Spotlight Talks | Jim Dow & Dell Hamilton

Join exhibition co-organizers 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 Marie Hamilton‘s expansive multi-media practice includes curatorial projects as well as painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and photography. She is also known for her work in performance art, which has been featured at the MFA Boston, the Clark Art Institute, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In 2019, she was a participating artist in the “Ríos Intermitentes” exhibition curated by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons for the Havana Biennial. In 2021, she was also a recipient of the ICA/Boston’s James and Audrey Foster Prize. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, Art in America, NKA: Contemporary Journal of African Art, and, most recently, in Kimberly Juanita Brown’s latest book, Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning (MIT Press, 2025). She is currently the acting director of the Alain Locke Gallery at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her work is also in the collections of Google, Tufts University, and the MIT List Visual Art Center.

Image: Courtesy of Jim Dow.