Mary-Kay Lombino

Richard Barnes, Murmur #23, Dec. 6, 2006, 2006

October 23, 2019. 

Mary-Kay Lombino, Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, discusses her exhibition Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, on view through December 15, 2019.

Shape of Light: Defining Photographs from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents a survey of Vassar’s renowned collection of close to 4,500 photographs. Spanning the history of the medium, the exhibition features numerous innovations in the history of photography including various types of photographic practices from daguerreotypes and gelatin silver prints to large-scale Polaroids and digital color prints as well as a wide range of styles and geographic focuses. This extensive exhibition, the first of its kind at the Art Center, aims to highlight the Art Center’s long interest and dedication to the photographic medium and present the unique character, depth, and diversity of the collection. Shape of Light also celebrates twenty years of commitment from the Advisory Council for Photography for supporting photography acquisitions.

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Mardges Bacon

Andrew Tallon (1969-2018), Staircase leading to the Art Library reading room from Taylor Hall, 2015.  Chromogenic color print.

November 21, 2018.

Mardges Bacon, Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Art and Architecture Emerita, Northeastern University, discusses her book John McAndrew's Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).

"With the recent restoration of his boldly colorful modernist design for Vassar College's art library, John McAndrew has been revealed not only as a curator, historian, and teacher but as an adventurous designer and historical figure in his own right. Mardges Bacon's engaging study allows McAndrew to emerge more fully; he can now be seen as a key voice in dialogue with the changing valences of architectural modernism in the United States in the interwar period."
- Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History, Columbia University

Photographs of Andrew Tallon's series in the book of the Art Library can be found in this blog post for the exhibit Back To the Future: Andrew Tallon's Vision.



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Susan Hassler

April 4, 2018.

Susan Hassler (VC '76), Editor-in-Chief of the  journal of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), IEEE Spectrum, talks about STEM, publishing, higher education, and trends in technology in this installment of our series on the value of liberal arts education in contemporary society. She has been included in “Folio 40: The Most Influential People in the Magazine Industry” and was inducted into min magazine’s Editorial and Design Hall of Fame in 2011.

IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. Its charter is to keep over 400,000 members informed about major trends and developments in technology, engineering, and science. Under Susan Hassler's editorship, Spectrum has won numerous awards for both its print and online efforts, including three Grand Neal Awards and a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in the Thought Leader category.

Molly Nesbit

Rachel Whiteread. Water Tower,  Lower Manhattan.  Public Art Fund, 1998.

February 21, 2018.

Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art at Vassar College, talks about her new book, Midnight: The Tempest Essays, just published in 2017 by Inventory Books.

“'What Was An Author?' Right from the opening words of these Tempest Essays, we see the great Molly Nesbit at work undoing and radically repositioning the time codes for the artist. She creates a living archive of critical debates, politics and philosophies. She paints a vivid picture of the many junctions between people, objects, quasi-objects and non-objects throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This is a true protest against forgetting as well as a toolbox for contemporary art criticism. Call it a guidebook to the labyrinth of reality.” —Hans Ulrich Obrist

Patricia Phagan

November 15, 2017

Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Strauss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, talks about the exhibition "Fluid Expressions: The Prints of Helen Frankenthaler from the Collections of Gordon D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundations," on view at the Center through December 10, 2017.

"Widely known for her iconic “soak-stain” canvases, acclaimed artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) was an equally inventive printmaker who took risks in a medium not frequently explored by abstract expressionists. Fluid Expressions: The Prints of Helen Frankenthaler, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation highlights Frankenthaler’s often-overlooked, yet highly original print production. The exhibition will be making its only northeast stop at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center October 6-December 10, 2017. This exhibition is free and open to the public."

Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Robert O. McClintock

Morningside Park Stairway with Seligman Fountain, New York City

May 3, 2017.  

We continue our series on the value of the liberal arts in contemporary society with a conversation with Robert O. McClintock, John L. and Sue Ann Weinberg Professor Emeritus in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Teacher's College, Columbia University in the City of New York, about his monograph, Formative Justice: To Make of Oneself What One Can and Should Become.

Text of Formative Justice (pdf).

44:28 minutes.

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Adam Michaels and Jeffrey T. Schnapp

October 26, 2016.

In a new installment of our series on the role of liberal arts education in contemporary society, c0-authors Adam Michaels, principle designer at Project Projects and founder of Inventory Press, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC'75), Co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and Faculty Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's knowledge design studio metaLAB, talk about their reissue of Blueprint for Counter Education (Inventory, 2016).

"Perhaps one of the most extraordinary books ever issued by an American commercial publisher.” —Richard Kostelanetz

"Blueprint for Counter Education is one of the defining (but neglected) works of radical pedagogy of the Vietnam War era. Originally published in 1970 and integrated into the design of the Critical Studies curriculum at CalArts, the book was accompanied by large graphic posters that could serve as a portable learning environment for a new process-based model of education, and a bibliography and checklist that map patterns and relationships between radical thought and artistic practices—from the avant-gardes to postmodernism—with Marcuse and McLuhan serving as points of anchorage."

Blueprint Archive

43:22 minutes.

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Seaver Leslie

October 28, 2015.

Artist Seaver Leslie discusses his work and the exhibition of magnificent glass sculptures on view in Thompson Library at Vassar College through November 22 entitled the Ulysses Cylinders by Dale Chihuly and Sever Leslie, with Flora C. Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick.

