Excursions

SAMPTA 2023 will host three excursions on Wednesday, between 1:00pm-3:30pm:

  1. A guided tour of the Yale Art Gallery (capped at 30 people)
  2. A tour of Yale’s historic campus (capped at 75 people)
  3. A refreshing hike up East Rock (capped at a large but practically infinite number)

Please indicate which by filling out the appropriate form here by Day 1. Details on each are below.

Yale Art Gallery Guided Tour

Meet at 1111 Chapel St (at York), New Haven. The Tour starts at 1:30pm.

Yale’s well-endowed University Art Gallery features exhibitions drawn from a collection of over 180,000 relics. As their webpage attests:

The Gallery’s encyclopedic collection can engage every interest. Spanning one and a half city blocks and three buildings, the museum features more than 4,000 works on display as well as a rooftop terrace and a sculpture garden. Galleries showcase artworks from ancient times to the present, including vessels from Tang-dynasty China, early Italian paintings, textiles from Borneo, treasures of American art, masks from West Africa, modern and contemporary art, ancient sculptures, masterworks by Degas, van Gogh, and Picasso, and more.

Joseph Turner’s Dort or Dordrecht Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, 1818. Oil on canvas. In the “In a New Light” exhibition of the Yale University Art Gallery

In addition to the permanent collection described above, the YUAG currently has three special exhibitions:

  1. “In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art” (details)
  2. “Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale” (details)
  3. “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” (details)

Yale Tour

Meet at the Yale Visitor Center on 149 Elm Street, New Haven. The tour starts at 1:30pm.

Yale’s campus embodies a certain self-conscious grandeur. Its most iconic buildings were designed after (or, in the case of Sterling Memorial Library, as) cathedrals – but dedicated to what philosopher Robert Pirsig called “The Church of Reason”. In Sterling Memorial Library, for instance, the gargoyles hold pens and books, their leering expressions perfectly matching the feelings of those students studying for midterms.

Yale’s Harkness Tower Yale’s Harkness Tower, photo by Kincaid MacDonald

After witnessing this cluster of collegiate-gothic monuments, you can walk up Hillhouse Avenue, a street shaded by towering elms and stately buildings, which Mark Twain called “the most beautiful street in America.” At the top is the expanse of shining glass and towering brick known to students as “Science Hill”.

East Rock

From the conference venue, the East Rock summit is 3.5 miles of mostly flat walking through the Yale campus and then onto paved neighborhood streets. There is a short, strenuous climb at the end, ascending 300 vertical feet up a series of giant stone steps. The spectacular views from the top look out over New Haven and the Long Island Sound.

View from atop East Rock View from atop East Rock, photo by Kincaid MacDonald

For the return trip, one can either retrace the 3.5 miles, or take a convenient Yale shuttle back to the venue/hotels to shorten the journey. Comfortable walking shoes and a water bottle are recommended.