Studio Art faculty will be present to share information and answer questions about:

• the Studio major and minor

• honors thesis

• double-majoring

• a concentration in film/media

• course requirements

• campus and studio resources

• Spring 2027 class offerings

• and more!

There will be pizza.

This event is open to current Wellesley and cross-registered students only.

Contact mm138 with any questions.

The Russian Department and CAMS Program will screen the 2025 Oscar-winning documentary film Mr Nobody Against Putin and host a question and answer session with the co-director, Pavel Talankin. 

Also directed by David Borenstein, the film follows follows Talankin in his job at a school in Karabash, a poor mining town near the Ural Mountains. While recording his students, Talankin also documents the Putin administration's moves to control public perception during the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.

The film had its world premiere at the World Cinema Documentary section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on 25 January, where it won the Special Jury Award. It went on to win Best Documentary Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

Mr. Talankin was recently named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Next 2026: The World's Most Influential Rising Stars: https://time.com/collection/time100-next/2026/pavel-talankin/

This event was co-sponsored by the Cinema and Media Studies Program and the Russian Deparment, with a generous contribution from the Maria Opasnov Tyler '52 Fund.

This event is free and open to the public. Visitors to campus should plan to park in the campus garage and walk to Collins. See directions here.

Contact katie.sangojackson@wellesley.edu with any questions.

The annual Art Department Halloween Party and Spring Course Preview event is almost here!

Bring your questions about all the Art Dept majors/minors and Spring '27 classes, bring your hunger for pizza and candy, bring your costume!

Art Dept faculty and staff (many in costumes of their own) will be present to introduce the Spring classes, answer your questions and hang out in the Halloween spirit.

See you there!

This event is open to members of the campus community only.

Contact mm138 with any questions.

Media Arts & Sciences faculty and staff will be present to share information and answer questions about Spring '27 courses and major advising.

There will be pizza!

This event is open to current Wellesley and cross-registered students only.

Contact ad114 with any questions.

to lie coiled is an exhibition of new work by artist lisa banta, the 2025-26 Alice C. Cole '42 fellow. The show will be on view October 9 - November 10, 2026, with a reception to celebrate with the artist on Thursday Oct. 8, 5:00 - 6:30 pm.

The exhibition speaks to the histories of the Klamath River, which runs through southern Oregon and northern California. A locus of food and trade for Native Americans along its path for thousands of years, the river's use and management became contested with the arrival of colonizers in the western US, which violent displacements resulting from events like the mid-19th-century California Gold Rush and the construction of privately-owned hydroelectric dams in the 20th century.

The works in to lie coiled conjured protective creatures and manifestations of the land itself that rest quietly and patiently, waiting to be called to action. These forms imagine a reciprocal relationship between human and nonhuman forces, one that acknowledges that agency of the land and our obligation toward it. With Land Back understood as both an imperative and future condition, banta articulates a hybridized in-between that ensures the protection of the land until its return to the care of its original stewards.

lisa banta is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Portland State University. Her work investigates the various ways that historical legacies shape present-day social and ecological injustices. Informed by postcolonial theory and lived experience, her practice bridges critical inquiry and material intuition, engaging questions of justice, care, and decolonization across personal, ancestral, and environmental registers. Through tactile, embodied approaches to material, her works become carriers of memory, grief, and survival, as well as vessels of resistance and repair. banta is an enrolled descendent of the Karuk tribe.

The Alice C. Cole '42 Fellowship is awarded to an outstanding early-career painter or sculptor, providing funds to support one year of unimpeded time and space to experiment, develop a body of work, and focus on future artistic goals. Cole Fellowships are based on nominations from prominent members of the national arts community. The fellowship is made possible by the generous bequest of Wellesley alumna Alice C. Cole '42. Aware of the burdens that recent graduates of art school face, Ms. Cole makes it possible for an artist to have 'a limited time free of economic necessity'-- an immensely valuable gift.

The exhibition is open to the public Thursdays - Sundays 12:00 - 5:00 pm, until 6:30 pm on Oct. 8 for the reception, or by appointment. The exhibition is open to members of the Wellesley campus community whenever Jewett is swipeable (typically Art/Music library hours).

The Gallery is free to visit. Visitors should plan to park in the Davis Parking Facility garage (near the west entrance to campus) and walk to Jewett from there; see the campus map here. Visitors who need handicapped accessible parking closer to the gallery should contact the Gallery Director for directions.

To arrange a viewing appointment or tour, or for any other questions, you can contact Gallery Director Samara Pearlstein at spearls2@wellesley.edu or 781-283-2043.

Once the calendar flips over to October that means it's time for WINKTOBER, i.e. Wellesley Inktober!

This year's prompt list comes from the people of the Art Department. Each day's word is inspired by the scholarship, practice, or life of a member of the current Art Dept faculty or staff. Can you guess which word goes with which person? Maybe we'll post an answer key at the end of the month...

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.

Tips for a successful WINKTOBER:

• work small; trying to make big drawings each day is too much to sustain

• work on 'bad' paper. We love post-its because it's hard to get too worked up about making a bad drawing on a post-it, and your goal is not to make good drawings, it's just to make 1 drawing per day

• don't worry about what kind of pen you're using

• don't worry about whether or not your drawing is 'good'; done is better than good!

• get silly with it!

We have some free pens, post-its, and copies of the prompt list in Jewett on the table next to the Art Library. Grab some supplies, use your own, and DRAW!

Want to share with us? You can use the tag #winktober2026 or tag us on insta (@wellesleyartdept), or you can email us images of your work at art@wellesley.edu! If we get some good stuff we may repost/share it throughout the month...

Questions? Contact spearls2@wellesley.edu

Studio Art professor Daniela Rivera's solo exhibition, Hacia Cuando (To When), opens at Mass MoCA on July 11!

Featuring new work in fresco, drawing, sculptural installation, and sound, the 3 gallery spaces occupied by prof. Rivera's work operate in tandem to activate sight, sound, and smell, creating a powerful sensory experience for museum visitors. Enormous, room-filling structures supporting vast frescos share space with exactingly drawn lines that reward both close and distant looking. Visitors are invited to walk on a tilted handmade fresco floor; the pressure from their feet will break and mark the surface while the sounds created by visitors walking across it and the resonance space beneath it will be amplified and echoed by contact mics.

Deeply invested in the ancient processes that she uses to create her work, prof. Rivera asks visitors to reflect on the histories carried by her materials, the people who pioneered their use and those who have kept their traditions alive, and what it means to engage with them here and now. The art will evolve over the course of the show, creating an ever-changing participatory work referencing the histories of art-making and architecture, politics and place. 

More information about the exhibition, and the accompanying opera performance planned for October 2026, can be found on the Mass MoCA website here.

This exhibition is open to members of the public with admission to Mass MoCA. See here for the museum's ticketing prices and policies.

Contact Mass MoCA with any questions. The Wellesley Art Dept is not running this exhibition and cannot answer questions about it.