The Bowdoin Orient

In the days immediately following November’s presidential election, Emily Simon ’17 felt that the student body had already begun to move on from its disappointment.

“I had a premonition that was grounded in past experience at Bowdoin. Today sucks, and maybe tomorrow will suck, but after that we’re all just going to go back to business as usual,” Simon said. 

It is this political complacency that inspired her, alongside Haleigh Collins ’17, Kenny Shapiro ’17 and Laura Griffee ’17, to create a giant sculpture of President Donald Trump’s head. 

Students may have already taken note of the unnamed and unfinished piece, which has been in the Lamarche Gallery since Saturday and will be on display until the first week of March. The piece is crafted mostly from recycled cardboard boxes. It will ultimately include videos projected onto the sculpture depicting  reactions to the election of Bowdoin students and others. 

The artists hope that the piece will catch the attention of the members of the Bowdoin community and encourage them to engage with political issues that they may not otherwise consider on a day-to-day basis.

“[Our goal is] disruption but in a productive, nuanced and thoughtful way,” Collins said.

The students came up with the original concept for the installation immediately after election day in A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art Mark Wethli’s “Abstractions” class. 

“We felt that people had already moved on,” Shapiro said. “[The piece] was definitely born out of our frustration and anger with a very targeted demographic.”

Though the four students consulted with several faculty members as well as former Sculptor in Residence John Bisbee, they created the piece outside of the classroom. This independence of their work and separation from the institution of Bowdoin is part of the project’s appeal to Simon.

“The most exciting thing for me has been working on something that challenges the need to protect our comfort in the status quo at Bowdoin,” she said. 

The ways in which the artists chose to address the politically provocative sentiments they hope the piece will represent have changed over the months after the election. During this time, they have considered different political perspectives and the variety of ways in which students might be impacted by the Trump presidency. The final product seeks to explore the political climate in a manner that is serious rather than flippant or absurd.

“We recognize that there are a ton of people at Bowdoin and elsewhere who are dealing with this issue on a very serious level,” Griffee said. “As artists, we have been struggling to try to be very careful and respectful of that possibility.”

The team’s original concept for the piece’s video component focused solely on the perspectives of the Bowdoin community. When Griffee invited students to give video testimonials, she was disappointed to receive only seven responses. She decided to use internet sources for the perspectives of strangers, however, ultimately providing a valuable opportunity for both the piece and for Griffee personally. It allowed her to engage with a diversity of identities and opinions.

“I got really excited and sucked into the different video reactions and testimonials,” she said. “I was really interested in listening to other viewpoints that were not my own and humanizing this group of people.”

The students constructed the base of the piece in the garage of Shapiro’s off-campus residence and transported the assemblage of boxes three blocks to David Saul Smith Union on Saturday. The artists said this transportation process was one of the the most rewarding moments in the process of creating the piece. 

“Moving it from spot to spot was just so crazy and fun and disruptive and weird,” Shapiro said. 

Griffee estimates that around 20 passing students stopped to to inquire about the piece or help her, Shapiro, Collins and Simon lift it over the glass wall separating the gallery from the rest of   Smith Union.

“A lot of people were excited that it was naughty on some level, which was exciting, because I didn’t think Bowdoin students had that in them,” Simon said. 

In addition to political conversation and heightened awareness, the artists hope their exhibition will generate student engagement with art as a mechanism of political and social discourse. 

“Art is something that anyone can literally approach and consider,” Simon said. “It speaks in its own way, and I hope that we’re making a case for public art here.”

Collins, Griffee, Shapiro and Simon aim to complete the piece before the start of next week and encourage members of the Bowdoin community to contact them with questions, concerns or interest in participating in the project.

Students interested in public health and medicine have stepped off campus to volunteer at Oasis Free Clinics in order to gain an interdisciplinary perspective on practicing health care and supplement their experiences in the classroom.

Oasis is an organization in Brunswick that offers free medical care to the uninsured and low-income members of the local community. 

Sarah Steffen ’16 started volunteering with Oasis during her sophomore year at Bowdoin. She graduated last semester and has been an employee at Oasis since January. Steffen said that her work with the organization has equipped her with a unique perspective on medicine and public health that correlates with her experience as a student in a liberal arts institution. 

“I originally wanted to be a biology major, but once I started taking sociology classes I was hooked, and I couldn’t go back,” Steffen said. “I love that Oasis works with a vulnerable population and shows that there is a combination of social factors that influence health.”

As an employee at the clinic, Steffen coordinates Oasis’s events, manages its social media and is in the process of conducting a community-needs assessment to evaluate how the clinic can improve its care for patients.

