News

In recent years as the critical emphasis on “medium specificity” in art historical practice has waned, it has been replaced by a scholarly focus on the interplay between various media. The replacement raises a number of critical questions about intermediality: How do artists exchange motifs and tropes from one kind of art to another? How do different media play against each other? Can the integration of aesthetic concepts from different media interfere with each other? How might experiences with different media spark new and surprising experiences for audiences and artists alike?

The symposium Across the Divide: Intermediality and American Art takes these questions as a point of departure for an investigation of this practice in American art. Scholars drawn from various disciplines, including history, art history, American studies, and English will address, among other issues, racial caricature, violence, memory making, and national identity. To encourage lively discussions and productive conversations around the issue of intermediality, each speaker’s presentation will be followed by remarks by a discussant whose research and teaching interests resonate with the concerns of the presenter.

For a complete schedule, please visit http://www.bowdoin.edu/symposia/across-the-divide/schedule.shtml

Sponsored by: the Office of the Dean for Academic Affairs, Department of Art History, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art. 

Olive Oil is a substance that has been processed and consumed by humans in the Mediterranean region for millennia. Today, olive oil is found around the world including Brunswick, Maine, where the nearest olive tree is more than 1000 miles away.  Still, the Mediterranean region, particularly Spain, remains the major supplier of oil to the rest of the world. 

What is it about the molecular composition of olive oil that makes it distinct from other types of fats and oils such as corn oil, butter, or canola oil? How are we to read the labels, and what are the chemical differences in oils labeled as “extra virgin” or “pure” or “light?”  Is this important to the quality of the oil? Why has the American Heart Association characterized extra virgin olive oil as a “heart healthy oil” and recommends consumption of about four tablespoons (60 ml) per day?” Why do some people say that the oil should not be used for frying? What are scientists doing to help consumers by identifying fraudulently produced oils or oils that might no longer be extra virgin?  

Patricia O'Hara will explore these and many other interesting questions to find out that, as in many things, the answers lie in an understanding of the chemistry of the oil.

O'Hara is Amada and Lisa Cross Professor of Chemistry at Amherst College. She received her BA in chemistry at Adelphi University and her PhD in biophysical chemistry at Columbia. 

Saxophonist Melissa Aldana was the first female instrumentalist and first South American to win the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2013.  Since then she has wowed audiences all around the world with her trio at top festivals and venues like Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, Blue Note in New York City, Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy and many more. Her latest album is Back Home released on the Wommusic label on March 11, 2016, and featuring her trio in a daring program of originals and standards.

Artist L.J. Roberts, whose work Portrait of Deb is included in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, speaks about the expression of LGBT identity through the visual arts.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Free and open to the public.

Photo:  L.J. Roberts

Richard Saunders '70 discusses the emergence of portrait abstraction in the context of the broader history of American portraiture. 

Saunders is a Walter Cerf Distinguished College Professor and director at Middlebury College Museum of Art. He is also an art historian and author of the recently published American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity (2016). He received his BA from Bowdoin, his MA in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware, and MA, M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale.


Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Free and open to the public.

Watch this event live at bowdoin.edu/live
 

George Lopez,  Bowdoin's Beckwith Artist-in-Residence, performs an evening of music associated with exhibitions on view. 

(The same program will be performed at the 5:00 p.m. concert)

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. 

This event is free, but tickets are required as seating is limited.  For ticket information, please call 207-725-3276.

George Lopez,  Bowdoin's Beckwith Artist-in-Residence, performs an evening of music associated with exhibitions on view.

(The same program will be performed at the 5:00 p.m. concert)

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

This event is free, but tickets are required as seating is limited.  For ticket information, please call 207-725-3276.

How do art and material culture reflect religious beliefs and practices in the ancient world? What do objects contribute to our understanding of the meaning and history of the term 'religion'?  Todd Berzon, assistant professor of religion, James Higginbotham, associate professor of classics, associate curator for the ancient collection, and Joachim Homann, curator, lead a discussion of these issues.  Organized in conjunction with the faculty symposium 'Religion before Religion'.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Free and open to the public.

Illustration:  The Presentation of the Virgin, ca. 1550, oil on panel by school of Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

In ancient Rome, civic aqueducts, spectacular though they may have been, primarily served the public fountains and baths enjoyed by urban residents. Rural residents depended on local sources for agriculture, industry, and domestic use. In both environments, competition over water was a common: in fact, the English word “rival” is derived from the Roman word rivalis, or “a person who shared a canal.” The Romans did not have sufficient technology to manage this competition because they were unable to measure and meter the volume of flow accurately. Instead, they relied on legal institutions buttressed by social norms and economic incentives to manage competition for water.

