By Lucy Oster '23
Staff Writer
The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum has not let the COVID-19 pandemic stop it from engaging with students. “Sightlines Tours,” which are live and interactive student-led thematic tours of the 3D museum, are available until May 1.
Student guide Katie Corasanti ’21 introduced students, faculty and alums to the art of Keiko Minami, Etienne Aubry, Joseph Chandler and Joseph Goldyne during her tour “The Art of Remembering: Nostalgia as Feeling and Experience in Art,” which took place last Saturday, April 10.
As the title indicates, Corasanti’s tour focused on nostalgia. “Nostalgia can be defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations,” Corasanti said. “Nostalgia can be a personal experience, so pay attention to your own experiences.”
For Claire Williamson ’23, the theme of nostalgia was what inspired her to attend “The Art of Remembering.” Williamson had been feeling a new pandemic-induced version of nostalgia, and she sought out art for some answers.
“I went to the virtual museum tour to better understand this feeling and to see how artists depict nostalgia through art. I wanted to see if I could recognize some of the emotions I’m having in works of art,” Williamson said.
Corasanti appreciated leading “The Art of Remembering” during 2021, which she recognized as a difficult year. “Th[is] experience has been the highlight of a really tough year, and I’ve learned so much,” she said.
The MHCAM tours are “3D” in that the presentations show images of the room the art resides in before zooming in closer to each piece so that viewers can properly look at them.
To add to the immersive experience, Corasanti named the galleries that each art piece was in, as though the tour was actually traveling through the galleries. She would introduce a work of art and invite the group to share their thoughts about it, even in the form of a single word, before explaining its context.
Despite missing Mount Holyoke, Corasanti found positives in hosting the tour via Zoom.
“A major plus of having virtual tours is that people from all around the world [can] tune in,” Corasanti explained. “I also [get] to show some really tiny pieces that I wouldn’t have been able to show on a tour if we were in person and some extreme close-ups of different pieces, which help to make the viewing experience a lot easier.”
Cortnei Edwards ’22, another student guide who will be leading her own Sightline Tour on Tuesday, April 22, especially appreciated the way Corasanti crafted her tour.
“[Corasanti] constructs their questions in a way that truly gets their audience to reflect on each piece,” Edwards said. “Museums can be very intimidating spaces where you feel like any answer you provide is potentially ‘wrong’ — but I think that Katie was great at getting their audience to feel comfortable enough to share their thoughts.”
For Corasanti, Chandler’s painting “Landscape of Early South Hadley” depicts nostalgia for a place, but it also demonstrates the dangers of cultural nostalgia. It “taps into common themes of cultural nostalgia for an American past, before maybe they lost this kind of idyllic countryside to the Industrial Revolution,” Corasanti explained. “American landscape painting usually touches on … yearning for this … ideal simple life in [the] quiet, pristine countryside, and it’s this kind of nostalgic yearning for [the] past.”
All the pieces displayed in Saturday’s show are currently available for virtual viewing through the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. If you are interested in seeing them, visit artmuseum.mtholyoke.edu.