Maddy Andersen
In thinking about what feels most important to me as I prepare to leave Williams, I keep returning to the ideas of community, friendship, and hope. In a time of deep uncertainty, for both myself and our country, this project is an offering and an invitation: to reflect, to connect, and to collectively envision a more joyful future.
For seven weeks this spring, I placed four collection boxes—much like the one displayed here—around campus. I invited people to respond to the prompt: “Hope shapes the future. What do you hope for?” The responses I received are displayed as Hope, Collected (Notes Towards the Future). They are wide-ranging, honest, and vulnerable. They form a shared vision for what lies ahead, grounded in individual reflection.
Hope, Projected is my response to the same prompt. It is a snapshot of what I hope for: friendship, sunshine, a meaningful relationship with the natural world. While personal, I created this work in conversation with the responses I gathered, and I intend for it to be a part of the broader, communal imagining.
This is an ongoing project. I invite you to add your own response to the prompt to the collection box. Your hopes will become part of this living archive, a future imagined together.
Martha Carlson
In Shadows and Rabbits, I consider stories as sites of belonging and storytelling as a tool for revolutionary work toward social change. Stories allow us to imagine different ways of being, often and importantly at odds with capitalist society.
I focused on shadow puppetry as a medium of storytelling for this project. I am interested in the ways in which we develop specific characters and imagined worlds from simple shapes and light. Hands, as one example, can simulate these shapes in shadows, but our minds fill in the blanks and give them personalities, desires, and stories through our words and imaginations. Light plays an integral role in both this and the cyanotype process. In my mind, storytelling often takes place in the dark with small light sources and big shadows—campfire ghost stories, bedtime stories… Here in this print, however, the process has been flipped; sunlight helped me make this piece, and the areas of fabric left uncovered during the printing process represent cast shadows.
The shadowy animal figures present in the cyanotype are loosely based on characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. As a young queer person, I have found comfort in Alice’s absurd and imaginative world. Stories like this, though not without their own problems, foreground the importance of imagination and nonsense, which make possible queer and subversive reimaginings.
Madeline Carswell
This piece began to take shape in the early Fall of 2024 when I arrived at the Williams-Mystic Program in Mystic, CT. Throughout my semester away, we sailed for 600 miles on the Atlantic Ocean, traveled to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, and wrapped up our travels in Southern Louisiana. Some of my most pivotal photographs came from the offshore experience, where the anatomy of the ship, its sails, and the open horizon lines led to abstract ideas of wilderness, isolation, and community.
This experience at sea was one of the most transformative experiences that I have had and I noticed a shift in myself and how I grounded myself when I returned to land. I am also a chemistry major and enjoyed the opportunity to study science at sea, which led to my motivation to take salt from the hull of the ship that I later photographed under an electron scanning microscope. These microscopic images juxtapose abstract shapes onto the desolate landscapes. Leaving the world behind and focusing on our community of ~35 shipmates while we were miles from land brought me into the present moment in a way that shifted my perspective.
I am excited to share my photos from that trip, as well as our adventures afterward that showcase what I was drawn to after my experience at sea. I find myself drawn to water, mindfulness, friendships, the outdoors, family, and my education in new ways after this experience and I am so grateful for everyone who made this experience possible.
Thank you to The Williams-Mystic Program, Genesis Baez, Nancy Piatczyc, Daniel Goudrouffe, Ohan Breiding, and all of my Friends and Family for your support.
Quinn Casey
Please give me a moment to make myself sound really smart. Ahem.
My practice uses humor as a subversive tool to infiltrate societal spaces and challenge normative structures. Through graphic design and drawing, I craft visual commentary anchored by text—often sarcastic, sometimes angry, and always tailored to the space it occupies: advertising, journalism, social media, etc. Ideally, it makes people laugh and reflect. Perhaps it does neither. In that case, this whole “art show” thing would be awkward.
Kamala’s First Day (2025) is my second satirical children’s book about American politics. The first, Lady Liberty’s Country Day (2021), was made after the Capitol insurrection and Trump’s election denial. In what feels like déjà vu, Trump is back in the White House, and many politicians—including the President—still act like children. This edition follows a young Kamala Harris on her first day at Uncle Sam’s Country Day.
Like its predecessor, Kamala’s First Day camouflages itself as a children’s book with clever rhymes and cheerful illustrations. The façade fades as the story explores themes of racism, sexism, and white nationalism. While the work leans clearly to one side (I’ll let you guess which), it presents all politicians as overgrown children in our current landscape.
