SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College presents Family Forms, an exhibition that invites visitors to consider how families are made, remade, and represented. Bringing together contemporary art and vernacular photography, Family Forms looks closely at kinship, care, and the stories we tell about who we are to one another.
Photographs, artists’ books, collage, sculpture, and video provide visitors ways to explore the spaces between our ideas about “the family” and the lived experiences of families. Much of the exhibition draws from the Tang collection with works that reflect the joys and frictions of everyday life; challenge stereotypes about the “nuclear” ideal; and expand definitions of belonging to include chosen, blended, multigenerational, queer, adoptive, foster, and non-monogamous families. Visitors are invited to reflect on their own experiences of giving and receiving care, and on the many ways relationships are made public and kept private.
The installation includes a domestic vignette built from thrifted frames displaying found photographs gifted to the Tang from Peter J. Cohen. Arranged above a historic mantelpiece, the scene turns the gallery into a living room where family pictures naturally gather. Artists with work on view include Julie Chen, Mike Disfarmer, For Freedoms, Jesse Freidin, Erika Kapin, Ann Lovett, Tracey Moffatt, PaJaMa, Milton Rogovin, Joachim Schmid, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Laurie Simmons, and Danielle St. Laurent, among others.
“Family Forms continues the Tang’s great tradition of collaborating with Skidmore faculty colleagues to produce exhibitions that reveal new connections and possibilities across all disciplines,” says Dayton Director Ian Berry. “Corinne Moss-Racusin, Professor of Psychology at Skidmore, and Rebecca McNamara, the Frances Young Tang ’61 Associate Curator, bring academic research into dialogue with art and visual culture, so visitors of all ages can see themselves and reflect on their own lives and experiences.”
“Collaborating on this exhibition has been an honor and a joy,” says Moss-Racusin. “Working with the Tang has given my students the opportunity to grapple with challenging issues of contemporary inequality from both artistic and scientific perspectives. It has also moved my teaching and research beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and generated new insights. This interdisciplinary project embodies the very best of what a liberal arts college offers and is at the core of what makes Skidmore unique. I look forward to seeing how the exhibition sparks conversations about how families can be formed and the many forms they take.”
Visitors are invited to contribute to the exhibition by submitting their own family photographs via an online form. These images will be shown in the gallery on a digital frame throughout the run of the exhibition.
Throughout the fall semester, students in Moss-Racusin’s course “Psychology at the Tang” were embedded in the museum, meeting weekly to learn about art and how it can be used to interrogate psychological concepts. Drawing on psychological research, the students will publish labels on the exhibition webpage that respond to specific found photographs on view, offering new perspectives on memory, bias, intimacy, and belonging in family life.