Cynthia Bannon will examine water supply at the local level, with three case studies from the Roman world that illustrate the use of property rights to manage local water supplies: (1) the private property regime of servitudes; (2) a small public aqueduct in Venafro in south-central Italy; (3) an irrigation community on the Ebro river in Spain that is a public/private hybrid. For each system, she will evaluate ownership, access, community, and enforcement to reconstruct the interplay between law and social relationships in these local water communities.

Cynthia J. Bannon is professor of classical studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her current research investigates local water communities in the Roman empire, building on her second book, Gardens and Neighbors: Private Water Rights in Roman Italy (University of Michigan Press, 2009). She enjoys teaching Latin, Roman law, and Roman civilization courses.  

Sponsored by the Department of Classics, with support from the Departments of Government & Legal Studies, History, and the Jasper Jacob Stahl Lectureship. 

This event is free and open to the public.

The artist Hasan Elahi, current Guggenheim Fellow whose work is included in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Art and Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today at the Museum of Art, discusses his practice and the larger question of visual documentation and the representation of identity in the post-9/11 era.

Elahi is a Bangladeshi-born American interdisciplinary media artist with a focus on technology and media and their social implications. 

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Free and open to the public.

 

The meaning of manliness for Romans and Jews points to a common anxiety over Greek youth culture: the vulnerable young male versus the lure of the gymnasium. Judean emulation of Rome within a shared elite discourse tells us much about the complex nature of Hellenistic-period Judea and Rome, and the Hellenistic World as a whole.   

In this talk, Kevin Osterloh will explore portrayals of Jewish manliness inspired by the redefinition of Roman masculinity that came at the expense of the Greek effeminate other.       

Osterloh is assistant professor in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. He specializes in ancient Judaica and the society and politics of the Greco-Roman world. His book project, Virtuous Sons of Abraham: Judean Identity in a Hellenistic World under Rome examines the reinvention of Jewish identity in the Hellenistic period amidst a complex conversation between Jews, Greeks and Romans. 

This talk is free and open to the public.  

Sponsored by the Department of Classics, with support from the Departments of Religion and History, the Mediterranean Studies and Medieval & Early Modern Studies programs, and the Jasper Jacob Stahl Lectureship.

A newly installed selection of works from the Museum's collection provides intriguing perspectives on art and culture of the nineteenth century. Laura Sprague, consulting curator of decorative arts, and Joachim Homann, curator, discuss how objects on view, ranging from American paintings and sculpture to selections of European, Asian, and tribal art, reflect the diversity of American society and its international relations.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Free and open to the public.

Illustration: Medee, Theatre de la Renaissance, Sarah Bernhardt, 1898, (detail), lithograph, by Alphonse Mucha. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  

The evening will feature the New England premiere of Don't Blink-Robert Frank, the 2016 documentary about Robert Frank, who revolutionized photography and independent film. Produced by Laura Israel, the film is introduced by Frank Goodyear, co-director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and is followed by a discussion with Tricia Welsch, professor of cinema studies.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition, Robert Frank: Sideways.

Free and open to the public.

illustration: Photo of Robert Frank by Lisa Rinzler, copyright Assemblage Films LLC

What good has a liberal arts education ever really done anyone? Humanists in our own time confront this question (or accusation) regularly, but skeptics have been leveling it since antiquity. Students and admirers of the classical tradition have responded with particular dynamism and creativity in all these centuries; and some of their most innovative and inspiring answers emerged in Renaissance Italy.

This presentation focuses on two Venetians of the Renaissance era, Laura Cereta (1469-1499) and Francesco Longo (1506-1576). Cereta, a writer of some renown in her own time but unknown today except to specialists, used her encounters with old books, and especially with Cicero’s Familiar Letters, to build an unusual life as a public intellectual and defender of women. Our second protagonist, a physician with no fame either in his own time or (as yet) in ours, built his life in the face of economic collapse, epidemic disease, and constant warfare using the mental, emotional, and ethical tools furnished by his library — above all, those he found in Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia. In their different ways, the stirring political arguments in Cereta’s Latin letters and the quiet philosophical reflections in Longo’s vernacular final testaments both reveal the vital importance of commerce with the classics.

Listening carefully to these Renaissance Italians, and meeting a few of their like-minded contemporaries, we find fresh evidence that the humanities may indeed be, as proponents have always claimed, essential for living (and dying) well.

Sarah Ross is associate professor and director of the history core in the history department at Boston College. Her research focuses on Renaissance Europe, especially in Italy. She earned her AB at Bowdoin, and her MA and PhD at Northwestern University. 

Presented by Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Steff Chavez '17, curator of the exhibition, and Frank Goodyear, co-director of the Museum of Art, will speak about the exhibition Where do I go from here? Snapshots of Twentieth-Century Life. 

The exhibition features a selection of American vernacular photographs recently donated to the Museum and explores how amateur photographers circumvented - and at times unsettled - assumptions about what a portrait might be.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Free and open to the public.

Illustration: Hold Up, ca. 1950, artist unknown. Promised gift of Peter Cohen to the BCMA.