The Arts
Past Events
Sketching Loss and Remembrance: An Art Workshop. Work alongside Kate McGloughlin in creating your own original work using India ink. Art supplies provided free of charge. Please email [email protected] to reserve a spot, space is limited.
The Palmer Gallery exhibit Imploding Meaning: Tale-less Tales About Absolutely Nothing and Everything In Between features the work of M. Pettee Olsen, Michael Oatman, Rosanne Walsh, and Monica Church—all of whom will be speaking at this event.
An exhibit of artwork by Kate McGloughlin depicts the beauty and sorrow inherent in the Ashokan Reservoir. Kate’s family lost both land and community to reservoir construction. There will also be an artist talk in the second week of the festival during Late Night at the Loeb. This exhibit is sponsored by the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.
Join us in kicking off this year’s festival with exciting exhibitions in three different gallery spaces on campus. Enjoy refreshments in the Loeb and Palmer Galleries to celebrate the wide range of visual art offerings for MODfest 2023.
The Palmer Gallery exhibit Imploding Meaning: Tale-less Tales About Absolutely Nothing and Everything In Between features the work of M. Pettee Olsen, Michael Oatman, Rosanne Walsh, and Monica Church.
This rotation of the Loeb’s In the Spotlight will feature a small selection of prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs depicting water in New York State
How do artists help us see or shape the past and future? Works ranging from Matthew Vassar’s initial bequest in 1864 to the Loeb’s most recent gifts and acquisitions will cluster in visual dialogues thematizing past, present, and future as categories in constant states of flux and transformation.
A Palmer Gallery exhibit featuring M. Pettee Olsen, Michael Oatman, Rosanne Walsh, and Monica Church. Though each artist’s approach is different, a through-line in their work is an embodied open-ness to interpretation, evoking experience and invoking a call to simply behold the work and the world.
This illustrated lecture by a Wesleyan University professor of art history and East Asian studies will focus on visual narratives spun by the Kumano nuns in early modern Japan for fundraising purposes and the paintings they used, called sankei mandara or “pilgrimage mandalas.”
Explore the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center while listening to music sung by the Vassar College Women’s Chorus and Choir at 6:30 p.m.
A lecture by Mark S. Cladis of Brown University, presented by the Vassar English Department in celebration of Professor Paul Kane’s long service.
This annual Advent service at the Vassar College Chapel features readings, choral anthems, and congregational carols, culminating in a candle lighting ceremony. Vassar College Choir, Chamber Singers, and Women’s Chorus, and Cappella Festiva Ensembles will perform.
This is an in-person event that was recorded.
James Osborn, director
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
Eduardo Navega, director
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
In this Drama Department senior project, Mrs. Lemarchand, a well-to-do woman and a study in megalomania, draws her innocent cleaner, Hilda, into a trap from which there is no escape.
Campus community only, please.
Drew Minter, conductor
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
Eduardo Navega, conductor
This concert is free and open to the public.
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
The Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre presents three programs of new choreography by guest choreographers Mike Tyus and Amy Hall Garner, as well as faculty and student works. This is a free but ticketed event, reservations required.
One of the best-known artists on the world stage, Xu Bing has made real impact in China and abroad. His talk will be given in Chinese, with simultaneous translation provided.
Campus community only, please.
James Osborn, conductor
This concert is free and open to the public.
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
Christine Howlett, conductor
Love Arrives: Music of Debussy, Poulenc, and contemporary compositions by Levente Gyöngyösi, Joan Symko, Tom Trenney, Mari Esabel Valverde, and arrangements of Gilbert and Sullivan by Joel Suben.
This concert is free and open to the public.
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
Eugenides is the author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and other works. This event will be hosted by Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair.
Latin GRAMMY winner Flor de Toloache is New York City’s first and only all-women mariachi group. Led by singers Mireya I. Ramos and Shae Fiol, the group’s members hail from diverse cultural backgrounds resulting in an edgy, versatile, and fresh take on traditional Mexican music.
An oratorio with silent film combines a performance of Richard Einhorn’s 1994 choral and orchestral work, Voices of Light, with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc. At the Bardavon 1869 Opera House. Free tickets are available for Vassar students by emailing [email protected]. Regular tickets are available for purchase at bardavon.com.
