SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (February 6, 2019) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College has revamped its website to showcase the museum’s growing collection of drawings, paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, and more.
The new site at http://tang.skidmore.edu/collection offers visitors access to more than 1,100 high-resolution images of artwork. These works are also organized in “collections,” groupings of works by artist, theme, or a specific Skidmore class. Visitors can also explore stories about the artworks through new scholarship by faculty, staff, students, and guests; creative responses to the collection through music, dance, and new visual art; and video interviews with artists.
Tang staff members Annelise Kelly, Online Content Coordinator, and Rebecca McNamara, Mellon Collections Curator, were led by Dayton Director Ian Berry in collaborating with Linked by Air, a New York City-based firm, to design and launch the new collection site. The site expands upon the Tang website that Linked by Air designed in 2015. Linked by Air is run by the principals Dan Michaelson and Tamara Maletic, with Christopher Roeleveld as the Tang website’s lead designer and Alison Abreu-Garcia, the lead developer.
“The Tang collection has been a great catalyst for ideas, conversation, and learning, and our new site means more people can access it than ever before,” Berry said. “We operate the museum as a laboratory of ideas, and this expands that mission by giving space for multiple voices to bring fresh perspectives on the objects in our care. What is online now is just the beginning, as we continue to add objects from the collection to the site and they generate new ideas and responses.”
Those responses include artists such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby speaking about the influence of the photographs of Malick Sidibé on her artwork and Tim Rollins and K.O.S. speaking about their work Winterreise (songs XX-XXIV) (after Schubert); scholars such as Skidmore College Professor of Political Science Beau Breslin on Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler’s Constitution on Tour and Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum Curator of Anthropology in the Department of World Cultures, on Asafo flags from Ghana; and students such as Sophie Heath ’18, a Classics major, on Fred Wilson’s Pharaoh Fetish.
Responses also include innovative and creative forms, such as an African music and dance performance inspired by Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté’s Métamorphose de papillon and a new woodblock print created by Atlan Arceo-Witzl ’18, a studio art major, inspired by the work of Self Help Graphics & Art, a community arts center in East Los Angeles, California.
About the Tang Teaching Museum Collection
The Tang Teaching Museum collection is central to the museum’s mission of object-based learning. The collection is filled with oddities of material culture and masterworks by renowned contemporary artists alike. The objects represent a wide variety of materials, subject matter, and time periods, and is available to Skidmore faculty, staff, and students, as well as visitors, for class use, research, inspiration, and discussion. Public access is available by appointment by contacting Jessica Lubniewski, Collections Registrar, at jlubniew@skidmore.edu or 518-580-5547.
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 institution’s approach has become a model for university art museums across the country—with exhibition programs and series that bring together the visual and performing arts with fields of study as disparate as history, astronomy, and physics. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, the Mellon Seminar, and robust publication and touring exhibition initiatives that extend the institution’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of ideas and exchange the institution catalyzes. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, from noon to 5 pm, with extended hours until 9 pm Thursday. More information at http://tang.skidmore.edu.