News

A three-part workshop addresses copyright and fair use in museums and on academic campuses.  Led by noted attorney and copyright specialist Peter Jaszi, professor at the Washington College of Law, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University and author of the College Art Association’s Code of Best Practices in the Fair Use for the Visual Arts. Participants may participate in all or selected sessions, which will address fair use in art museums, fair use in teaching, publishing, and making art, and fair use in libraries and archives.

11:00 am - 12:30 p.m. 
Fair Use in Art Museums
(Session is Full)
 
1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Fair Use in Teaching, Publishing, and Making Art

 2:45 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.
Fair Use in Libraries and Archives

4:15 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Open Discussion

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the College Art Association.

Limited Seating. Please RSVP to 207-725-3276 by September 15, 2016.  

From 1870 to 1908, artist and botanist Kate Furbish traveled Maine, collecting, classifying, and illustrating the native flora of her state. Plants and Flowers of Maine: Kate Furbish's Watercolors, a new two-volume set produced by Bowdoin College Library and Rowman & Littlefield publishers and in collaboration with Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, faithfully reproduces some 1,300 of Furbish's drawings.

Jed Lyons '74, CEO, Rowman & Littlefield; Richard Lindemann, Director Emeritus, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives; and Melissa Cullina, Director of Education and Staff Botanist, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens are the team behind the book and will discuss Furbish and the importance of bringing her work to a wider audience.

This event will be lived streamed at http://www.bowdoin.edu/live/ and available for future viewing in Bowdoin Talks.

A reception and opening of the exhibition, Botanizing America: Citizens, Scientists, and the Quest for a National Identity, will immediately follow on the second floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.

Free and open to the public.

Books will be available for purchase.

Margaret Williams, Managing Director of the World Wildlife Fund's Arctic Program, will discuss the challenges facing the Arctic region, including increased ship traffic, development projects, human-animal conflicts, and global warming - all taking place in an international arena. In her talk she will address some of these challenges, as well as the opportunities they present.

Sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund and the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center.

Novelist Kelly Kerney ’02 will read from her recent work, Hard Red Spring, a novel that examines the violent relationship between Guatemala and the United States, interconnecting the lives of four fictional American women over the course of a century in the years 1902, 1954, 1983, and 1999. The New Yorker says of the book, “…Kerney’s insights are rewarding,” and Publisher’s Weekly says, “Kerney's fine research, wealth of exact details, and control of the historical timeline will keep readers turning pages.”  

Kerney graduated from Bowdoin College in 2002 and received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where she was awarded the Nicholas Sparks postgraduate fellowship. Her debut novel Born Again was published in 2006.

Sponsored by the English Department Visiting Writers Fund.

The Fall 2016 Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project at Bowdoin College Visiting Artist is Liz Chalfin. She will be on campus September 25 through 28 and will be working with students in our printmaking courses. She will give a public lecture on her work, examples of which can be viewed at www.lizchalfin.com.

Artist talk at 4:30pm in the Beam Classroom in the VAC, followed by a reception in the Edwards Main Lobby. Refreshments will be provided.

Liz Chalfin makes prints, drawings, and artists’ books and exhibits them in the US and internationally. Her work is in numerous private collections and the permanent collections of the Museum of Art and the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives at Bowdoin, the Smith College Museum of Art, and Mortimer Rare Book Room, as well as the Portland Museum of Art, the De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park, The Hood Musuem, The University of the Arts (Philadelphia), Yale University, the University of Arkansas, Southern Graphics International Archive, Museo Internacional de Gravura, Alijo, Portugal, California State University, Long Beach Student Union Permanent Collection and the Boston Public Library. She is currently the director and resident artist at Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, Massachusetts. 

This event is sponsored by the Marvin Bileck and Emily Nelligan Trust and is presented by the Department of Visual Art. 

Caribbean Anolis lizards are a diverse group that has been a workhorse of ecological and evolutionary study for a half century. Less well known is the fact that anoles are also diverse in mainland Central and South America.

Synthesizing phylogenetic, behavioral, ecological and biomechanical studies, comparisons between the anole faunas in the two regions investigate whether evolution proceeds in the same way in island and mainland areas.

Professor Losos is the Monique and Phillip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.  He is also the curator in herpetology   in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.  

The materiality of visual artifacts is an interest ubiquitous among art historians nowadays, and in many respects this is a salutary development. A danger, however, is that some immaterial aspects of images—especially their fluid transferability and multiplication across media—will become obscured. Practices of combining media, simulating one medium in another, sharing images across media, and compressing many images into one were crucial features of the visual culture of western modernity, and they are fundamentally at odds with Clement Greenberg’s influential thesis that medium purification was the essential motor of modernist art. Taking account of this multimediality changes our understanding of modern picturing, and it entails changes in the ways art historians define their objects of study and interpret and evaluate them.

Michael Leja, professor of history of art and chair of the graduate group in the history of art at University of Pennsylvania, will examine these ideas and deliver the keynote lecture for the Across the Divide: Intermediality and American Art symposium.

