Image: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College is presenting ‘A Feeling of With,’ a year-long collections exhibition examining relationships between the self, other people, nature, language, mathematics and art. The exhibition is on view at the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, from August 8, 2026, through July 18, 2027.
Installed in the museum’s Malloy Wing, the exhibition brings together works from the Tang collection across three related presentations. Its central premise is that relation functions both as a subject and as a structure: the selected artworks consider connection, community and belonging while inviting viewers to examine how people understand themselves and the world around them.
The project is also framed as an example of the teaching museum’s collections-based approach. It is the second in a series of year-long exhibitions intended to support interdisciplinary teaching and learning for Skidmore’s campus and wider audiences. Curatorial collaboration with faculty provides distinct interpretive perspectives, while the exhibition positions museum objects as tools for developing observation, critical thinking, public speaking and writing across disciplines.
The first section, ‘Behind, Below, Within,’ explores the spatial and emotional implications of three prepositions. The works address ideas of concealment and revelation, enclosure and opening, and movement through time and space. Co-curated with English Professor Mark Mayer and Dance Professor Brian Lawson, the presentation includes works by Sarah Braman, Sarah Cain, Amy Cutler, Jane Irish, William Kentridge, Anya Kielar, Naomi Savage, Mindy Shapero, Dasha Shishkin and William T. Wiley. Among them is Amy Cutler’s ‘Siege’ (2004), a gouache on paper from the Tang collection.
‘Human Nature’ turns to encounters with, and estrangement from, the natural world. Co-curated with Art History Professor Talia Lieber and GIS Professor Nwasinachi Menkiti, it includes artists Atong Atem, Michael Joo, George Osodi, Wendy Red Star, Katy Schimert, Whiting Tennis, Barthélémy Toguo, Fred Tomaselli, Johannes VanDerBeek and William Villalongo, alongside works by unrecorded artists. The section includes Atong Atem’s ‘Fruit of the Earth’ (2016), a digital chromogenic print, and Whiting Tennis’s ‘Wilderness Painting’ (2011), made with acrylic and collage on canvas.
The third presentation, ‘The Forms of Things Unknown,’ considers the connections people construct between sacred experience, pattern, numbers and geometry. Its co-curators are Mathematics Professor and Director of the First Year Experience Rachel Roe-Dale and Religious Studies Professor Ryan Overbey. Works include Dorothy Dehner’s ‘Lunar Series #4’ (1970–71), Vera Molnár’s ‘Structure de Quadrilatères (Square Structures)’ (1985), Lenore Tawney’s ‘Shrine I’ and ‘Shrine II’ (both 1995), and a Tibetan mandala by an unrecorded artist.
‘A Feeling of With’ is organized by Rachel Seligman, the Tang’s Malloy Curator, with Mayer, Lawson, Lieber, Menkiti, Roe-Dale and Overbey. The exhibition is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Friends of the Tang. A curator’s tour is scheduled for October 22, while the museum lists ‘A Feeling of With’ as on view through July 18, 2027.