“It can be hard to find opportunities to get your foot in the door in public health because Maine doesn’t have a big centralized public health program,” said Steffen. “But if you find a mentor at a hospital or a smaller clinic that can be a really good way to meet other people … who are really passionate about what they do.”

Julia Michels ’17 has worked with Oasis since the beginning of her junior year at Bowdoin. She said that shadowing physicians and interacting directly with patients has been the most rewarding part of her volunteer experience. 

“A lot of patients have mental health issues or unhealthy habits, and the doctors really respect that and try to make them healthier, happier humans,” she said. “There’s never any judgement for their actions or their history or their past.” 

Students are not the only Oasis volunteers with Bowdoin ties. Director of Health Services Jeffrey Maher volunteers at Oasis once every three weeks and is enthusiastic about helping connect students with Oasis. Maher became involved with the clinic before working at Bowdoin after being frustrated with his inability to treat patients without health insurance. He describes the community need which Oasis seeks to fill as endless. 

“Until a decision is made at a macro level to insure everybody, my best response is a micro level: what can I do to help in the time that I have,” he said. “It’s a challenge to think of that every day, but you do the best you can.”

Anita Ruff, executive director of Oasis Free Clinics, emphasized the importance of volunteering for students interested in medicine.

“You may be doing a wide variety of things that may not seem interesting or fulfilling to you, but every opportunity is a chance to learn,” she said in a phone interview with the Orient. “Whether it’s learning about public health directly or how to be a good teammate or what it means to run a good program.”

The opportunity to complete a rigorous education in a variety of disciplines while still pursuing a career in medicine is part of what drew Ilana Olin ’20 to Bowdoin. She hopes to start volunteering with Oasis.

“I also really like philosophy, and not being on a strict pre-med track where every [first year] is doing the same thing, I have the opportunity to take the classes I want to and get a liberal arts education,” she said.

Olin is a certified Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and worked as a member of an ambulance crew during high school. At Bowdoin, Olin is part of the Public Health Club and volunteers at Partners for World Health, a Portland-based organization that sends unused medical products to developing countries. She is looking forward to joining Steffen in volunteering at Oasis, which she hopes will provide her with yet another perspective on what it means to work in the field of public health. 

“I think the more exposure I get to different areas of medicine, the more interested and more passionate I become,” she said. 

Oasis is not the only place where Bowdoin students have found an outlet to gain experience in public health.

Mason Bosse ’18 believes that working or volunteering with medical organizations is critically important for students interested in careers in medicine or public health. Bosse is also a licensed Advanced EMT and works on ambulance crews based in both Lisbon and Lewiston, Maine and works as an instructor for United Ambulance in Lewiston. He leaves campus almost every weekend, departing on Friday and returning Monday morning. 

“There is a big problem with physicians and physician assistants in the medical field who are very scientific but aren’t very good with people,” he said. “Volunteering, getting involved and actually getting hands-on experience can really open your eyes to whether or not it’s the right field for you.” 

Last week, six members of the Bowdoin Queer Straight Alliance (BQSA) attended First Event, an annual conference held in Marlboro, Massachusetts dedicated to the transgender and gender-variant community. The event is in its 37th year, but this was the first time a group of Bowdoin students attended. 

Gabi Serrato Marks ’15 served on the event’s steering committee for the Youth and Family program and invited Bowdoin students to attend. 

The conference aims to create a sense of community and solidarity among youth who identify as transgender or gender-variant. It also provided a space for participants from across New England to ask questions about gender identity. 

“My boyfriend is transgender, and being at the conference was a nice way to be around other trans people, as well as to work on creating more equality and opportunity for trans people,” Serrato Marks said.   

Bowdoin students attended panels, discussions and lectures within the event’s Youth and Family program. Serrato Marks spoke at one panel dedicated to relationships and dating. Rayne Stone ’18 said the panel was one of the most meaningful parts of the conference, and hopes to create a similar event at Bowdoin. 

“We don’t ever really talk about the specific experience of being trans and trying to navigate dating,” said Stone. 

The conference also featured a keynote address by minister and activist Louis Mitchell, who spoke about privilege within the gender-variant community. 

“That was something that hit home for me,” Stone said. “It is something that I see happening at Bowdoin … as well as in my own experience as a white-passing trans person.” 

Several Bowdoin students who attended the conference said that one of its most empowering and meaningful moments was a fashion show that took place on Friday night. 

“Seeing everyone express themselves in a way that made them feel comfortable, even if they don’t feel safe expressing themselves that way at home, was really joyful and it was a really great space to be in,” Stone said.  

Students had the opportunity to speak to the husband of one of the show’s participants after the show. 

“He was cisgender and straight, but it was interesting to hear his point of view as an ally and a partner,” said Fiona Doherty ’20. “He was very supportive.”