Chabitnoy, a Koniag descendant (Aleut) and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, is an award-winning writer and an Assistant Professor of English at UMass Amherst. Her works include How to Dress a Fish, which addresses the lives disrupted by the Indian boarding school policy of the U.S. government.
A Drama Department senior project in which the ensemble cast tells the story of Pippin, a young prince who longs to find passion and adventure in his life. Campus community only, please.
Koestenbaum—a poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker, and performer—has published 22 books and received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2020. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Dr. Square is Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design and a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He will speak about his present research, which explores connections between histories of enslavement and the fashion system.
Join us for our 20- to 30-minute lunchtime recital series by members of the Vassar College Chamber Music Program. Thursdays, October 27 and November 3, 10, & 17 at 12 noon.
Blake’s work explores play, eroticism, and the subjective experiences of desire, power, and loss. Inspired by feminist theory and queer subcultures, they address the contradictions of representation in sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, particularly as it relates to their own identity as a nonbinary multiracial artist.
An exploration of individual and collective history as viewed through multiple lenses, proposing alternatives to the systemic representations ordered by colonial narratives. Gallery talk & opening reception: October 28, 2022, 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Director/producer Michael Dwyer made this 20-minute film featuring Tomiko Morimoto West, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima who taught Japanese language courses at Vassar for a decade until she retired in 1994. Both will be available for a Q&A session after the screening.
Art historian Dora Apel considers the dynamic nature of memory, how it can be mobilized for social justice, and how memory is embodied, including through her own experience as a daughter of Holocaust survivors and a cancer survivor. A reception for Dora Apel and artist Buzz Spector will precede the lecture.
An exhibition in the Vassar College Art Library.
Eduardo Navega, conductor
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
Members of VOCES8 will present a variety of sessions, including composition and choral arranging, vocal production and diction, and career paths in music and music education. Registration required.
A wide-ranging recital of music from the Renaissance to the present day performed by internationally renowned choral ensemble VOCES8.
Join us for an open master class with members of the internationally renowned choral ensemble VOCES8.
The Loeb Art Center hosts a public reception celebrating the exhibition On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print, followed by a conversation featuring visiting artist Aaron R. Turner, founder/director of the Center for Art as Lived Experience and the Photographers of Color Podcast at the University of Arkansas School of Art.
A folk music concert sponsored by the Vassar College Lifelong Learning Institute. Open to the public, free admission. Face masks and proof of vaccination required.
Explore the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center while listening to music sung by the Vassar College Women’s Chorus, Chamber Singers, and Choir. Short performances at 6:00 p.m., 6:30 p.m., and 7:00 p.m.
A story of sibling love that explores subjects closely linked to science. Reservations for performances on October 6, 7, and 8 can be made by emailing the box office. Campus community only, please.
A recital exploring three hundred years of keyboard music, from Bach in 1721 to Nina Shekhar in 2021. A trip through the musical centuries, this recital presents music according to three categories borrowed from the writing of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: code, message, and myth.
Kwan, Chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, will discuss her new book, which explores intercultural duets between artists of different backgrounds. Campus community only, please.
Shaughnessy, the award-winning author of seven poetry collections, is a Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark.
James Ruff, tenor and Early Gaelic Harpist, explores the famous Marian pilgrimage site in Walsingham, England, and the music from three periods: Medieval pilgrimage, Tudor destruction and lamentation, and the shrine’s restoration exactly one hundred years ago.
Featuring Blanca Uribe and Richard Wilson, pianos.
This is an in-person event that will also be streamed live
Featuring Vassar faculty member Robert Osborne, bass-baritone, Tammy Hensrud, mezzo-soprano, and Richard Pearson Thomas, piano, this entertaining cabaret revue will shed light on the remarkable Alma Mahler through a broad array of art songs, cabaret tunes, satirical songs, and vocal duets.
The artists’ cooperative LongReach Arts is an important part of the Hudson Valley’s cultural life. Opening reception Thursday, September 22, 5:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m.