Clark Art Lecture on History of Arcadia

10:43AM / Tuesday, April 08, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Saturday, April 12 at 11 am, the Clark Art Institute presents "A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature," a talk by Paul Holberton.

This free lecture is given in conjunction with the Clark's exhibition Pastoral on Paper and takes place in the Clark's Manton Research Center auditorium.

According to a press release:

Dr. Holberton, author of the acclaimed two-volume book A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature (2021), examines how idyllic landscapes and rustic scenes have been portrayed from antiquity through the Renaissance and into the eighteenth century. Responding to leading early modern literary and artistic luminaries such as Torquato Tasso, Claude Lorrain, and Thomas Gainsborough, he traces the complex journey of the pastoral across cultures and eras, from Virgil's adaptations of Theocritus to the influence of medieval pastourelles.

The idyllic tranquility of the lives of shepherds became a prominent subject in literature, music, and the visual arts over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On view through June 15, Pastoral on Paper explores how artists depicted rural life by considering their representation of cows, cottages, mules, maidens, shepherds, ruins, and overgrown landscapes. Selected primarily from the Clark's strong holdings of drawings by Claude Lorrain and Thomas Gainsborough and supplemented with select loans of Dutch Italianate artworks, this exhibition analyzes pastoral imagery to examine how artists construct their own visions of an idealized landscape.

Pastoral on Paper is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by William Satloff, Class of 2025, Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Tags: Clark Art,

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Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
07:00AM / Saturday, September 12, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.

"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.

"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."

Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.

"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.

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