The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opens Copycat. Reproducing Works of Art an exhibition on view January 29 through April 1, 2012. exploring the line between innovation and imitation, the exhibition features 50 prints and photographs that are both original works of art and repetitions of drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and architecture created by other artists.
The Libyan Sibyl, c. 1780 by Francesco Bartolozzi. Etching and color etching on paper© Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA.
The exhibition highlights the complex process of copying by studying replications of many rarely seen works from the Clark’s permanent collection, including those by Albrecht Dürer, Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix, Rembrandt van Rijn, Roger Fenton, and Édouard Manet, among others. The exhibition also marks the first public presentation of one of the Clark’s recent acquisitions, Jean Dughet’s series The Seven Sacraments.
Copycat is one of the ClarkNOW exhibitions that the Institute announced last autumn in conjunction with the launch of its campus expansion project. ClarkNOW is a series of more than 60 programs that the Clark will present in Williamstown, New York, and abroad over the next two years as it extends the Clark’s reach and engagement during a time of transformation on its campus.
“ClarkNOW is about experimentation, challenging us to bring our collections and intellectual programs to U.S. and international audiences in new and exciting ways,” said Michael Conforti, director of the Clark. “With this exhibition, we invited new curatorial voices to lead us in looking at some of the works in our permanent collection with fresh eyes.”
The exhibition was curated by Alexis Goodin, Independent art historian and part-time Curatorial Research Assistant at the Clark, and James Pilgrim, a current graduate student in the Clark/Williams graduate program in the history of art, working in collaboration with Richard Rand, The Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Senior Curator, and Jay A. Clarke, the Clark’s Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs
For more information, call 413 458 2303 or visit clarkart.edu