The project gained new relevance after printing, when Trump signed an executive order to cut funding for PBS and NPR—threatening educational access for kids nationwide.
The fight is not over. We’ve only begun.
In a nation like ours, many are greater than one.
Fior Cecchi Rivas
This piece, for me, is about waiting. About a slow, seemingly paused, process of change.
I am interested in the way small quantities of water move. Drip, Seep, Pool. These quantities of water that are just before or after changing in form. Drops that shrink and evaporate off of your skin. Puddles that migrate over the course of a few hours. These in between bodies, these small moments at the edge of change.
I created this piece in conversation with a text by Astrida Neimanis, Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water. I want to clarify that this is not a work about being a woman, this is a work about being a body. A body, or a puddle, caught between complex systems, where small change has large implications. Water moves through these clay bodies—perhaps in a similar way to how water moves through our bodies of flesh, taking us from here to there, from young to old, “from potentiality to actuality. Translation, transformation. Plurality proliferates,” as Neimanis writes.
I encourage you to sit, and wait, with these watery bodies.
Arden Fluehr
The grid of sixteen life-sized photographs captures the hands of female rowers after practice—open, exposed, and wounded. Each pair of hands is suspended against a black background, isolated and made anonymous. The glossy surface reflects the viewer’s image back at them, merging their gaze with the hands in pain. These hands are both grotesque and tender: they speak to the quiet violence of sport, the pain we choose, and the trust built through repetition and endurance. Their sameness reveals not only the specificity of this community, but also the limitations of who is represented and who is not.
To the right of the photographs, a handmade book of monotype portraits rests on a shelf. Inside are the faces of the same girls whose hands appear on the wall. The book unfolds slowly and intimately, inviting a different kind of encounter. These portraits introduce softness, individuality, and presence. They bring us back to the person behind the labor. At the same time, they explore femininity in a context not typically associated with it: the world of physical strain, blood, tape, and grit.
Chris Gontarek
Materials
o A piece of paper
o A pen or pencil or self timer “grenade”
o At least two participants
Instructions
1. Fold the paper into equal sections, one for each participant
2. The first participant draws within their section, letting their lines escape slightly into the next
3. Fold the paper to conceal the drawing
4. Pass it along
5. The next participant adds to the drawing based only on the visible lines they receive
6. Repeat until all sections are filled
7. Unfold and discover the whole image
JESS HUAN HU
I examine the disabled body as a site for violence and discomfort. My body is constantly healing itself, skin and mind repeatedly scarring over. Living in crip time, I see dreaming as a way of offering my disabled body expanded time.
In dreamtime, the body may prepare itself for certain unhealable wounds, like those left by the death of a mother. I consider my present experience living with my mom and how I will one day survive in a world where she is no longer beside me. I understand that with the loss of my mother will come the loss of so much more: the person who has known me longer than I have known myself, the first person to love me back. When my mother dies, I will become my own caretaker.
Through painting, the canvas becomes a site of care. I meticulously apply delicate tissue paper to the canvas with my fingertips, as if caressing my own skin. I lavish the figure’s contours with the brush, not to conceal but to tend. I gaze back at myself, crawl on top of the painted surface, and feel the press of body onto body.
During the collage process, legible material from this world is obscured to create portals to another. I imagine my mother living a life where she has all that she gave up to take care of me. I dream of making this trade with heaven one day.
Hugo Ichioka
The series Between Presence and Erasure engages with the instability of emotional visibility. Each form becomes a negotiation between revealing and concealing—between what is allowed to surface and what remains hidden. These gestures are both destructive and reparative, echoing how social narratives around emotion are constructed, reinforced, and sometimes undone.
This body of work is an intimate excavation of emotion and memory—an attempt to give tangible form to feelings I once silenced in myself. Each piece reflects a particular emotional state—comfort, anger, interest—translated into form through layered process of construction and erasure.
The act of carving, coating, and rebuilding mirrors the fragmentary nature of emotions and memory. They operate within a state of flux, holding space for contradictions between visibility and erasure, introspection and outward expression.
Ellie Iorio
“ ‘I am sorry,’ sighed the tree. ‘I wish that I could give you something… but I have nothing left. I am just an old stump. I am sorry…’ ”—Shel Silverstein
In this series, The Giving Trees, I respond to the fragile state of our natural landscapes through a lens of whimsy. Step closer, and you will find yourself beneath a papery silver birch, gazing out over the turquoise vastness of Lake Superior. Every texture, color, and form tells the story of nature’s reciprocity, shaped by over two decades of observing the ecosystems around me.
