NEWSLETTER
Saratoga Springs, NY (February 3, 2022) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College reopens to the public on Thursday, February 3, at noon and announces a series of upcoming tours that are free and open to the public.
Tang Guide Tours, Sundays at 2 pm during the spring semester (through May 1), provide visitors with an overview of the museum and what’s on view. These tours are given by Tang Guides, Skidmore College students and visitor services associates who are part of a program that introduces them to the Tang and the museum world, trains them how to be gallery ambassadors and tour guides, provides guidance in how to talk about art, and gives them valuable experiences interacting with visitors.
Curator’s Tours feature the organizing curator or curators providing in-depth information of an exhibition:
- Friday, February 11, noon: Tang Student Advisory Council member Paige Meade ’22 gives a tour of Hyde Cabinet #15: Doomsday.
- Thursday, February 17, noon: Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman, Assistant Professor of Art History Nancy Thebault, and students from the Scribner Seminar “Outsiders? Folk and Self-Taught Artists in the United States" give a tour of On Their Own Terms.
- Thursday, March 24, noon: Associate Curator Rebecca McNamara give a tour of Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science, which includes the community-created crochet coral reef Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef.
- Thursday, April 14, noon: Dayton Director Ian Berry gives a tour of Opener 34: Ruby Sky Stiler—New Patterns.
- Thursday, May 12, noon: Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman on Thursday, May 12, at noon, for a tour of Lauren Kelley: Location Scouting
All tours are free and open to the public. The museum is open Thursdays noon to 9 pm, and Fridays through Sundays noon to 5 pm. All visitors are asked to follow Skidmore College protocols for COVID-19, which include wearing high-quality KN95 masks (or the equivalent, such as N95 or KN94) and showing proof of vaccination plus booster shot via a vaccination card, a copy of a vaccination card, or the Excelsior Pass.
For more information, please contact the Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080, visit http://tang.skidmore.edu or email tang@skidmore.edu.
Now on View
- Elevator Music 42: Laura Splan—Rhapsody for an Expanded Biotechnological Apparatus, through April 10: The latest installation in the Tang’s elevator presents Laura Splan’s sound and sculptural work, re-envisioning the space as an organism’s cell and its visitors as proteins. Methodical instructions guide visitors to remove shoes and sit cross-legged on Lumen, a rug made from the wool of laboratory llamas and alpacas. These instructions choreograph visitors’ movements to embody the folding of proteins inside a cell’s lumen. In Chaperone, the buzzing of specialized laboratory equipment, chatter of scientists, and countless other unidentifiable, fragmented sounds coalesce and disperse, their arrangement following the structure of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
- Hyde Cabinet #15: Doomsday, through February 27: In the student curatorial project space, Paige Meade ’22 explores the legacy of the Y2K bug through the January 18, 1999, cover of Time magazine and Prince’s album 1999.
- Lauren Kelley: Location Scouting, through September 10, 2023: In the fourth exhibition in a series that invites an artist to re-imagine what a community space in the museum can be, artist and curator Lauren Kelley reshapes the Tang Teaching Museum’s mezzanine by combining meditations on travel with snapshots of everyday life in her drawings, sculpture, and stop-motion animation videos. Using plasticine, toys, and souvenirs, Kelley’s videos conjure worlds that are malleable and unfixed, inhabited by robust protagonists whose quirks stem from efforts to correct the asymmetrical relationships they encounter.
- On Their Own Terms, through April 10: The exhibition is the culminating project of the Scribner Seminar “Outsiders? Folk and Self-Taught Artists in the United States,” a class for first-year students taught by Skidmore College Assistant Professor of Art History Nancy Thebaut. The students researched and analyzed work by a selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists who have been categorized as “self-taught,” “outsider,” “folk,” or “visionary,” and questioned the ways curators, dealers, and scholars have exhibited, acquired, and sometimes overlooked this important work.
- Opener 34: Ruby Sky Stiler—New Patterns, through May 15: Ruby Sky Stiler’s visual language spans time periods, art movements, and spatial dimensions. Her influences move between the art historical and deeply personal: from textbook images of Greco-Roman sculpture and Art Deco illustrations to contemporary textile patterns and iPhone photographs. The exhibition features Stiler’s new reliefs and a monumental site-specific installation, including a custom bench that spans the gallery.
- Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science, though June 12: The exhibition features work created by artists, scientists, and mathematicians alike at the intersection of fiber craft and the sciences. By foregrounding each work as fine art, process-driven craft, and scientific tool, the exhibition celebrates interdisciplinary creativity and collaborative learning. Radical Fiber also features a new artwork created by amateur and professional makers: the Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef, part of the worldwide Crochet Coral Reef project by Christine and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring.
About the Tang Teaching Museum
The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the Tang’s approach has become a model for university art museums across the country — with exhibition programs that bring together visual and performing arts with interdisciplinary ideas from history, economics, biology, dance, and physics, to name just a few. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, and a robust publication and touring exhibition program that extends the museum’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s award-winning building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of art and ideas. Museum hours: Thursday to Sunday, Noon to 5pm, with extended hours until 9 pm Thursdays. For the latest visitor guidelines, please visit https://tang.skidmore.edu
Media Contact
Michael Janairo
Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College
518-580-5542
Caption for attached image: Associate Curator Rebecca McNamara speaks about the Core Memory Quilt, 2018, by Helen Remick, Daniela Rosner, Samantha Shorey, and Brock Craft, in the exhibition Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science. Tang Teaching Museum photograph