Clark Art Presents Symposium on Artists Featured in 'A Room of Her Own'

11:43AM / Monday, September 08, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute presents a two-day symposium on Thursday, Sept. 11 and Friday, Sept. 12 in celebration of its current exhibition, "A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945."

All events are free and open to the public and take place in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

This symposium hosts an international group of scholars to explore how select artists featured in the Clark's exhibition negotiated public and private spaces to establish professional careers as artists and thrive creatively. A keynote lecture on Virginia Woolf's essay, "A Room of One's Own," begins the symposium Thursday, Sept. 11. Vanessa Bell, May Morris, Mary Lowndes, and Gwen John are the subjects of four in-depth talks by art historians on Friday, Sept. 12.

On view through September 14, the exhibition celebrates the achievements of twenty-five women across the fine and decorative arts and features paintings, drawings, prints, stained glass, and embroidery. Inspired by Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own" (1929), the exhibition examines the spaces in homes, studios, art schools, and exhibition sites that women artists used to produce their work and cultivate professional success.

Schedule

Thursday, Sept. 11, 6 pm

Keynote Lecture: Virginia Woolf's Incomparable Female Gaze

Merve Emre, Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, discusses Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay, "A Room of One's Own." Emre highlights Woolf's understanding of formal education, and how women's exclusion from this social institution served to devalue their creativity. Emre's lecture will demonstrate how Woolf's essay provides a rich framing device for considering the artists in the exhibition.

Friday, Sept. 12

Symposium

10:00 am: Welcoming Remarks

Kathleen Morris, Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Exhibitions and Collections and Curator of Decorative Arts, and Alexis Goodin, associate curator, welcome guests to the Clark.

10:15 am: Session One

10:15–10:40 am: Wendy Hitchmough, Emeritus Senior Lecturer, University of Sussex, United Kingdom on Vanessa Bell and the Subversive Studio

10:45–11:10 am: Rowan Bain, Principal Curator, William Morris Gallery, London on May Morris at the Worktable: Home, Craft, and the Business of Embroidery

11:30 am: Session Two

11:30–11:55 am: Jasmine Allen, Director and Curator, The Stained Glass Museum, Ely, United Kingdom on "Making space for women:" Mary Lowndes—Pioneering Stained Glass Artist and Suffragist

12:00–12:25 pm: Rachel Stratton, Independent Curator, on Strange Beauty in Gwen John's Interiors

1:30 pm: Panel Discussion

Moderated by Alexis Goodin, curator of A Room of Her Own: Women Artists in Britain, 1875–1945, this panel will bring together the day's speakers to explore parallel and divergent experiences of the artists discussed, and provide the audience with an opportunity to ask further questions.

All symposium events are free and open to the public. No registration is required for the keynote lecture on September 11, but advance registration is recommended for the program on September 12. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. To register and view the program schedule, visit clark.edu/events.

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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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