By infusing these paintings with heightened beauty, I invite viewers to reflect on what is at risk. Suspended in a state of hovering vertigo, teetering at the cliff’s edge, the viewer is drawn to seek refuge in the trees’ embracing branches. Abstract up close, the work resolves into resounding resonance when you step back. It is in this liminal space—between falling apart and coming together—that I hope to bridge the gap between human and earth.
Please, take a seat on these stumps from Northern Michigan and remember the storybook lesson: Give in return for what you’ve taken. Sustain those who sustain you—and the earth, like these trees, may endure.
Ava Irons
How do you capture the experience of living in a body? The entire concept is so abstract yet implicitly understood because no matter what—we all exist. More importantly, our bodies hold onto the remnants of said existence. My small ink drawings aim to capture these remnants by utilizing gesture. Some of the drawings detail bolder lines, tapping into the sharpness that comes with experiencing pain, whereas others are primarily ink bleeds to echo how sensation permeates through the body.
It was important to me that when these drawings came together they were inherently connected. So, I turned to quilting practices since quilts themselves take small works to create something greater; I created a paper quilt with my drawings. Sewing the drawings together connects them in a way that adjacency simply cannot accomplish.
Together, the drawings create their own gestural mark, each one a smaller part of a greater dynamic whole.
Mayel Levin
This installation responds to the growing political risk faced by people whose migration history, legal status, or political speech makes them vulnerable. The work draws on historical persecution patterns and the present-day suppression of dissent. Through glass, projection, and spatial interaction, it explores how bodies are controlled, obscured, and made precarious by state power.
Glass is central to the work because it is an amorphous material, which means it has no fixed structure. It behaves like a solid but has the instability of a liquid. That tension matters because the work considers how safety, identity, and belonging shift under pressure. Its optical behaviors (refraction, diffraction, reflection) shape what is visible, what is distorted, and what stays out of view.
The installation changes as the viewer moves through the space. The body’s movement might block or reveal something, and this shift is a crucial part of the work. It connects material choices to the political and personal stakes of a present that feels unstable, resembling other times in history when rules changed quickly and specific groups were targeted. The work doesn’t offer answers. It opens questions: What does it mean to witness? What does it mean to act? What are you willing to notice? What are you willing to risk, and for whom?
“This project has reminded me that art is never made alone. From the first brainstorms to the long production days (and nights!), collaboration shaped every part of the process. People helped bring ideas to life, gave feedback, made me laugh, and stayed with me through the highs and lows. After I sustained an injury, they stepped up again to help me finish the work. I’m grateful to everyone who has been part of this, even if I can’t name each person here. Thank you to the Art Department faculty and staff for supporting my vision; to my friends who have been an extension of me (Annapurrna, Jess, Fior, Emma, s.n., and many more); to the ’25 Studio Art cohort; and to my family, near and far. Special thanks to Ben Davis ’27 for video editing support. And thank you to Vermont Paws and Boots in Bennington, VT, for the donated glass.”
Melissa Mendino Solano
This work is one of my attempts to feel connected to the small town I lived in for the first two and a half years of my life. The town my parents grew up in, the town that my paternal grandfather tells me stories about, the town that my maternal grandmother was laid to rest in one and a half years ago.
Even with no real memories of my own to remember my pueblito, I have been imagining and creating my home there since I left. My life has been filled with phone calls to Mexico, and stories of my dad hunting in el monte and of town traditions and of my antics as a toddler, and a finite amount of old photographs that show me a glimpse of where I am from. My home exists in these stories, photographs and the voices of my loved ones.
This work’s composition is inspired by photographs of my last birthday party in Tlaxmalac, with objects that represent stories of home. The Yakult bottle from when I learned how to open the fridge and drank a whole pack of Yakults in one afternoon. The chairs that one of my great grandfathers made and existed in everyone’s home. Through my hand sewing, I pour the love and care I have for my family and my pueblo. The tedious stitching and pricks of needles on my fingers mimic my experience in building my home out of wisps.
Riku Nakano
This piece comes to life again through the videography of Fior Cecchi-Rivas and the work of the documentation crew, including photographers Beneyam Hassen and Beza Lulseged. The crew ran around with mics and umbrellas on the rainy spring day. Because of them, the singular hour-long parade has a longer, larger life.
