This fall, the Museum of Art has welcomed faculty and students across the college for class visits, research sessions, and academic programs. The conversations and research that transpired during class sessions at the Museum have resulted in exciting outcomes. Students have made creative studio projects inspired by artworks in the Museum’s collection, including Jim Mullen’s Drawing I course, Carrie Scanga’s Narrative Structures course, and Judy Gailen’s Principles of Design theatre course. In other classes, students have studied individual artworks for research papers, including Javier Cikota’s first-year seminar in History on “deviant” lives in Latin America, and Ambra Spinelli’s courses on Roman and Greek archaeology. In Kate Gerry’s course on medieval art, students are researching artworks and writing texts for a future exhibition and catalogue featuring medieval works from the Wyvern Collection on a long-term loan at the Museum.

Professors teaching in History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Art History have also integrated dynamic exhibition projects into their courses. In David Gordon’s history course on Central African art, students have visited the Museum throughout this fall to develop a new exhibition, The Presence of the Past: Art from Central and West Africa, which will open in March 2020. Drawing on the Museum’s collection of photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, and others, students in Carolyn Wolfenzon Niego’s Latin American Studies course are curating an exhibition about tradition and change in modern Mexico to open in January 2020. Students in Visual Arts have had the chance to engage with the artist Andrea Dezsö, the 2019 halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-In-Residence, as she curates an exhibition drawing from the Museum’s collections which opens this spring.

The Museum has also facilitated exciting academic programs. During Family Weekend in October, Bowdoin hosted an Arabic calligraphy workshop with scholar Muhammad Habib from Harvard, where students enrolled in Pamela Klasova's and Batool Khattab’s Arabic courses–and some of their parents–visited the Museum to view Islamic artworks featuring Arabic texts and calligraphy. In November, over sixty students enrolled in four courses in History, Government, Romance Languages and Literature, and Religion visited the museum for the first connection meeting of Africa Hub, a new integrated learning initiative. Students viewed artist Hervé Youmbi’s Double Visage (2015-2017), a mixed-media work that features a mask and its shipping crate, along with a video and photograph recording a dancer performing in the mask in Cameroon, to discuss the complexities surrounding the global movement, collecting, and display of African art.

The Museum’s website includes a selection of portfolios highlighting recent class visits: http://artmuseum.bowdoin.edu/kiosk/classp.htm

 

 

Allison Martino & Sean Burrus
Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellows
Bowdoin College Museum of Art