WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.- Williams College Museum of Art announced today that artist Kelly Akashi has been selected to create a site-specific artwork on the grounds of the new museum, set to open in the fall of 2027.
This commission will create a new moment of welcome, signaling WCMA’s relationship to its natural surroundings, the campus community, and its collections and exhibitions. The commissioned artwork will be installed in the east meadows, facing toward campus, in late 2027. Akashi will visit Williams throughout 2026 to collaborate with the building’s architects and landscape architects and meet with the campus community.
“I'm looking forward to developing my new sculptures over this next year in close dialogue with the wooded and diverse landscape and the new building's design,” Akashi said. “The project centers on works that are at once botanical, geological, and sculptural. Their placement and scale invite museum visitors to create new relationships with the forests and plants in their daily environment. I’m excited to share more as the work begins.”
Akashi’s work emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording moments in time alongside personal and social histories. Her practice is characterized by a rigorous approach to research, deft manual skill, a reverence for process and materials, and formal play. Akashi is perpetually studying new ways of making, such as glass-blowing, casting, candle-making, and stone carving. Her works range across intricate glass-blown flowers and bronze casts of plantlife, to lifesize sculptures of her body made in polished travertine and animations of shells of extinct species.
"From her first site visit, Kelly has been asking good questions about the region's ecology and natural history and immediately reached out to college biologists and forestry experts to inform her proposal,” said Pamela Franks, the Class of 1956 Director of WCMA. “We are excited that her developing project engages such a wide array of disciplines, from biology, botany, ecology, and environmental studies to scientific imaging, public policy, migration, and history.”
Akashi was born in 1983 in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design in 2006 and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014. She also studied at the prestigious Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2010. Akashi was the Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School for 2025. Recent solo exhibitions include Kelly Akashi–Converging Figures, Fondazione Furla Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy (13 September–December 8 2024), and Kelly Akashi: Encounters at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA (September 30, 2023–June 15, 2024). Her 10-year survey, Formations, which began at the San José Museum of Art in 2022, travelled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and then to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through 2024.
Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, USA; Sifang Museum, Nanjing, China, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and X Museum, Beijing, China, among others.
The new commission builds on a long tradition at WCMA and Williams of integrating artwork into campus life. Works of art from WCMA’s collection can be found across the campus. These sculptures and installations choreograph unexpected and informal encounters with art into the daily lives of students, residents, and visitors.
Now an iconic, well-loved artwork, Louise Bourgeois’s Eyes has welcomed visitors to WCMA since 2001, when it was commissioned for the museum’s 75th anniversary. Eyes will remain embedded in the landscape outside Lawrence Hall, which will continue to be the home of the Art History wing of the Art Department and a future hub of student-led arts spaces, maker spaces, rehearsal, performance and exhibition spaces.
