Clark Art Lecture By Artist Mariel Capanna

12:40PM / Monday, February 10, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. —On Saturday, Feb. 15 at 2 pm, the Clark Art Institute presents a talk by artist Mariel Capanna marking the opening of "Mariel Capanna: Giornata," the newest public spaces installation at the Clark.

This free lecture takes place in the Clark’s Manton Research Center auditorium.

According to a press release:

Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, where she lives and works) plays what she calls "games of remembering" as a way of reckoning with loss. Working from home videos and family slideshows, whose runtime is her constraint, the artist races to record fleeting memory images in oil paint. She scatters these flat, pastel forms like confetti across deep, atmospheric surfaces, creating compositions that are at once jubilant and wistful. For the Clark, Capanna presents two new, site-specific oil paintings as well as a monumental, two-sided fresco. The fresco process is also defined by time constraints: the term giornata has referred, since the Italian Renaissance, to the area of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day. Mariel Capanna: Giornata marks the artist’s first museum solo exhibition.

This year-long installation, free and open to the public, is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects.

Support for Mariel Capanna: Giornata is provided by Margaret and Richard Kronenberg.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. For more information, visit clarkart.edu/events. Admission to the Clark is free January through March 2025.

Tags: Clark Art,

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Letter: Incomplete Picture from Greylock School Committee

Letter to the Editor06:30PM / Wednesday, October 28, 2026

To the Editor:

At the October Mount Greylock School Committee meeting, there was much celebration over the student growth percentiles (SGP) from last year's MCAS test data (Spring 2026). Growth is worth celebrating. But I worry the meeting, and the coverage of it, left families and our community with an incomplete picture of how our students are doing in math.

"Growth" sounds like it means scores went up, but that isn’t quite what SGP measures. SGP compares each student to students in the state who scored about the same the year before, then ranks how they did this year against that group. If a whole group of similar students decreases, the student who decreases the least can still earn a high growth percentile. A strong SGP tells us our students did better than their peers who scored similarly the year before. It doesn't tell us whether they are at grade level.

For example, the current 6th grade class at Williamstown Elementary School (WES) has decreased in their grade-level math proficiency every year since their 3rd grade MCAS. In 2024, 64 percent of the class was meeting expectations; in 2025 48 percent were at grade level, and in 2026 only 33 percent of their class met grade-level expectations. Our current WES 5th grade class follows a similar trend, with 48 percent meeting grade-level math expectations last year vs 56 percent meeting expectations in 2025 when they were in 3rd grade.

Not every class follows this pattern; our current 7th graders gained to 62 percent last year. But seeing entire classes decrease is something that deserves our attention.

Growth comparisons across the state provide useful information, but they do not tell the complete story. We also need to look at where our students are in terms of grade-level proficiency and how those numbers are changing from year to year within the Mt. Greylock school district. This will be our first year with the math interventionist role filled at WES and our second year with the new i-Ready curriculum.

As we watch whether these changes are working, I hope the School Committee will discuss proficiency alongside growth in its public meetings, so our community can see the full picture. Growth matters, but it isn’t enough if fewer of our kids are reaching grade level each year.

Sincerely,

Jenna Hasenkampf
Williamstown, Mass.

Hasenkampf is a parent of WES students in Grades 2 and 4.

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