Visiting Artists and Speakers

The Bowdoin community has had a longstanding dialogue with different kinds of artists from around the world. This cultural connection allows student to interact with many different kinds of ideas, techniques, and approaches in an intimate setting. There is nothing like learning printmaking directly from a master printmaker, collaborating with a graphic novelist to make a comic book, or hearing what is happening in far corners of the artworld on a firsthand basis.

Bowdoin has an ongoing commitment to bringing the highest caliber to campus through Lehman Lectures, a Visiting Artist Fund, a general college Lectures and Concerts series and visiting artists to the campus studios.

Past Highlights

April Vollmer - Fall 2009
April Vollmer is an expert in traditional Moku Hanga, or Japanese woodblock printing, technique. She brought Japanese prints with her to illustrate the history of Moku Hanga. She described the various functions of these prints in society while explaining the advancements in technique that occurred over the centuries.

April VollmerApril VollmerApril Vollmer

This visit came to professor Carrie Scanga's Printmaking I course just after students completed their first series of woodblock prints, cut and printed with the Western method and tools, and designed in the style of the German Expressionists. The Western and Japanese methods for carving and printing are very different. The Japanese method is quite complex, but it allows artists to make amazing uses of color. Her visit gave students the opportunity to learn about the Japanese tools and methods for carving a woodblock, and the students got to create prints from antique carved woodblocks.

Gregory Witt - Fall 2009
Spoke and visited Sculpture 1 and Sculpture 2 with John Bisbee.
A recent graduate of the MFA program at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art, and a participant in this summer’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Gregory Witt has been living and making art in Pittsburgh since 2006. Following short- lived majors ranging from computer science to philosophy, Greg spent most of his near- decade-long undergraduate career at Indiana University building boats and bicycles and digging in the trash, eventually earning a BFA in sculpture in 2005. Apart from the occasional river trip, Greg has spent most of the last five years making electromechanical sculptures that expose unseen realities and ridiculous fantasies of real and made-up natures.

8x10Keliy Anderson-Staley, photographer, wet-plate collodion artist - Sping 2009
Visited with Mike Kolster's photography class and gave lecture in Beam classroom.
Keliy Anderson-Staley, born in 1977, grew up in the woods of northern Maine. She earned a BA from Hampshire College, in Amherst, MA, and an MFA from Hunter College, in New York City. She was a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellow. She has been working on two projects for a few years—a series of wet plate collodion portraits examining the history of portraiture and the representation of ethnicity, called “-Americans,” and “Off the Grid,” a series about families living in owner-built cabins in Maine without electricity or running water. Images from Off the Grid were published in Camerawork Magazine, and the project was featured by Daylight Magazine as a video podcast. Her collodion portraits have been published in New York Magazine, RiseUp and Moment. Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the California Museum of Photography, Rockland County Center for the Arts, Jenkins Johnson Gallery in NYC and San Francisco, and Susan Maasch Fine Art, Portland, Maine. She has taught the wet plate collodion process at The Center for Alternative Photography in NYC, at Hampshire College and Bowdoin College, and at the Bakery Photo Collective in Maine. She currently lives and works in Queens, NY.

scott petermanScott Peterman, photographer - Spring 2009
Scott's work has been shown widely both nationally and internationally including the Tate Modern London, The 10th annual Architecture Exhibit Venice, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Portland Museum of Art and The Decordova Museum, as well as many commercial Galleries. Scott is represented by Higher Pictures in NY. His commercial clients include IBM and Nextel, editorial clients include New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, Men's Journal, Newsweek, CN Portfolio, Forbes, Fortune, Nest, Harpers and Fastcompany among others. Scott's first monograph was published in 2006 by Channel Photographics, and was featured by PDN as one of the best Photo Books of 2006.

Martha MacleishMartha Macleish - Fall 2008
Martha Macleish is an artist whose work explores some of the spatial possibilities that exist between painting and sculpture. She received her MFA from Yale University and has exhibited her work nationally in both solo and group exhibitions. In 2009 she will have her first solo exhibition in New York. She is currently Assistant Professor and Head of Graduate Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Her talk was supported by the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund.

Gideon Bok, painter - Fall  2005
Gideon Bok, painter - Fall 2005Gideon Bok gave an artist talk in Beam classroom with slides and met with 350 students with Mark Wethli and Painting 1 students.
Mr. Bok is an American painter who lives and works in Maine. He earned his B.A. from Hampshire College and his M.F.A. from Yale University. He has gone on to teach painting and drawing at Hampshire.

He is a recipient of a 2004 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship as well as the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Fund Purchase Award through The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005. Bok’s work has been written up in The New York Times, Time Out New York, ARTnews, Art New England, and The Boston Globe.

Abelardo Morrell, photographer, Professor, Mass College of Art - Fall 2007

Allie Humenuk, filmmaker - Fall 2007

Lothar Osterburg, photographer, printmaker, photogravurist - Spring 2006

Charles Wylie, curator, Dallas Museum of Art - Spring 2006

Alison Nordstrom, senior curator, George Eastman House - Spring 2009

Peter Shellenberger, photographer - Fall 2008

Steven Albert
Lennart Anderson
Elise Ansel
Jake Berthot
Brett Bigbee
Lisa Bossi
Katherine Bradford
Bruce Brown
Ben Butler
Steve Cayard
Chaz-Maviyane-Davis
Grace DeGennaro
Mark Dytham
Peter Eisenman
Richard Frances
Sean Foley
Frank Gohlke
Rebecca Goodale
Anne Harris
Alie Humenuk
Robert Irwin
Vincent Katz
Tom Krumpak
Ann Lofquist
Eve Mansdorf
Anne Minich
John Moore
Abe Morell
Barak Olins
Carl Palazzolo
Nick Riggie
Faith Ringgold
Johnnie Ross
Guy Saldanha
Peter Schjeldahl
Bernadette Searle
Beth Sellars
Andrea Sulzer
Deke Weaver