"Gorgeous, enigmatic, and provocative, Dale Chihuly's Ulysses Cylinders stand as some of the artists's most intellectually compelling and unique works.  Begun in 1975 and completed nearly forty years later in 2014, the Ulysses Cylinders--adapting drawings by Seaver Leslie to Glass--follow the course of James Joyce's Ulysses, in equal parts representation of the senses in the novel and insightful interpretation of Joyce's work and its place in the history of Irish culture and literary allusion."

43:52 minutes.

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Exhibition website

Tobias Armborst

September 30, 2015.

Tobias Armborst, Associate Professor of Art and Urban Studies at Vassar College and principal of the award-winning architecture and urban planning firm Interboro Partners, talks about design thinking and the liberal arts, urban planning, and Interboro's project to reform areas of the Long Island shoreline to protect communities from rising sea levels and future hurricanes.

40:59 minutes.

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Mary-Kay Lombino

April 22, 2015.

Mary Kay Lombino, Emily Hargroves Fisher 1957 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, discusses the exhibition on view April 10 - June 14, 2015 entitled Through the Looking Glass: Daguerreotype Masterworks from the Dawn of Photography.

40:16 minutes.

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Alix Christie

February 18, 2015.  

Writer, journalist, and printer Alix Christie, (VC'80) talks about her historical novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice (Harper Collins, 2014).

"If ever there were a historical novel with up-to-the-minute resonance, this is it. As we go through another information revolution, Christie’s novel takes us back in brilliantly-observed detail to the first – the invention of the printing press. Her characters are engaging, the world as beautifully crafted as one of Gutenberg’s hot-metal letters, and the themes more relevant now than ever."

51:42 minutes

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Jeffrey T. Schnapp

February 4, 2015.

Harvard cultural historian and media theorist Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC'75), Co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and founding Faculty Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's knowledge design studio metaLAB, talks about his new book, co-authored with Matthew Battles, entitled The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard, 2014), as well as about the Library Test Kitchen and experiments in library interfaces for the digital age.  

"With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive, although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library's history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels."

56.34 minutes.

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Charles Henry

December 3, 2014.

Charles Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, former CIO and University Librarian at Rice University, and a former Director of Libraries at Vassar College, talks about CLIR, its history, mission, and programs, as well as the role of liberal arts college libraries in the implementation of a coherent information infrastructure for higher education.

44:19 minutes.

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Patricia Phagan

November 5, 2014.

Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, will discuss the exhibition currently on view at the Center through December 14, 2014 entitled: Imperial Augsburg: Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475-1540.

"Like Albrecht Dürer’s Nuremberg, the city of Augsburg was vital to the flowering of the Renaissance in Germany. The exhibition features prints, drawings, illustrated books, medals, and armor from Augsburg and addresses the themes of Christian devotion and the Reformation, moral conduct and everyday life, and art made for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I."

34:41 minutes.

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Elizabeth Eisenstein

May 28, 2014. (SEASON FINALE):

Elizabeth Eisenstein (VC'45), author of the massively influential history on the impact of the introduction of printing on Western society, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols., Cambridge 1979), will discuss her book Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West (U Penn, 2011).

"Eisenstein's research is impressive, reaching far and wide across languages and centuries. Her knowledge of the history of publication engages the wealth of recent scholarship and extends as far back as Roman copyists. . . . Her breadth enables her to identify topoi and their mutations; to observe long-term trends, diminishing ripples, and delayed reactions; and to distinguish what is new or newly dressed in authors' concerns and readers' complaints."— Journal of Scholarly Publishing

45:57 minutes.

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Nicholas A. Basbanes

March 26, 2014.

Writer, journalist, cultural historian and bibliophile Nicholas A. Basbanes talks about his book On Paper: The Everything of Its Two Thousand Year History (Knopf), winner of the Amercian Library Association's Best Book of the Year award for 2013. 

"A consideration of all things paper—its invention that revolutionized human civilization; its thousand-fold uses (and misuses), proliferation, and sweeping influence on society; its makers, shapers, collectors, and pulpers—written by the admired cultural historian and author of the trilogy on all things book-related: A Gentle Madness; Patience and Fortitude; and A Splendor of Letters." 

54:17 minutes.

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R. David Lankes

September 18, 2013.

R. David Lankes, Syracuse University Professor, Dean's Scholar, and Director of the Information Institute of Syracuse, will talk about his vision for a new conception of librarians as

"radical agents of positive change" in their role as facilitators of community learning and knowledge-building, and his books Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today's Complex World (2012), and The Atlas of New Librarianship (MIT, 2011), winner of the ABC-CLIO Award for the Best Book in Library Literature.

"The Atlas is not a book; it is a manifesto, a set of principles and convictions aimed at shaking new life and belief into a field that too often fears for its own future. Read it and be prepared to act." -- Andrew Dillon, University of Texas at Austin.

59:44 minutes.

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Thomas Warger

December 5, 2012.

Thomas A. Warger, lead author of the Edutech Report, former CIO (Bryn Mawr), and a leading consultant in academic information systems, talks about the changing landscape of technology-enhanced learning at American liberal arts colleges, and the path toward developing more innovative and effective learning and research environments. 

52:12 min.

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