The giant root takes great amounts of labor to tend to; an amount more than I am capable of alone. The structure was made with assistance from Josh Ying, who helped me pin and tie numerous rounds of wood caning. The daikon sustains its shape by the countless knots of twine that he and I pulled tight with our fingers. In the parade, the daikon was held gently by peers: Alexa Cohen, Brianna Dechet, Campbell Leonard, Ella Ball, Genevieve Randazzo, Juna Pfeifer, Liv Chambers, and Ruby Yager. They carried the large root on their bare feet; over asphalt roads and muddy hills. As they walked under damp skies, the procession was energized and touched by the musical accompaniment of Chris Gontarek on drum, and Innes Asher on bagpipes. Their sounds echoed from the hills and rang beautifully in the valley.
Through the gradual accumulation of many, many human interactions in a place, I feel like we are collectively growing something silent, yet stunning and massive. The harvest of the giant radish is a celebration and farewell to this “growing season” I experienced in Williamstown. I am incredibly grateful to have created and shared this piece with many loved ones.
Emma Neuhauser
In their smallest unit, glaciers are individual snowflakes that pile up. They eventually compress, forming ice. In New England, the Laurentide Ice Sheet shaped the landscape we know today, reaching its maximum about 20,000 years ago. In the late 1800s, Wilson Bentley took some of the first microscopic images of snowflakes from his home in Jericho, Vermont. 20,000 years ago, these snowflakes would have fallen on ice over a mile thick. For this work, I re-created some of these images as cyanotypes, washing a few of them in snowmelt that, not too long ago, would have added mass to this enormous ice sheet.
If you have yet to catch on, I love ice—I’ve spent the past year trying to quantify recent melt in the Cordillera Darwin Icefield in southern Patagonia. Most of the information has come from satellites as, unsurprisingly, reaching these glaciers is an undertaking. Access to clear images depends on weather and satellite orbits, and often, I stitched images together to create a larger mosaic. The risograph has many of the same restrictions, as larger images are created out of smaller constituent parts.
The pink polygons mark glacier termini—where big chunks break, calving into lakes or fjords. I traced these endpoints in 2017 through 2024, documenting the retreat of 24 glaciers. To visualize loss, each ceramic bead in the installation represents two large container ships, with each container filled with ice. In seven years, that is a loss of about 430,000 40-foot shipping containers.
Austin Osborn
There is tension in the moments leading up to a breaking point. In these moments, it is not hard to envision what happens next. However, if it is not explicitly seen, there is still some room for the miraculous. This work seeks to capture these instances. In each image the physical body is initiating the possible “breaking” with the paper arm placed in a challenging position. However, despite the precarious setup of each composition, some idea of the paper arm persists throughout the tryptic. This piece is not about the destruction of each sculpture. In many ways, I see the narrative as more about their inexplicable continuity past each breaking point.
This project is a continuation of my long-standing fascination with paper folding which has gradually shifted towards trying to pull chaotic moments out of what is traditionally such an orderly and precise methodology. The central arm in each image is constructed by folding large sheets of tissue paper. These sheets were built by layering and combining smaller papers with methyl cellulose to add “sizing” to each. This helps the folded objects maintain their curved forms.
Juna Pfeifer
I started collecting sidewalk chunks in response to mending my own clothing. Learning this skill made me question how we mend land, and I began noticing the patchwork in roads.
It took a few years to learn how to look down and pay attention to the ground, but this is how I move through the world now. Looking towards the sky too, watching balloons floating away, and listening to my surroundings.
The works here are a way of processing these moments, lost in time, but ever so tender while they last.
Genevieve Randazzo
After struggling to make things for nearly a year, since a profoundly lonely summer as a cook at an artist residency,
I have returned to the printmaking studio, a place I trust and care for. The meditation of tending to and cleaning a space is similar to the satisfaction of repetitive mark making and diligent detail. As I lavish attention on a space I love, I pay attention to my marks and through my marks, capturing the patterns, plants, landscapes and objects that I witness and interact with. As I contend with loss, I have wanted to make something big that embodies and encourages the joy of close looking, calling attention to the labor and touch imbued in its making.
Genevieve Randazzo is a maker and cook from Brooklyn, NY. Her passion for food and the nourishment of others through communal meals manifests in her prints, paintings, illustrations, textiles and performance art. Her work is born from the discord between a hyperactive mind prone to rumination and a desire for slowness and close attention.
Clem Roach
I love to approach art from a space of joy and collaboration. My plan to be an art therapist shapes the way I see art— looking at it as an opportunity for discovery, connection, and meaning. I’m also interested in art as a mode of celebratory and defiant queer self-expression.
