SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the Tang’s approach has become a model for college and university art museums across the country—with exhibition programs that bring together visual and performing arts with interdisciplinary ideas from history, economics, biology, dance, and physics, to name just a few. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, and a robust publication and touring exhibition program that extends the museum’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s award-winning building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of art and ideas.
UPCOMING EXHIBITONS 2024-25
Establish, Insure, Provide, Promote: Election 2024
September 10–December, 15, 2024
Anchored by a large stage and featuring rotating artwork, the exhibition is an open platform for talks, panels, concerts, voter registration, debates, town meetings, class meetings, club events, and gatherings of all sorts. A series of moveable display boards will serve as interactive educational hubs for contemporary issues, topics, maps, news, and updates.
The Forms of Things Unknown
October 19–January 5, 2025
This collaborative project will explore how we use the visual to extend our knowledge and how envisioning what we can’t see can help us create new knowledge and solve existing problems. The show will feature a re-envisioning of an early 20th-century Gilboa Forest diorama created by Winifred Goldring for the New York State Museum, fossils, 3-dimensional microfossil models, historical diagrams, maps, and scientific illustrations, and more.
A field of bloom and hum
March 1, 2025–June 29, 2025
At a time when the rights of members of the queer community are under threat (the ACLU is tracking 437 anti-LGBTQ bills in the US this year, for example), the Tang will present work by queer artists that assert their lives and stories in the world. A field of bloom and hum brings together extensive series created over multiple decades by artists such as Steven Arnold, Dyke Action Machine, Robert Giard, Nan Goldin, Alice O’Malley, and PaJaMa, with seminal works by David Armstrong, Nayland Blake, Joe Brainard, Tony Feher, Oliver Herring, Jim Hodges, George Platt Lynes, Donald Moffatt, Catherine Opie, Mickalene Thomas, and many others. The presentation of their work will also include new commissions, including wall works, printmaking, and an art and activism resource room for gatherings, workshops, dissemination, and study. Public programs, co-organized by faculty, such as films, dialogues, dance, theater, and workshops will explore issues of history telling, theatricality, memory and loss, inclusion and identity formation, and the role of artists in building and defining queer communities. The intergenerational dialogues will serve as points of entry for new scholarly inquiry and can act as a model for new modes of thinking and making.
Up to Us: Black Dimensions in Art, 1975–Tomorrow
May 31, 2025–September 21, 2025
Since its founding in 1975 in Schenectady, New York, Black Dimensions in Art, Inc., has promoted the art of the African diaspora through exhibitions, workshops, and other programs in the Capital Region and beyond. The BDA mission is centered on education, sales opportunities, representation, and encouraging Black youth to engage with the arts. In celebration of BDA’s 50th anniversary, this exhibition traces key moments in the organization’s history through archival material such as brochures, posters, photographs, artwork, and more. The exhibition title, originating from the 1984 Harlem Week slogan “Much more to do … a better Harlem is up to us,” epitomizes the need for Black communities to create and claim space for themselves and connects BDA to other grassroots Black arts and culture organizations throughout the country.