Serrato Marks hopes to make the conference, which was mostly attended by white transgender women, more diverse in future years. Additionally, she plans on working with BQSA to create a program specifically geared towards gender-variant people who are college age.

“There’s this big gap between youth and adulthood … this college-age part was really missing” said Sophie Sadovnikoff ’19. “College can be a really difficult time and a big transition.” 

BQSA is working to create a month of activism and awareness during February, called Februqueery. Stone hopes to share the messages of acceptance and pride that students experienced during the conference. 

“It’s important to have empathy for other people,” said Stone. “It’s important to have compassion and empathy for yourself, and it’s important to try to recognize your own positions of privilege to use your privilege in a way that is constructive to other people.”   

Art History students dug into the College’s archives to curate a photography exhibition that opened on Wednesday. Each student in Assistant Professor of Art History Dana Byrd’s “Snap, Shoot, Instagram: A History of Photography” class presented collections of photos inspired by a specific theme in the history of photography on the second floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.  

The class’s concentrations ranged from the evolution of photographic technology to the representation of women and indigenous peoples. Although Byrd has taught the course three times, this is the first time she has incorporated a curation project.

“[Students] translated ideas that may be deeply involved with theory into something that anyone walking by a case can begin to understand by looking at the objects,” she said. 

After selecting their themes, students worked with Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian Marieke Van Der Steenhoven to explore the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives and selected between two and five books, photographs or other items relating to their theme. 

Many students had never used Special Collections before taking the course, and Van Der Steenhoven hopes that the exhibition will encourage those students to come back and to invite others in. 

“One of the things that I find really exciting about Special Collections here at Bowdoin is that our collections are incredibly diverse and they are here for the students to use,” she said. 

Special Collections houses over 50,000 rare books as well as the manuscripts of more than 300 families and individuals. 

“Getting to go through all the different sources was really interesting, and to see the sheer volume of objects in the collection is really impressive,” said Ethan Bevington ’19.  

After looking through the artifacts in the Special Collections reading room, students wrote labels and texts for the pieces they chose to display. Some students found the process of consolidating all of their research into a paragraph under 200 words to be challenging. 

“You don’t want to leave anything out, but you don’t want to make it too long so that people are nervous to read it,” Emily McColgan ’17 said. “You have to find a balance.”  

Byrd hopes that students’ descriptions and curatorial work will teach visitors to the exhibit about the history of photography and encourage them to consider the art form in new ways. 

“It’s nice to kind of see the texture of the real object, to look at different historic photo processes as they change over time, to look at different sizes: all of the sort of things you lose by looking at a digital image or a JPEG,” Byrd said. 

The opening of “Shoot, Snap, Instagram” also featured a ‘selfie station’ of enlarged reproductions of photographs from the college archives as they relate to the various themes relating to the history of American photography.

The exhibit will be on display until the end of the semester in May.  

For the past year, a nearly 200-year-old, hand-colored edition of John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” has been on display in Special Collections. A small crowd gathers on the first Friday of every month for a ceremonial page turning. Should the page-turning continue each month, it won’t be until the year 2052 that every page will have been displayed.

The book, which depicts one species on each page, is so large that it requires two librarians to turn the pages. Once a month, Special Collections holds this ceremonial page-turning in the Reading Room. The 12th page-turning event will take place on Friday at 12:30 p.m. and will feature a short presentation by biologist Justin Schuetz ’94. 

Schuetz believes that the fusion of artistic and scientific talent represented in this rare edition of “The Birds of America” will draw a wide range of Bowdoin faculty, staff, students and community members to the page-turning. 

“Some people will come because of an interest in art and art history. Others will come because of an interest in book making, and I suspect there will be some bird watchers there,” he said. “What Audubon does uniquely well is put all those people together in one room and have them see something that is interesting to all of them.” 

Much like “The Birds of America,” Schuetz’s career and passions straddle the worlds of art and science. After graduating from Bowdoin, he earned a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University as well as a Masters of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. A selection of his photographic work was displayed at Bowdoin during the 2015-2016 academic year. 

According to Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian Marieke Van Der Steenhoven, a group of bird enthusiasts from the surrounding communities has consistently attended the page-turnings since the event debuted in January of this year. 

“There is starting to be a community around the page turning. I think it’s a fun way to come in and see something totally different and have an excuse to stop studying for a minute,” Van Der Steenhoven said. 

The event on Friday will reveal the bird to be on display for the month of December. Schuetz plans on discussing the biology of the species and the way in which that biology is depicted in Audubon’s art. Attendees of the event will receive a complimentary pin featuring the species of the month and will have the opportunity to explore a selection of books about birds that will be on display in the reading room. 

