Clark Art Installation on 250 Years of Art in Mass

08:14AM / Friday, September 26, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute continues its new series of year-round public installations, Paginations, featuring works drawn from the Clark library's extensive holdings and curated by members of the library staff.

The installations are featured in a newly designed space located in the Manton Research Center's reading room, just outside the entrance to the Clark's library and are on view for free during all open hours.

On view Sept. 26 through Nov. 16, Back Bay to the Berkshires: Celebrating 250 Years of Art in Massachusetts looks at some of the artists and artistic innovations associated with the Bay State through their relationships with book illustration, printing, and publishing. This display is held in conjunction with MA250, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' commemoration of the semiquincentennial of the American revolution, and highlights the revolutionary spirit upon which the state was founded.

The Clark's library is widely recognized as one of the most important art history collections in North America, holding nearly 300,000 volumes in over 130 languages. The library's encyclopedic collection includes a number of special collections, including rare books, artist's books, decorative arts, photomechanical reproductions, and the world's only collection of ephemeral materials from the Venice Biennale.

From its opening in 1962, the library has grown and changed to accommodate teaching spaces, visual resources, new programs and initiatives, and a never-ending array of new technologies. The library—one of the few remaining open stack art history libraries in the nation—is open to the public Mondays through Fridays from 9 am to 5 pm.

The library is housed in the Manton Research Center building and serves a wide array of patrons, including scholars, students, and researchers. Appointments can be arranged to explore special collections materials and library staff members are always happy to assist visitors in finding specific items of interest.

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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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