FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 12, 2019
WCMA’s ‘Ologies’ Summer Program Series Ends With ‘Hooshology’

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) will conclude its popular summer series, “Ologies,” on Thursday, Aug. 15.

“Ologies” is a playful riff on the academic experience in which artists take on unexpected fields of study in a series of hour-long interventions. This summer, because WCMA’s main galleries in Lawrence Hall are closed for renovations, programs will be held in locations across the Williams College campus and will be followed by receptions at WCMA Summer Space, located at 76 Spring St. Both the programs and receptions are free and open to the public.

The Aug. 15 program will focus on “Hooshology.” Multidisciplinary cultural producer J. Morgan Puett shares the philosophy around her seminal work, Mildred’s Lane—a 94-acre, wildish site deep in the woods of rural northeastern Pennsylvania—and the work, including the art of the “hoosh,” collectively practiced there.

Puett was born in Hahira, Georgia, in 1957. She received her BFA in painting and sculpture in 1981, then a MFA in sculpture and experimental filmmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. Puett is a trans-disciplinary creative producer with accomplished work in the areas of installation art practices, clothing and furniture design, architecture, fine art, film, and more—rearranging these intersections by applying conceptual tools including research-based methods in history, biology, new economies, design, craft and collaboration. Morgan’s early work forged new territory by intervening into the fashion system with a series of storefront installations and clothing/dwelling/event projects in Manhattan in the 1980s and ’90s, then produced a long series of research installations on the histories of the needle trade systems in museums around the world. These past and present works are innovations in the realm of new social engagement. Puett is the architect of The Mildred’s Lane Project, which continues to forge new ground citing that being is profoundly a social and political practice. Most recently, she co-founded a new project space, A Guide To The Field.

The program will begin at 5:30 p.m. at Griffin Hall on the Williams College campus. Visitors can park across the street in the main museum parking loop. Visitors also can park on Spring Street or in the municipal parking lot at the foot of Spring Street and join a group that will walk from Summer Space to Sawyer at 5:10 p.m. Maps of building and parking locations can be found online at wcma.williams.edu.

After the program, visitors are invited to sip, snack and socialize at a reception at 6:30 p.m. at WCMA Summer Space.

The main WCMA galleries in Lawrence Hall will reopen Friday, Sept. 6, with an exciting lineup featuring Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., a critically acclaimed exhibition co-curated by Williams College professor C. Ondine Chavoya.