Museum of Art

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art looks forward to welcoming you to experience great art in a lively environment. Come see what’s new!

Teaching and Learning. As a teaching museum, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art offers educational resources for Bowdoin College students and faculty, scholars anywhere in the world, and learners of all ages.

Digital Resources. Experience the BCMA collection through online exhibitions, digital catalogues, interactive applications, teaching materials, and creative activities.

Shop. The Museum Shop carries catalogues of Museum exhibitions and collections. The Shop also stocks gifts, jewelry, art books, posters, calendars, notecards, and items for children.

Join and Give. Monetary contributions and gifts of works of art from alumni/ae, parents, and friends strengthen the collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and help ensure that our teaching inspires and our programming is lively and varied.

For the last several decades, Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, has been collaborating with artists to imagine and render specific animals, plants, and places as they would have appeared millions of years ago. Through the lens of time, any place has been many places. The human eye is tuned to see animals as individuals and plants as background and the result is that many expressions of paleoart are biased toward the animals and not the places. This creates a false sense that we understand past landscapes.

This lecture was presented in conjunction with "Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island: The Monhegan Wildlands," on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art from December 12, 2024 through June 1, 2025.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in collaboration with the Monhegan Museum of Art & History. Recorded January 23, 2025 at Bowdoin College.

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