Calendar of Events

Calendar of Events

Calendar Archive

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Robert Lehman Lecture
Dr. Laurence B. Kanter
Curator-in-Charge, Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of Early European Art, Yale University Art Gallery

Fra Angelico, Bowdoin College
Scenes from "Il ninfale fiesolano" ("The Nymphs of Fiesole")
tempera on panel, 11 3/8 x 49 13/16 inches.
Bowdoin College Museum of Art

"Boccaccio, Fra Angelico, and Bowdoin: A Problem in Connoisseurship"

7 PM Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center

Link: Campus News: Bowdoin Fra Angelico Panel Included in Met Exhibition

Thursday, October 5, 2006
Anne Dunlop
Assistant Professor of Art History, Yale University
"Petrarch and Painted Love."
This talk examines the links of love, pathology, and early-Renaissance models of painting. It focuses especially on the Chamber of Love in the castle of Sabbionara d'Avio, near Verona, done about 1340. Such a room shows a conception of painting based in the permeability of the body in sight, a conception similar to ideas of love in period. As love acquired a pathology in the early Renaissance, this model of painting was also scrutinized, especially by Petrarch and his circle, and the first theorizations of Alberti and others can be seen partly as defensive reactions.
7 PM, Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center

Clif Olds: Edith Cleaves Barry Professor of the History & Criticism of Art, EmeritusWednesday, February 15, 2006
Fake! The Art of Forging Art
Clifton C. Olds
Edith Cleaves Barry Professor of the History & Criticism of Art, Emeritus
4:15 pm in Beam classroom, Visual Arts Center.

Thursday, March 2
Lehman Lecture by Daniel Walker, Director, The Textile Museum.








Tuesday, April 11
Lehman Lecture by Richard Davis, Professor of Religion, Bard College.
Lives of Indian Images by Richard H. DavisThe Art of the Procession
Richard Davis is Professor of Religion and Director of the Religion Program at Bard College. His book, "Lives of Indian Images," which won the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize in 1999, examines unexpected and illuminating lives of Hindu and other sculptures as they circulated through time and space encountering new audiences and acquiring different meanings. Prof. Davis continues to do research on the intersections of religion and art.
4 pm in Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center.



Charles WylieThursday, February 2
Lecture by Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art
The Photographic in the Contemporary Field
Beam Classroom, VAC
7:00 PM




Art History Independent Study Presentation

Performing Otherness: Mythic Beings, Amerindians and Other ConstructsWHO: Senior Elizabeth Mengesha
WHAT: Independent study presentation, "Performing Otherness: Mythic Beings, Amerindians and Other Constructs"
WHEN: Thursday, Dec. 8th 2005 at 4 PM
WHERE: Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center.
The presentation examines the performance art (and some other forms of art) of Adrian Piper and Coco Fusco. She will discuss the ways these artists address race politics, cultural identity, colonial fantasies, and inter-cultural exchange, among other issues. It should be an interesting presentation.

Wednesday, October 12
AMY McNAIR
Art History / Asian Studies Lecture
4:00 pm Beam Classroom, VAC

November 17, Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., Kresge Auditorium
Lehman Lecture
Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania
Larry Silver: East is EastEast is East
Images of the Turk in German Art of the Reformation Era
During the Renaissance, the empire of the Ottoman Turks posed a grave military and cultural threat to the Christian nations of Europe. Working on the frontiers formed by the Danube River and the Mediterranean Sea, the artists of the Holy Roman Empire were eyewitnesses to this epoch-shaping conflict. This lecture will present late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century imagery that depicts that cultural confrontation. It will discuss works by Albrecht Dürer and other celebrated artists of the period, who sought (either through on-site inspection or through their imaginations) to represent Turks in peace and war. A close inspection of such works reveals that they comprise a range of western responses to the Ottoman threat, at times dealing with the Turkish "Other" by means of ethnographic and geographic exactitude, on other occasions picturing a demonized and alien enemy. In short, the western attitudes towards Islam that these works display offer intriguing - and instructive - parallels to present-day concerns.

Past speakers have included:

David P. Becker:
"Fact and Fantasy in the Art of Rodolphe Bresdin"
David P. Becker: "Fact and Fantasy in the Art of Rodolphe Bresdin"


  • psychologist Howard Gardner
  • art historians Marvin Eisenberg and Albert Elsen.
  • Linda Nochlin
  • Svetlana Alpers
  • David P. Becker: "Fact and Fantasy in the Art of Rodolphe Bresdin"
  • Arthur Danto
  • Leo Steinberg
  • Mary Ellen Miller
  • Peter Schjeldahl
  • Clifford Ackley
  • Stephen Addiss.

Thursday. October 14
"Fact and Fantasy in the Art of Rodolphe Bresdin" by David P. Becker, Independent Curator and Scholar. Sponsored by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Wed. Sept. 15
Stephen Perkinson "French Painting Begins with a Portrait: Nationalism and the History of Portraiture in France, from 1350 to the Present"
Faculty Seminar Series
Main Lounge, Moulton Union
12:00-1:00 p.m.

September 30, Monday, 7:00 p.m., Kresge Auditorium
Howard Gardner, psychologist.
"Good Work in Education"
Brodie Lecture for Education, Art History co-sponsor

Lehman Lecture Fall 2004October 18, Monday, 7:30 p.m., Kresge Auditorium
Lehman Lecture
Natalie Kampen, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women's Studies & Art History, Barnard College
Gender and Family in Late Antique Art (300-500 C.E.)

October 27, Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., Kresge Auditorium
Vincent Katz, author , Editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, MIT Press, 2003
"Journey To Black Mountain"
Discussion, in part, of his personal involvement with Black Mountain, how that evolved, as well as, certainly, a discussion of how he sees the importance of the institution in the development of Modernist ideas in American art. He would discuss how the philosophy of the institution affected all the arts at Black Mountain, and what lessons we may be able to take from that philosophy today.

Robert Lehman Lectureship Program
In the mid-1980s the Robert Lehman Foundation awarded a generous grant to Bowdoin to fund the Robert Lehman Lectureship Program.

The Lectureship enriches the curriculum in Art History and Visual Arts and adds significantly to the co-curricular life of the college and the community through presentations by noted art historians, art critics and artists. This extraordinary grant from the Lehman Foundation opens a window on the current international art world and makes the research of distinguished scholars accessible to a wide audience. When the Foundation inaugurated the lectureship at Bowdoin, it stated its intent "to provide a general audience with increased knowledge, appreciation, and enjoyment of the visual arts." The Department of Art carries out this charge by sponsoring from one to as many as five lectures a year.

The first speakers invited for the 1985-86 academic year, who offered three different perspectives on the concept of artistic creativity, were psychologist Howard Gardner, art historians Marvin Eisenberg and Albert Elsen.

Other past lecturers have included: Linda Nochlin, Svetlana Alpers, Arthur Danto, Leo Steinberg, Mary Ellen Miller, Peter Schjeldahl, Clifford Ackley, and Stephen Addiss.