The Wellin Museum centers collaboration as a core practice—across disciplines and with other partners—as a means of reaching broader audiences, deepening relationships, and sharing expertise. Collaboration with students, faculty, the local and regional community, and artists has always been central to our values. Over the last year, we have seen how building bridges internally and externally has expanded the reach of the museum. At Hamilton, we emphasized co-organizing programs with departments/programs/groups among them Admissions, the Art Department, the Levitt Center, the Performing Arts Series, the Filius Jazz Archive, the Days-Massolo Multicultural Center, the Black and Latinx Student Union, the Feminists of Color Collective, and the Center for Intersectional Feminism, among others. We also formalized a collaboration with the UK-based arts organization “without SHAPE without FORM” (wSwF) who is a partner on our fall 2027 exhibition Awakened by the Unstruck with Canadian artist Nep Sidhu. In March, we kicked off this partnership with a concert at Wellin Hall entitled Total Response, which brought together six renowned musicians from across the US, a practitioner from wSwF, and artwork by Sidhu. The recording of the performance will be incorporated into sound sculptures created by Sidhu that will be a center point of the forthcoming exhibition. 

Off the Hill, we deepened our knowledge and engagement with the international art community. As the art world continues to globalize, curators and artists crisscross continents to bring their expertise and experiences to new audiences. Rather than a leveling out, what I’ve been witnessing is a broadening of perspectives. Nowhere was this more evident than at the May opening of the Venice Biennale, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, where Wellin artists Alexa Hatanaka (visiting artist 2024) and Celia Vasquez Yui (Wellin collection artist) were featured among over a hundred others in the curated Central Pavilion and Arsenale. The selection of artists from around the world generated a palpable energy driven by the multiplicity of voices. This was echoed by my recent visit to London with my colleagues Alexander Jarman and Chris Harrison where we developed plans with the team at without SHAPE without FORM for our fall 2027 season. During the trip, I saw a number of shows that expand the public’s exposure to international artists, among them the retrospective of Colombian artist Beatriz González at the Barbican, and a survey of Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern.

At the Wellin, we’re further broadening our connections to other institutions by traveling our original exhibitions. The Wellin has a track record of touring exhibitions with geographic breadth from the Honolulu Museum of Art to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Following this trajectory, the Wellin exhibition Jamea Richmond-Edwards: Another World and Yet the Same will open this fall at the California African American Museum, a major museum in Los Angeles. And we continue to be in conversation with institutions to host our future exhibition Awakened by the Unstruck.

This spring brought opportunities for me to participate in public events in dialogue with past Wellin exhibiting artists Yashua Klos at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins Gallery and Alyson Shotz at Derek Eller Gallery, both in NYC. Looking back at their solo shows at the Wellin in 2022 and 2015 respectively, and being part of their ongoing creative journey, remains a privilege.

So why is any of this important? At its root, these connections emphasize one of our educational pillars “to bring the world to Hamilton” but it also points to the fact that we are in conversation with the international art world, which is vital and growing. We remain connected to art hubs like New York, London, and Venice—places the global art world gathers for art fairs, biennials, and major exhibitions—and to our community here at Hamilton. At the Wellin, we have witnessed the direct impact of our diverse scope of exhibitions and collection holdings—and the expertise of the Wellin staff—on Hamilton students' educational experience, that builds a tremendous amount of pride in Hamilton as a nexus of contemporary art and thought.

Photo caption: Tracy L. Adler at the preview of the Venice Biennale with exhibiting artist Alexa Hatanaka.