On view now until May 9 2025 in the Sawyer Library Atrium (across from the circulation desk).
As this year marks eighty-five years of radio at Williams College and 68 years of FM broadcasting, the likes of WCFM aims to recollect and put faces to place with this retrospective. How special is it, to see yourself in a DJ from the 1980s as they operate the soundboard during their show, or host an event on the same Paresky lawn you walk through at least five days a week? Radio Active is an ode to the ever expansive archives that radio at the College has been able to create over nearly a century of broadcasting, one that captures an interiority to life at the College that is removed from the rigor of our academic quotidian. College radio was and continues to be a necessary escape from this rigor, and has been attributed to its own community-building within the College. This exhibit is a call to DJs and listeners alike to engage with radio beyond the confines of Prospect basement, and instead revel in radio’s omnipresence through these photographs, fixed moments and sounds from the archives.
91.9 on your dial,
Beza Lulseged, Class of 2025 (Archives, WCFM)
Workshopped with the help of Jessika Drmacich of Williams College Special Collections, Hale Polebaum-Freeman of Sawyer Library, Dahlia Miller, Class of 2027, and Olivia Johnson, Class of 2026
