On the Road: Experience BCMA Collections at Other Museums

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) stewards approximately 30,000 works of art that span 5,000 years of human history and represent a wide array of cultural traditions and artistic practices. We are always excited to share this collection with audiences in Brunswick through our robust program of changing exhibitions, class and research visits, and public events. To fulfill our mission of making the collection accessible, we also embrace opportunities to lend objects to other institutions, where they can be (re)interpreted in groundbreaking exhibitions for new audiences outside the walls of the BCMA. Below are some highlights of works that are currently installed at other museums. Whether your summer travels take you elsewhere in Maine or further afield, we hope you will stop in to visit some of these collection favorites! 

Last fall, the BCMA loaned Joshua Johnson’s Portrait of Man (Abner Coker) to the American Folk Art Museum in New York City for the traveling exhibition Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (November 15, 2023–March 24, 2024). In the spring, Johnson’s painting continued onto the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, part of Historic Deerfield, for the second iteration of this exhibition, which runs through August 4, 2024. Unnamed Figures centers representations of Black individuals in New England and the Mid-Atlantic from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Bringing together more than 100 paintings, portraits, needlework, and other vernacular material culture, Unnamed Figures illuminates and enriches the lives of Black people in the antebellum North. The BCMA’s painting by Joshua Johnson is an important portrait of a Black individual from the early nineteenth century by a Black artist. In his signature style, Johnson portrays his sitter—Abner Coker, a Reverand at Baltimore’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church—with solemnity, gravitas, and dignity. This portrait will be reinstalled in the BCMA’s exhibition Re|Framing the Collection: New Considerations in European and American Art, 1475–1875 when it returns later this fall.

Frank Stewart’s photographic portraits of artists Alma Thomas and David Driskell are currently on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, as part of the exhibition Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present (June 30–September 22, 2024). Organized jointly by the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) and Telfair Museums (Savannah, Georgia), Frank Stewart’s Nexus emphasizes the artist’s ability to portray the intricacies and joys of Black life with empathy and intimacy. The BCMA’s portraits of two renowned Black artists entered the collection in 2022 through funds donated in memory of Gridley W. Tarbell II ’74, a Bowdoin student who was inspired by his photography classes at the College before his tragic death at age twenty.

Two collection highlights—one old favorite and one new acquisition—are currently on view in other Maine museums. Marsden Hartley’s painting After the Storm, Vinalhaven is included in the exhibition Marsden Hartley and the Sea on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum, which you can experience through September 8, 2024. The BCMA’s Hartley painting depicts wind-whipped waves and stormy clouds in the vicinity of Vinalhaven Island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. Like many of the artist’s later seascapes, After the Storm, Vinalhaven exemplifies the artist’s respect for the elemental strength of the North Atlantic coastline. It also resonates with the themes of the Farnsworth exhibition, which investigates Hartley’s seascapes from the late 1930s painted both in Nova Scotia and back in the artist’s native Maine.

The Portland Museum of Art is currently exhibiting Jeremy Frey’s Permanence as part of the retrospective Jeremy Frey: Woven. Acquired in 2023 by the BCMA to expand the Museum’s holdings of historic and contemporary Indigenous art, and particularly Wabanki basketry, Permanence is a point basket woven from undyed black ash that contrasts with deep navy and cool slate blues. A scalloped collar of birch bark surrounds the neck, and cedar bark coils help construct the neck and lid. Standing nearly twenty inches tall, this basket requires a mastery of weaving on a large scale that few artists have achieved. As its title suggests, Frey is committed to asserting the presence of Indigenous people in the past, present, and future. His baskets have revitalized this Indigenous artform and created new possibilities for emerging Native American artists to innovate their craft. The Portland Museum of Art’s exhibition is the first museum survey of Frey’s expansive practice. After its run at the Portland Museum of Art, the BCMA’s basket will travel to subsequent exhibition venues at the Art Institute of Chicago (October 26, 2024–February 10, 2025) and the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. While Frey’s work tours the country, other examples of Wabanaki basket making from the BCMA collections can be enjoyed in the exhibitions Threads: Artists Weave their Worlds (on view through October 6, 2024) and Re|Framing the Collection: New Considerations in European and American Art, 1475–1875 (ongoing).

We hope that you will enjoy seeing the BCMA artworks wherever they—and you—are in the world! It is our privilege to share them with audiences near and far.

Cassandra Braun
Curator, Bowdoin College Museum of Art