cultural OFFERINGS

Distinguished guest artists, filmmakers, and scholars regularly visit the Five Colleges to lecture and meet with students, give performances, or read from their work. The music departments jointly hosts in alternative years an outstanding composer and musicologist-in-residence for a week. In alternate years, a Five College choral festival brings together all the choral groups for a roof-raising concert. A Five College opera is performed each third year. The theater departments hold open houses for all productions and sponsor a Five College Mulitcultural Theater program.

Museums10

A dynamic collection of ten museums that inspire, engage and enrich their communities through shared experiences of art, literature, history and the natural world is also affiliated with the Five College Consortium. Most are located on our campuses:

• Beneski Museum of Natural History, Amherst College

• The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Hampshire College

Anna studied social and cultural anthropology, German language, and book arts. In addition to her studies at Hampshire, she took eight classes across the Five Colleges and borrowed dozens of books from the Consortium libraries. Her Div III combined interests in anthropology and the book arts culminating in a thesis on the connections between the trend of contemporary conservative homeschooling and a pioneer ethos of whitewashed history idealized through 20th-century children’s literature such as The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Through a class at Mount Holyoke, she bound her Div III into an artist’s book, making handmade paper, printing the thesis onto the paper, adding poetry and illustrations, and binding the whole thing. Artist books at Smith College were invaluable to her study of the book as art.

• Hampshire College Art Gallery

• Mead Art Museum at Amherst College

• Mount Holyoke College Art Museum

• Smith College Museum of Art

• University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMass

• Yiddish Book Center, Hampshire College

Nearby are the Emily Dickinson Museum and Historic Deerfield.