Maker(s) not known by Williams College Museum of Art
Williams College Museum of Art
1870.1.1
Historic House (2022-23)
Steel
It is typically only the exteriors of historic buildings at Williams that have been deemed worthy of preservation for their historical and architectural significance. Yet their interior contents, and particularly any markers of the enslaved people and others who labored to build and maintain them, are rendered invisible. By removing the walls of the historic house to reveal the hearth, Cortez invites us to imagine the space where these forgotten workers tended to the households of colonial settlers who continue to be memorialized on campus.
XX (2022-23)
Steel
The college cemetery, a six minute walk north of here, was intended as the final resting place for tenured Williams faculty and their immediate families. Many people who built this place and worked here have been excluded, in particular enslaved individuals whose graves remain unidentified and unknown to us to this day. This mound of steel rocks, shaped and welded by hand and carefully placed here on the grass, pays solemn tribute to those unnamed and their legacies. The title XX recalls the name given to the graves of unidentified people resulting from the war in the artist’s home country of El Salvador and from migration at the border region between Mexico and the United States.
Mohican Homelands (2023)
Locally sourced river rocks
The phrase, “Kpomthe’nã Mã’eekanik,” which literally translates as “We are walking on the Mohican homeland,” was selected in consultation with members of the Stockbridge Munsee Community language program. It is inscribed here by the artist directly on the land using locally sourced stone as a visible reminder of where we are and those who have been displaced, but also as a way to celebrate the survival of the Mohican language.
The Portals, an exhibition in multiple locations by artist Beatriz Cortez was curated by Lisa Dorin, Deputy Director of Curatorial Engagement at Williams College Museum of Art.
Photos by Phillip Byrne.