Tang Teaching Museum to reopen Feb. 3
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College is delaying its public reopening to Thursday, Feb. 3.
Two new exhibitions — “Opener 34: Ruby Sky Stiler— New Patterns” and “Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science” — were originally scheduled to open to the public on Saturday, January 29; however, for the health and safety of students, faculty and staff at the start of the semester, Skidmore College is prohibiting off-campus visitors through Sunday, Jan. 30.
When the Tang reopens to the public on Feb. 3, the museum hours will be noon to 9 p.m. on Thursdays and noon to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday.
The new exhibitions will join the continuing exhibitions:
• “Hyde Cabinet #15: Doomsday,” through Feb. 27: In the student curatorial project space, Paige Meade ’22 explores the legacy of the Y2K bug through the Jan. 18, 1999, cover of Time magazine and Prince’s album 1999.
• “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, reenvisioning 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.
• “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.
• “Lauren Kelley: Location Scouting,” through Sept. 10, 2023: In the fourth exhibition in a series that invites an artist to reimagine 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.
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 college and 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.
More information about the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery is available by contacting the Visitors Services Desk at (518) 580-8080 or visiting tang.skidmore.edu.