Spotlight Talks | Jim Dow and Dell Hamilton

Join exhibition co-curators Jim Dow and Dell Hamilton for tours of their areas of SMFA at 150: Looking Back, an episodic history of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA).

Renowned photographer and long-time faculty member emeritus Jim Dow will explore work from the community of photographers at the SMFA from the 1970s onward, while artist and curator Dell Hamilton (MFA’12) will discuss the legacies of artistic pedagogies that emerged at the school, from the seminal Black artists and educators trained at the SMFA in the early 20th century to performance art and its development in the latter half of the century.

Jim Dow (b. 1942) earned a BFA in graphic design and MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965 and 1968, respectively. He first gained attention for his panoramic triptychs of baseball stadiums, a project that began with an image he made of Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia, PA, in 1980. To date, Dow has documented more than two hundred major and minor league parks in the United States and Canada. Dow is an internationally exhibited artist and has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, LEF Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been published in American Studies (2011), Marking the Land (2007), Where We Live: Photographs from the Berman Collection (2006) as well as in international magazines and academic and fine art journals. In addition to teaching at Harvard University and Tufts University, Dow has taught photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for over twenty years.

Dell Hamilton (b. 1971) is an artist, writer and independent curator whose performances have been presented to audiences in New York at Five Myles Gallery and Panoply Performance Lab. She has extensively presented her work in the New England area including at the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, as well as at the Clark Art Institute, where she became the first visual artist -in the Clark’s 64-year-history - to present a performance artwork in their galleries. Working across a variety of mediums including performance, video, painting and photography, she uses the body to investigate the social and geopolitical constructions of personal memory, gender, history and citizenship. With roots in Belize, Honduras and the Caribbean she frequently draws upon the colonial and folkloric traditions of the region.

Image: Courtesy of Jim Dow.