Lafayette College Art Galleries
Williams Center Gallery

Williams Center Gallery Mission Statement

The mission of the Williams Center for the Arts, which includes the Performance Series, College Theater, and Art Gallery, is to serve the educational and cultural programming objectives of Lafayette College while endeavoring to engage the varied cultural and ethnic groups throughout the greater Lehigh Valley. This mandate yields a broad and comprehensive artistic vision which embraces both the educational values of a college campus and a diverse audience.

Expanding on the Center's mission statement, the Williams Center Gallery's specific mission is to present exhibitions, related activities (lectures, workshops, films, and other educational programs, etc.), and publications which represent a wide range of media, cultures, and time periods. All exhibitions and related activities are planned in accordance with the mission statement. Because it is broadly defined, the statement allows the gallery a great deal of flexibility to present a varied and lively program. Criteria for selecting exhibitions—both within the college's curriculum and the regional audience that the Center serves—include artistic excellence; diversity of aesthetic traditions; attention to cultural contexts represented within the Lehigh Valley and campus demographics; nurturing of artists' experimentation and growth; and the educational potential of exhibitions, lectures, and publications. Campus galleries, as part of their educational mission, are in a unique position to explore challenging subjects and provide a venue for artists whose work is best suited to non-commercial spaces.

In addition to the Williams Center Gallery, there are additional galleries in the Williams Visual Arts Building, Skillman Library, and the David A. Portlock Center. For a summary of galleries and campus exhibitions click here.

Grossman Gallery Mission Statement

updated page under construction - please return soon

Williams Center Gallery Exhibition Archives

Williams Center is at the edge of the Lehigh Valley, and at the cutting edge of contemporary arts. For 20 seasons director Ellis Finger and gallery director Michiko Okaya have presented operatic hip-hop dancers and performance-art photographers, countertenors and hair sculptors, slam poets and a cellist who played, and destroyed, a block of ice. Blending scholarship with entertainment, they've made the center a school, a satellite, a multimedia mecca. —Geoff Gehman, The Morning Call, April 2004, in an article marking the Williams Center's 20th year.

2001–2002	2002–2003	2003–2004	2004–2005	2005-2006	2006–2007	2007-2008

Catalogues from previous exhibitions are available for purchase. Check back soon for a complete list.

Click here to read more about the Lafayette College Art Collections.

Collections and Gallery Updates:

Gallery:

In Geoff Gehman's "2007 year in review" summary he lists the exhibitions On Ice ("A sense-surrounding smorgasbord of min-glaciers and pinballing pellets that crystallized ice as a chamber for nothing and everything.") and A Son and His Adoptive Father ("A quirky biography of the profound friendship between the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington and America...") among his six favorite exhibitions of 2007. He also selected Amour d'Armor ("This contemporary companion to Knights in Shining Armor [at the Allentown Art Museum] featured a shark suit of silver metal mesh, a plague robe of Japanese rice paper, and other practical, wacky safety objects for an increasingly unsafe age.") as one of his six favorite ideas in 2007.) (Morning Call, Go Guide, December 27, 2007)

A view of Stacy Levy's Lafayette installation Blue Lake (2005) was featured on the cover of Sculpture magazine, December 2006.

Photographs from Joan Jeanrenaud's 2001 Ice Cello performance were used on the cover and index page of Oakland Magazine, October 2007.

Art Collection:

William Walcutt's 1857 painting, Pulling Down the Statue of George III at Bowling Green is reproduce in David McCullogh's 1776: The Illustrated Edition, published in 2007.

Walcutt's painting is also reproduced on the cover of Christian G. Fritz's American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Lafayette has been selected by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as one of 183 college and university art museums across the United States to receive a gift of original Warhol art. Lafayette will receive approximately 100 original Polaroid pictures and 50 black and white prints selected by Jenny Moore, curator of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. The program hopes that the gift will enable a wide range of people from communities across the country to view and study this relatively unknown area of Warhol’s work. By placing the Warhol works into the College’s permanent collection, the gift will enrich the breadth and depth of Lafayette’s holdings.- 2008

The exhibition program is presented under provisions of the Frederick Knecht Detwiller endowment.

All exhibitions and related programs are free and open to the public.