The Immortal Magu & The Worlds of Ilsa Bing

Join MA-NMWA for a curator led-tour with Dr. Yuhua Ding, Kemper Assistant Curator of Collections and Academic Affairs, of The Immortal Magu: A Sixteenth Century Painting Up Close. The painted scroll was donated to Wellesley in 1983 by Lois Levin, Class of 1942. It depicts Magu 麻姑, a legendary Taoist immortal deity associated with longevity and beauty. In 2023 the Davis Museum launched a 2-year project to preserve this unique painting for generations to come, an effort led by world-renowned paintings conservator Jing Gao, which combined traditional and innovative approaches to the restoration and the new mounting.

Dr. Ding will also walk us through the exhibition of The Worlds of Ilsa Bing. Featuring a recent gift of vintage photographs by the groundbreaking photographer Ilse Bing (1899-1998), this exhibition explores the development of the photographic medium in the mid-twentieth century. The era in which Bing came to prominence saw the birth of the journalistic photo-essay, the launch of the 35-mm Leica camera, and experiments with abstract photograms and solarization. Artists led critical debates over how photography should remain true to itself as a medium of and for the modern world. From Frankfurt to Paris to New York City, Bing was at the center of it all, carving out a place for herself as “Queen of the Leica” in a male-dominated world of image making.