This exhibition shares three films artist and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt shot near his home in midcoast Maine: "Daisy" (1966), "The Apple" (1967), and "Caterpillar" (1973). Together, these shorts reveal the playful, contemplative, and collaborative aspects of the artist’s work and pay homage to the state’s natural landscapes.
In 1966, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art presented an exhibition of photographs by John McKee titled "As Maine Goes." The exhibition featured a series of black-and-white photographs that starkly depicted the environmental degradation of Maine’s coastal landscapes, highlighting issues such as pollution, seaside dumps, and the impact of unchecked development. Almost 60 years later, the Museum is refreshing McKee’s original exhibition in a new presentation that is no less relevant in the face of the changing climate and its impact on Maine.
In January 1944, at the height of World War II, Gordon Parks photographed Herklas Brown, owner of the general store and Esso gas station in Somerville, Maine. These 65 photographs, which are being exhibited at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation, highlight an important early chapter in Parks’ career—before he joined Life magazine in 1948 and began to achieve wider recognition.
This exhibition focuses on Ann Craven’s moon paintings, executed from 2020 through 2024. Craven begins by painting the moon plein air and afterwards scales her composition based on her initial observation. Over the course of the exhibition, three curators will collaborate with the artist to execute three distinct presentations of her moon paintings. The exhibition, like the moon itself, will evolve over time, bearing the traces of the moon’s “celestial journey” within the universe of the gallery.
Featuring works from the collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art spanning nearly two thousand years —from approximately 1300 BCE to 400 CE—Flora et Fauna examines how ancient Mediterranean societies understood and depicted the natural world.
Members of Bowdoin College’s Class of 1825, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow created some of the most popular literary works in nineteenth-century America. In response to Hawthorne's novels and Longfellow's poetry, artists created many remarkable paintings, sculpture, and prints. Conversely, the authors drew inspiration from art and objects of all ages, often using them as narrative devices. This exhibition explores how the two authors and their compelling stories influenced American visual culture during this period.
This exhibition features thirty-five photographs—self-portraits or portraits of other artists—which reflect radically new propositions for what a portrait might be. They foreground the idea that identity is fluid, bodies are malleable, and strangeness is common. Whether confessional or slyly secretive, each of these photographs offers new revelations to the viewer. Working against systems meant to define, categorize, and normalize, these artists have reclaimed the portrait to express themselves and realize a vision of self otherwise foreclosed.
"Currents: Art Since 1875" tells new stories, asks provocative questions, and challenges assumptions about the human experience through works of twentieth and twenty-first century art.
This exhibition of art in the Atlantic World considers empire-building across Europe, North America, and their colonies, and how it shaped interconnected global networks from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
