Visual Arts

Distinguished linguist and photographer, Kuo-ming Sung is Associate Professor and Chair at Lawrence University.

Prof. Sung has published several books on Tibet and the Tibetan language, and is currently working on a textbook of Colloquial Lhasa Tibetan language.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Asian Studies Program at Bowdoin.

Free and Open to the Public.

Distinguished linguist and photographer, Kuo-ming Sung is Associate Professor and Chair at Lawrence University.

Prof. Sung has published several books on Tibet and the Tibetan language, and is currently working on a textbook of Colloquial Lhasa Tibetan language.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Asian Studies Program at Bowdoin.

Free and Open to the Public.

Hank Lentfer will discuss the challenges of conservation work in our increasingly consumptive culture, and how having an attachment to place and community can give us greater hope for the future. Using images and sounds gathered from a life embedded on Alaska's wild edge, Hank will explore the role of beauty and wonder to inspire the work of conservation.

Hosted at Bowdoin by the English and History Departments and the Environmental Studies Program. Offered collaboratively by the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust & The Nature Conservancy. Open to the public free of charge.

Norman Vorano, curator of Contemporary Inuit Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, in Gatineau, Quebec, will deliver a lecture entitled Things that Matter: How Inuit Artists Create Meaning on April 10 at 7 pm in the Visual Arts Center, Kresge Auditorium on the Bowdoin College campus. The lecture marks the opening of The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum’s newest exhibit, Spirits of Land, Air, and Water: Antler Carvings from the Robert and Judith Toll Collection. Following the talk the museum will host a reception at 8 pm in the foyer of Hubbard Hall.Guests will also be able to tour the exhibit at that time.

Vorano, who holds a degree in Interdisciplinary Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, has worked with Inuit art and Inuit artists for over a decade. He has studied the history of Inuit printmaking, the influence of Japanese printers and printmaking on Inuit printmakers, and the many ways in which Inuit art is part of the modern world. At the Museum of Civilization he curated the exhibit Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration; Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic, and the online exhibit Inuit Prints from Cape Dorset.

“We are very excited to have Dr. Vorano here to deliver what promises to be a very interesting and lively talk,” reports curator Genevieve LeMoine, “His perspective on the place of art in Inuit society, and in the south, is refreshing and I’m sure he will have interesting stories about his work with the artists.” Verano’s talk will examine the ways that Inuit artists use their art to create meaning for themselves, for their communities, and for their southern audiences.

Following the talk guests will be welcomed to the new exhibit, which features over 30 caribou antler carvings from the Canadian Arctic, as well as a selection of Inuit prints highlighting the importance of caribou in Inuit culture. 

For more information visit our web page at www.bowdoin.edu/arctic-museum  or call 207-725-3416.

Barbara Putnam is the 2012-2013 Coastal Studies Artist in residence.

What is the path that an individual takes that leads to a life of art influenced by science? From the Italian Alps to the Arctic, from research station in Manitoba to Bowdoin, this talk will take you on a visual tour of how science informs artistic practice and development.

See the Bowdoin news article about Barbara's class: Drawing on Science.

Dr. Winnie Wong, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, explores the unlikely connections among photojournalism, documentary photography, and conceptual art in depictions of Dafen village, the world's largest production center for hand-painted art products.

This lecture explores the visual rhetorics of manual labor and creativity in China's most famous cultural site and traces the value of "truth" in American journalists', artists', and photographers' representations of China.

Sponsored by the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, the Asian Studies Program, and the Department of Art History.

Open to the public and free of charge.

An interdisciplinary faculty-facilitated conversation on what Bowdoin students can do about climate change and how different fields can contribute to the conversation. Moderated by President Barry Mills and led by a panel featuring Casey Meehan (Education), David Collings (English, Gay and Lesbian Studies), Emily Peterman (EOS), Laura Henry (Government), Mary Lou Zeeman (Math), Barbara Putnam (Visual Arts), and Katy Longley (Bowdoin's Chief Financial and Administrative Officer).

"Down by the River: Photographing American Waterways 40 Years after the Clean Water Act" by Michael Kolster, associate professor of art.

“Mike Calway-Fagen: A Search-Based Practice.” The lecture is sponsored by the Art Department, Lectures and Concerts Committee and the Art Club.

"My conceptual interests deal with some big ideas, eeking out space to understand questions like human worth and insignificance, existence as animals, faith, time, death, love, and in large part tie together many of these far flung epicentric points. We are in jeopardy of losing our collective imagination, any meaningful contact with the relevance of daydreaming, and becoming exceedingly more grounded. I make things for people  to slow down, look, listen, think, and feel."

His website is:
http://mikecalway-fagen.com/
Sponsored by The Art Department, Lecture and Concerts Committee and the Art Club.

