This digital exhibition was created by students in Professor Katherine Fein’s course The Art of Weather in spring 2025. The course proposed an art history of weather from the vantage point of our climate crisis, exploring how and to what ends weather has been given visual form across a wide variety of artistic and scientific media. The extraordinary archives of the Amherst College Weather Station served as a jumping off point for engaging with representations of weather in College collections. After visiting Archives & Special Collections, the Beneski Museum of Natural History, and the Mead Art Museum together, students embarked on individual projects about objects of their own choosing. They studied these objects in person, using the close-looking and analytical skills they developed in the classroom, and collaborated with one another to open up dialogues across their projects. By making this digital exhibition public, we hope to contribute to the robust archive here at Amherst College and encourage further investigation into the representation of weather in the past and present.
– Professor Katherine Fein, June 2025
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to many members of the Amherst College community for supporting our work this semester, especially:
- Mimi Dakin and Rachel Jirka in Archives & Special Collections
- Hayley Singleton and Fred Venne at the Beneski Museum of Natural History
- Elias Bradley at the Emily Dickinson Museum
- Sara Smith at Frost Library
- Angie Camarena, Miloslava Hruba, Emily Potter-Ndiaye, and Hannah Richards at the Mead Art Museum
- Max Ansorge in Academic Technology Services
- Ethan Myers in the Writing Center
Further Reading & Listening
In addition to the essays on this site, you are welcome to browse our course bibliography and Spotify playlist.
Prof. Fein and students in The Art of Weather at the Amherst College Weather Station, May 2025