Community
ARTHive
ARTHive is a student organization that brings together people who share a common passion for visual art and history of art. Through a series of monthly events, ARTHive club members explore how art history applies to life experiences outside and beyond the classroom. ARTHive sponsors events focused on exhibitions and arts events in the Boston-Providence area, career development and graduate education, and the appreciation of art in our daily lives. We seek to inspire one another, and to create a more engaged community of Wheaton students interested in Visual Art and History of Art.
Friends of Art
Members of the Wheaton College Friends of Art include alumni, current students, faculty, and local residents with an interest in the visual arts. The Friends of Art and the Greater Boston Wheaton Alumnae/i Club co-sponsor an annual Fall event coordinated with the featured exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Friends of Art sponsors bus trips to New York and other cities, and contributes to the Department of Visual Art and History of Art in a variety of other ways, including support for exhibitions in the Beard & Weil Galleries and for Wheaton’s Permanent Collection. Every year, the Friends of Art purchases artwork from the Senior Visual Art Majors’ Exhibition and then donates it to the Permanent Collection. Over the years, these gifts have strengthened our holdings of works on paper, of sculpture, and of animation, among others. In Fall 2010, an exhibition of artwork donated by the Friends of Art was mounted in the Beard Gallery. In addition to these donations, the group annually contributes to the Ann H. Murray Art Conservation Fund, which is used to conserve objects in Wheaton’s collection.
Heuser Lecture
Mary L. Heuser Memorial Lecture in Art History
The Wheaton College Friends of Art established this annual lecture in 2009, to honor the memory of Professor Mary L. Heuser—Professor of Art History from 1952 to 1981, first holder of the college’s William Prentice Chair, and founder of the Friends of Art. Professor Heuser completed her doctorate in art history at Radcliffe College, where she specialized in medieval art history. A talented, demanding instructor and scholarly polymath, she dedicated her life to promoting the arts at Wheaton. The lecture that bears her name honors each year the work of a distinguished art historian, and celebrates the spirit of this remarkable woman.
2009: Dr. Nancy Hirschland Ramage, Class of 1963, The Cone Sisters of Baltimore: Collectors of the Avant-Garde
2010: Dr. Anna Indych-López, Mexican Muralism: Art and Revolution
2011: Dr. Alicia Volk, Japanese Modern Art in the World: Global Modernism from a Local Perspective
2012: Dr. Alison Syme, Paint, Pollen, Polymorphy: Sargent’s Allegorical Self-Portraits
2013: Dr. Timothy McCall, Brilliant Male Bodies on Display: Italian Renaissance Fashion, Ornamentation, and Splendor
2014: Dr. Jacqueline Jung, Charismatic Bodies and the Performance of Feeling in German Gothic Sculpture
2014: Dr. Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Class of 1965, Goya’s Ingenious Arrangements: Imagined Worlds
2016: Mr. Christopher Monkhouse, Cabinets for Collections: From Wunderkammern to the Athenaeum
2017: Dr. Suzanne Blier, Picasso’s Demoiselles: Africa, Sex, Origins and Creativity
2019: Dr. Christa Clarke, Lida Clanton Broner: An African-American “Activist Collector” in Pre-Apartheid South Africa
2020: Dr. C. Morgan Grefe, A Watchman’s Web: Using Archives to Visualize 19th-century Providence