Exhibition Considering Artists’ Relationship with the Environment Opens at Bowdoin Museum December 2018

In December, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) will open Material Resources: Intersections of Art and the Environment, a global consideration of the ways artists have engaged with and understood the environment. On view December 6, 2018 through June 2, 2019, Material Resources will bring together over 80 objects from the BCMA’s encyclopedic collection to explore this fundamental relationship across cultures and over 2,000 years of history, ranging from a Fayum mummy portrait and medieval manuscript to seminal landscapes by Albert Bierstadt, Mary Blood Mellen, and Carleton Watkins, and contemporary works by Barry Dana, Christo, Mel Chin, Leonardo Drew, and Agnes Denes. Highlighting artists’ historic dependence on Earth’s material resources, the exhibition will question how the production of art objects reveals interconnected ecologies—cultural, political, and social.