Leja, who holds a PhD from Harvard, studies the visual arts in various media (painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, illustrations) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, primarily in the United States. His work is interdisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. He is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and particular audiences.

Sponsored by the Bowdoin College Office of the Dean for Academic Affairs, Department of Art History & The Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

In recent years as the critical emphasis on “medium specificity” in art historical practice has waned, it has been replaced by a scholarly focus on the interplay between various media. The replacement raises a number of critical questions about intermediality: How do artists exchange motifs and tropes from one kind of art to another? How do different media play against each other? Can the integration of aesthetic concepts from different media interfere with each other? How might experiences with different media spark new and surprising experiences for audiences and artists alike?

The symposium Across the Divide: Intermediality and American Art takes these questions as a point of departure for an investigation of this practice in American art. Scholars drawn from various disciplines, including history, art history, American studies, and English will address, among other issues, racial caricature, violence, memory making, and national identity. To encourage lively discussions and productive conversations around the issue of intermediality, each speaker’s presentation will be followed by remarks by a discussant whose research and teaching interests resonate with the concerns of the presenter.

For a complete schedule, please visit http://www.bowdoin.edu/symposia/across-the-divide/schedule.shtml

Sponsored by: the Office of the Dean for Academic Affairs, Department of Art History, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art. 

Artist L.J. Roberts, whose work Portrait of Deb is included in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, speaks about the expression of LGBT identity through the visual arts.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Free and open to the public.

Photo:  L.J. Roberts

Richard Saunders '70 discusses the emergence of portrait abstraction in the context of the broader history of American portraiture. 

Saunders is a Walter Cerf Distinguished College Professor and director at Middlebury College Museum of Art. He is also an art historian and author of the recently published American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity (2016). He received his BA from Bowdoin, his MA in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware, and MA, M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale.


Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Free and open to the public.


 

George Lopez,  Bowdoin's Beckwith Artist-in-Residence, performs an evening of music associated with exhibitions on view. 

(The same program will be performed at the 5:00 p.m. concert)

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. 

This event is free, but tickets are required as seating is limited.  For ticket information, please call 207-725-3276.

George Lopez,  Bowdoin's Beckwith Artist-in-Residence, performs an evening of music associated with exhibitions on view.

(The same program will be performed at the 5:00 p.m. concert)

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

This event is free, but tickets are required as seating is limited.  For ticket information, please call 207-725-3276.

How do art and material culture reflect religious beliefs and practices in the ancient world? What do objects contribute to our understanding of the meaning and history of the term 'religion'?  Todd Berzon, assistant professor of religion, James Higginbotham, associate professor of classics, associate curator for the ancient collection, and Joachim Homann, curator, lead a discussion of these issues.  Organized in conjunction with the faculty symposium 'Religion before Religion'.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Free and open to the public.

Illustration:  The Presentation of the Virgin, ca. 1550, oil on panel by school of Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

A newly installed selection of works from the Museum's collection provides intriguing perspectives on art and culture of the nineteenth century. Laura Sprague, consulting curator of decorative arts, and Joachim Homann, curator, discuss how objects on view, ranging from American paintings and sculpture to selections of European, Asian, and tribal art, reflect the diversity of American society and its international relations.

Presented by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Free and open to the public.

Illustration: Medee, Theatre de la Renaissance, Sarah Bernhardt, 1898, (detail), lithograph, by Alphonse Mucha. Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  

What good has a liberal arts education ever really done anyone? Humanists in our own time confront this question (or accusation) regularly, but skeptics have been leveling it since antiquity. Students and admirers of the classical tradition have responded with particular dynamism and creativity in all these centuries; and some of their most innovative and inspiring answers emerged in Renaissance Italy.

This presentation focuses on two Venetians of the Renaissance era, Laura Cereta (1469-1499) and Francesco Longo (1506-1576). Cereta, a writer of some renown in her own time but unknown today except to specialists, used her encounters with old books, and especially with Cicero’s Familiar Letters, to build an unusual life as a public intellectual and defender of women. Our second protagonist, a physician with no fame either in his own time or (as yet) in ours, built his life in the face of economic collapse, epidemic disease, and constant warfare using the mental, emotional, and ethical tools furnished by his library — above all, those he found in Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia. In their different ways, the stirring political arguments in Cereta’s Latin letters and the quiet philosophical reflections in Longo’s vernacular final testaments both reveal the vital importance of commerce with the classics.

Listening carefully to these Renaissance Italians, and meeting a few of their like-minded contemporaries, we find fresh evidence that the humanities may indeed be, as proponents have always claimed, essential for living (and dying) well.

Sarah Ross is associate professor and director of the history core in the history department at Boston College. Her research focuses on Renaissance Europe, especially in Italy. She earned her AB at Bowdoin, and her MA and PhD at Northwestern University. 

Presented by Medieval and Early Modern Studies.