"Collaborative Printmaking and the Master Printer"

Peter Pettengill

Peter Pettengill is a master printmaster and the founder of Wingate Studio in Hinsdale, New Hampshire.  Wingate publishes and produces original etchings, monotypes, and relief prints in collaboration with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Neil Welliver, and Walton Ford. Prints editioned by the studio are in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, and The Portland Museum of Art. Pettengill will speak about his studio practice and the process of collaboration with contemporary artists. Supported by the Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project, he will spend this week working with Coastal Studies Artist-in-Residence Barbara Putnam and Bowdoin students in the Burnett Printmaking Studio.

Sponsored and presented by the Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project
http://learn.bowdoin.edu/courses/visual-arts-marvin-bileck-printmaking-project/

Katharine J. Watson, director emerita, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Aprile Gallant, Smith College Museum of Art, followed by a viewing of selected prints from David Becker's bequest.


You are invited to attend this symposium presented in conjunction with Printmaking ABC: In Memoriam David P. Becker on view through March 24, 2013. Speakers will introduce aspects of the printmaking tradition that exemplify the joys and rewards of close looking and in-depth study. Printmaking ABC comprises masterly prints from Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt to David Hockney and Mel Chin and is drawn from the collection of 1,500 works of art given and bequeathed to Bowdoin by David Becker, Class of 1970. David Becker, scholar, collector, and educator, is remembered at Bowdoin as a trustee, quiet philanthropist, and advocate for the Museum of Art.

This is the first day of the exhibition "The Fixed Image: History and Process in American Photography" in the Becker Gallery at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

The exhibition highlights technical developments of photographic processes and their intersections with cultural and historical moments in the United States. Organized in connection with Dana Byrd's course ARTH 244: Shoot, Snap, Instagram: A History of Photography in America.

The exhibition continues through March 3, 2013.

Image: Gurney & Son, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, albumen print. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

This selection of masterly prints from Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt to David Hockney and Jasper Johns is drawn from the collection of 1,500 prints given and bequeathed by Bowdoin alumnus David P. Becker, class of 1970.

Becker, a former trustee of the College, was an internationally recognized print scholar whose expertise encompassed drawings, illustrated books, and writing manuals. Throughout his life, he collected with the intent to build a comprehensive teaching resource for his alma mater.

This exhibition will introduce visitors to the techniques, themes, and stylistic developments of western printmaking since the Renaissance. The exhibition is on view through March 10, 2013.

Organized on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College, the exhibition "Fantastic Stories: The Supernatural in Nineteenth-century Japanese Prints" features forty prints by well-known artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kawanabe Kyosai, Utagawa Kunisada, and Katsushika Hokusai. Viewers will delve into the world of mythical creatures and ghostly apparitions in the Edo period. The exhibition continues through March 3, 2013.

Image: Utagawa Kunisada, Japanese, 1786-1865, The Cat Witch, color woodblock (detail).

"Markets and Networks: An Art Historian's Journey into the Digital Landscape"

Dr. Anne Helmreich, Senior Program Office, Getty Foundation (Associate Professor of Art History, Case Western Reserve University, on leave)

Dr. Helmreich has published widely on British art, including work on garden history, landscape painting, and the history of London's art market. She is currently serving as a Senior Program Officer at the Getty Foundation, where one of her areas of specialization is the digital humanities. She will speak about her most recent scholarship, which uses social network analysis to visualize and interpret the international art market in the late 19th century. She will also offer her perspective on the present condition and future of the digital humanities, and the ways in which art historians and other humanists might integrate computational methodologies into their own work.


The lecture is part of the "Computation and the Liberal Arts Colloquium Series," funded by the Office of the Dean for Academic Affairs.

First day for the exhibition: "We Never See Anything Clearly": John Ruskin and Landscape Painting, 1840s-1870s.

John Ruskin (1819-1900), a prominent English art critic of the Victorian era, discussed in his writings possibilities for the reconciliation of two adverse trends in British art of his time: the atmospheric effects that characterize art by J.M.W. Turner and his circle and the heightened detail cherished by the Pre-Raphaelites and their emulators.

The exhibition, drawn from the permanent collection, features several of Ruskin's own drawings and those of English and American artists whose struggles with pictorial detail and effect echoed his own.

Art majors Ben Livingston, class of 2013, and Ursula Moreno-VanderLaan, class of 2013, worked with Pamela Fletcher, Associate Professor of Art History, to research and organize the exhibition, as part of Bowdoin College course ART 352, The Pre-Raphaelites.

The exhibition will be on view in the Becker Gallery at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through December 23, 2012.

Image: John Ruskin, English, 1819-1900. Bellinzona, 1858, watercolor and gouache over graphite. Gift of Miss Susan Dwight Bliss.

A festive reception to celebrate fall exhibitions, including In a New Light: American and European Masters; In Dialogue: Art from Bowdoin and Colgate Collections; Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography; The Renaissance and the Revival of Classical Antiquity; Simply Divine: Gods and Demigods in the Ancient Mediterranean; "We Never See Anything Clearly": John Ruskin and Landscape Painting, 1840s-1870s; and William Wegman: Hello Nature, which closes October 21.