This project is a culmination of a semester-long collaboration with two Williamstown siblings to build drag personas: Minnie (9 years old, she/they) and Tilly (12 years old, they/them). They gave me color palettes, personality traits, patterns, flowers, animals, and general outfit ideas for their characters. Each also came up with a mashup creature that represents their drag persona. Minnie drew a dolphindog-bunny, and Tilly created an axolotl-bunny-cat. Their creatures come to life as huge stuffed sculptures, with aesthetics matching each child’s makeup and dresses. I created the makeup looks and sewed outfits for each kid based on our collective brainstorms. We put it all together, and Casey (Tilly) and Pink Pearl (Minnie) were born.
I worked with children because I love the creativity and imagination children bring, and because queer childhood has become so vilified. Casey and Pink Pearl will keep their outfits and the creatures, hopefully as a reminder of how it feels to play with being an alternate, extravagant and fun version of themselves.
Thank you to Minnie and Tilly for being the heart of this project, and thank you to Fior for being my photoshoot partner!
annie scott
As a trans artist, my practice explores transformation, violence, and care through the queer body. My experience of gender-affirming plastic surgery directs my interest towards constructed bodies and flesh, exploring how identity can be built, destabilized, and restored. In my practice, I queer mediums, pushing the adaptability of plaster, paper, and plastic, to explore new configurations of the body. My material transformation reifies the close interaction between my body and materials, because I value them as equal: emphasizing the vulnerability and fluidity inherent to both, through intimate body contact.
My process involves mixing plaster, coaxing a rigid medium from water and powder by transforming their material contradiction—into which I dunk paper and then layer to create a body. Once layered, the plaster thickens to a fleshy paste that I scoop away to articulate the ribs. As the projection of labels onto my flesh required self-definition by similar material ablation, I’m compelled to play with the vulnerability of artificial skin. Such shaping of identity through fleshy removal reflects the embedded violence in plastic surgery undergone by queer bodies seeking to affirm themselves.
The replication of individual vertebrae (using plastic bread clips) emphasizes pain as they transform into a spine—a symbol that is salient in its embodiment of and relationship to pain. I also approach plastic not only materially, but symbolically, to reckon with the implications of trans people and their specific reliance on artificiality. The existence of a queer body requires artificial construction by another’s hand, becoming a site of material collision, falsity, and transformation. Because of plastic, I see the queer body as being both constructed and malleable, capable of rejecting traditional forms and reshaping itself into something new. Through my work, I tease these physical and psychological tensions, exploring how identity can be constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed again.
seth nikolai wolfe // s.n.m.l.q.c.j.g
Dear Reader,
This constellation of work is helping me process my relationship to time and memory. As a queer, disabled person in a moment of personal and political upheaval, the installation is designed to allow you to experience these concepts from my point of view: circular; layered; something that requires traversing.
My art is informed by living with a disorder that distorts and destabilizes my sense of self and the stories that accompany it. Love and loss get tangled up. Past, present, and future exist alongside each other all at once. I am left to wade through a mess of things, to sort and to make meaning from the chaos. I do not aim to fully resolve these tensions, but to explore the different understandings that can be found depending on what we choose to sit with and the directions we choose to take throughout the journey.
With much love and respect,
seth nikolai wolfe // s.n.m.l.q.c.j.g
P.S. Many thanks to Emily Bourguignon and Richard Duncan for the paperclips they donated to supplement my collection; to Kevin Forkey and the Physics Dept. for the box TV; and to Thierry Breard for the mahogany.
Nina Yankovic
As a child, I was intrinsically drawn to arranging small assemblages in my room, especially within my wooden cabinet, where each compartment became its own world. I carefully aligned figurines, organized fossil collections, and placed letters from loved ones with care. By honoring the space and the memories each object held, my room became imbued with thoughtful presence, and the cabinet transformed into a kind of portal.
I still collect, but now I gather the invisible: ephemeral moments, memory, connection, and the beauty embedded in routine. The cabinet in this piece becomes a space to hold the intangible—specifically, the shadows and light from my childhood bedroom. Each compartment contains layered, hand-dyed and collaged mulberry paper, painted with walnut ink. Within each framed section, projections of leaf shadows flow across the wall, light filters through windows at night, and the mobile that hung in the corner of my room remains suspended.
When I reflect on why I make art, I return to moments of deep resonance—times when I feel at home in myself and my environment, and to the imagery that carries that feeling. I’m interested in shifting functional objects into something contemplative, and in exaggerating the mundane just enough that we might notice it again. Through warm, internal light and familiar forms, I hope to evoke a feeling not unlike love.
