Our culture does not tell us about shape. Our culture does not give us enough words to express fully the sensory realm. And there’s a reason for that. … For 200 years, the primary aesthetic experience in America was verbal, not visual. … American culture is historically Puritan. … Our mood, culturally, begins in the relentlessly Puritan space of the Puritan Meeting House … a vessel for the spoken word.”
—Michael Lewis, the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art at Williams, speaking about “Visual Images in a Verbal Culture” during the first-ever Williams Thinking, a public lecture series launched over the summer.
See President Adam Falk’s “Teaching and Scholarship” for more on Williams Thinking.