All programs and exhibitions presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art are open to the public free of charge. Museum hours are Tuesday-Saturday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday: 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; Sunday: Special hours on Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. through October 21, 2012, for the William Wegman exhibition. Closed on Mondays and national holidays.

Artist William Wegman will return to campus on Thursday, October 18, for "William Wegman in Conversation: Performance, Process, and Early Video Art" at 4:30 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center. Wegman will be joined for the discussion by Lori Zippay, executive director of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York City. Wegman first established himself within the contexts of video and performance art in the 1970s. In conversation with Zippay, he will comment on a selection of his early films and explain how they gave rise to and influenced his current artistic practice.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art's Fall Open House will follow the talk, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the museum. This festive reception celebrates all the fall exhibitions on view, including William Wegman: Hello Nature (which closes Oct. 21) and Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography.

All programs and exhibitions presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art are open to the public free of charge. Museum hours are Tuesday-Saturday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday: 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; Sunday: Special hours on Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. through October 21, 2012, for the William Wegman exhibition. Closed on Mondays and national holidays.

Isabelle Smeets, Dutch Artist and member of BIOMODD (NYC⁴).

She will talk about her involvement with BIOMODD, a multifaceted socially engaged art installation that finds meaningful relationships between biology, computers and people. On the most basic level, Biomodd creates symbiotic relationships between plants and computers, and ignites conversations among the community around them. Another project she will discuss is a conceptual architectural project called "A Watchtower of Nothingness."

The event is co-sponsored by the Art, Biology and Computer Science Departments and the Environmental Studies Program.

kathbradford.com

McKee Grant and Kaempfer Fund Recipients
James Boening, Becky Rosen and Zara Bowden

Summer Project Student Presentations
October 11, 2012
7 pm
Searles 315

James Boening
The Weekender; New York City to Millerton

Becky Rosen
Beyond V4: Exploring Identity and Recognition

Zara Bowden
Street Art: A Transformative Reconstruction of Tagged Space


The McKee Photography Grant, supported by the McKee Fund for Photography, an endowed fund established in 2003 to augment the photography offerings within the Visual Arts Department at Bowdoin College, is intended to support annually one student photography project during the summer months and a public lecture and exhibition of the project upon completion in the fall. 

Susan McHugh, associate professor, Department of English, University of New England, will deliver this lecture presented in conjunction with the exhibition William Wegman: Hello Nature. Respondent: Daniel Kany, Art Historian and Critic.

Susan McHugh is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines, 2011, in the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series, as well as Dog, 2004, a volume in Reaktion Books' groundbreaking Animal series.

William Wegman: Hello Nature features over 100 works, including painting, photography, video, and drawing, all produced in or inspired by Maine, where Wegman has summered since the late 1970s. Taken together, this body of work demonstrates Wegman's rigorous and sustained engagement with the natural world and places the artist squarely within the American landscape tradition. On view through October 21, 2012.

lucdemers.com

Liz Chalfin is director of Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, Massachusetts, a studio dedicated to safer and non-toxic printmaking. The imagery in her prints and books explores social, spiritual, and psychological issues through the use of figuration and abstraction. She will talk about her work as an evolving printmaker and studio director. FREE.

SPONSORED BY the Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project at Bowdoin College.

A Day, a deconstructed book of observations on a single day, 2012, intaglio prints, and a detail of a single page spread. Photo by Stephen Petegorsky.

Trevor Fairbrother is the curator of Making a Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography, on view at the Museum of Art. Fairbrother discusses how F. Holland Day expanded the expressive faculties of art photography by posing for his own cameras and those of his distinguished photographer friends. In Fairbrother's interpretation, F. Holland Day appears as a distant ancestor of William Wegman, with whom he shares a penchant for costumes, oblique literary references, and wry humor. Sponsored by: Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Image: Frederick Henry Evans, F. Holland Day in Algerian Costume, ca. 1901, platinum print. F. Holland Day Collection, Norwood Historical Society. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph (c) 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

September 6, 2012 4:30 p.m. Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center. A Roundtable on A River Lost & Found: The Androscoggin River in Time and Place with Anne Whiston Spirn, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History, Princeton University; Matthew Klingle, Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies, Bowdoin College; and Michael Kolster, Associate Professor of Art, Bowdoin College. A River Lost & Found: The Androscoggin River in Time and Place includes photographs and oral histories highlighting the cross-disciplinary research of two Bowdoin faculty members, Matthew Klingle and Michael Kolster. Images and testimonies by local residents revisit the history of a waterway once devastated by industrial contamination and now partially restored. On view through September 16, 2012. (Pictured: Brunswick Rocks, 2011, ambrotype, by Michael Kolster.)