Clark Art Lecture on Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne

03:52PM / Wednesday, March 12, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Tuesday, March 18, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents a talk by Annie Bourneuf (School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Clark Professor 2024–25).

She investigates one of the most enigmatic passages in the German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg's picture-atlas Mnemosyne, his attempted summation in arrays of images of his work on the afterlife of antiquity, centered on Renaissance Europe and nearing completion when he died in 1929, stated a press release.

This free event takes place at 5:30 pm in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

According to a press release:

Mnemosyne ends with two panels revolving around the Lateran Accords of that year, which established a new relationship of reciprocal support between the Catholic Church and Mussolini's Fascist regime. Warburg himself stayed out late to witness the massive celebrations of the agreement, which he described as "the re-paganization of Rome," and later combined press photographs of this and related events with reproductions of paintings by Botticelli and Raphael on the theme of the Eucharist, defamatory woodcuts depicting Jews desecrating the Host, a staged photograph of seppuku, and newspaper photographs of athletes, among other items, to make the two last panels. How might Warburg have understood the accords? What do these combinations of images do? More broadly, how can we understand the possibilities and perils of this foundational art historian's attempt to bring his scholarly work to bear on the images and gestures formed by and in part forming the mass politics of his present?

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

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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