Van Der Steenhoven hopes that the page-turning will help expose members of the Bowdoin community to Special Collections. 

“I think that this department is a hidden treasure of the College,” she said. 

An interdisciplinary journey through photography, anthropology and geology led Associate Professor of Art Michael Kolster to a remote, garbage-ridden beach on Hawaii’s Big Island last March. 

It all started after Kolster read an article in the New York Times that described the work of three geologists who traveled to Hawaii in search of a new kind of stone called “plastiglomerate,” formed by discarded plastic fused with rock. Kolster’s interest was piqued by the article’s claim that these artificial stones would become a permanent part of the geological record—a kind of fossil of the future.

“These particular objects will become portraits of us for whoever uncovers them hundreds or millions of years from now, and they will indicate a moment of geological time where humans have begun to alter geological history,” Kolster said. 

He contacted the researchers cited in the New York Times article in hopes of seeing the plastiglomerates for himself and discovered that the researcher in possession of the physical plastiglomerate samples was a visual artist. The artist refused Kolster’s request to photograph the objects as she planned on incorporating them into her own artistic project. Not to be deterred, Kolster was awarded a Faculty Research Award to travel to the remote Kamilo beach, known also as “junk beach” for the massive quantities of refuse that wash ashore, where the original samples had been found. 

With the help of a local resident, Kolster spent a day photographing plastiglomerates, other trash and the general landscape. 

Kolster said that it was the beach’s imperfections that he found most compelling. He hopes his work will encourage viewers to look for beauty and opportunity in places one might consider flawed. 

“Places that demonstrate our presence have a certain value and allure, and they deserve our attention and deserve to be taken care of,” he said. “We have pretty much affected or altered every spot on the earth; we tend to neglect the places we’re actually living in and have attachment to, in some ways because of how we’ve changed them.” 

Kolster captured the plastiglomerates using the technique of stereography, which, when viewed properly, allows the audience to experience the images in three dimensions. According to Kolster, the experience of viewing stereographs pushes viewers to engage more actively with the images. Additionally, the technique is often employed by scientists when documenting data in order to create a more accurate representation of their subjects. 

“I’m not a scientist, but I’m interested in that language and I’m interested in having the pictures become credible and believable,” Kolster said. “That’s an important quality that I want to have in my pictures generally: that if you were there, you could see them, and you could connect with them in a similar way.” 

Kolster hopes to publish the project, titled “Chronicle of the Geologic Record Foretold” as part of a larger collection of his work. He said that one of the most rewarding parts of this project was the way in which it connected unexpectedly to some of his other recent projects, including a photographic study of rivers across the country, such as the Los Angeles and the Androscoggin rivers. Both projects represent nature in a singular temporal moment, yet seek to encourage the viewer to contemplate nature’s constancy. 

“When you look at a still picture you realize it isn’t life. So then you ask yourself, what is life? Life is change and flux. And a photograph basically stands in relief to that,” Kolster said. 

Last Saturday, the McKeen Center for the Common Good coordinated Bowdoin’s 18th annual Common Good Day. More than 450 members of the Bowdoin community participated in the tradition, working with 54 nonprofit organizations and municipalities throughout the Brunswick area. 

The day started at Farley Field House, where students, faculty, staff and alumni congregated at 11:30 to check in with projects they had selected or been assigned before hearing a short talk from Jamie Silvestri, the founder of ArtVan, a mobile arts therapy organization. Silvestri spoke about mindfulness in community service and the importance of being present and engaged. After lunch and Silvestri’s talk, the groups boarded vans and buses or walked to their projects on foot. Some groups stayed on campus and worked in the community garden, while others drove as far as Augusta, Maine. 

Preparation for the day-long event began in June. Common Good Day Coordinator Sydney Avitia-Jacques ’18 worked in the the McKeen Center over the summer. She chose to become involved because she wanted to get acquainted with the McKeen Center staff and the work they do. 

“I actually hadn’t been involved with the McKeen Center since my orientation trip … but I was interested in learning more about what they did and getting more involved in service work because that’s one of the reasons that I chose [to attend] Bowdoin,” Avitia-Jacques said. Avitia-Jacques and the McKeen staff worked to contact and select organizations from a list of over 170 community service groups in midcoast Maine.

“We review it every year to make sure we’re not missing anyone who could be an interesting partner, especially if we’re thinking about doing more work with [for example] Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services, an organization that’s new this year and, students are really excited to work with immigrant populations,” said Sarah Seames, director of the McKeen Center. 

Among the organizations that students worked with this year, seven had never worked with Bowdoin before. A few organizations continue to be Common Good Day staples. ArtVan has hosted Common Good Day participants for the past 11 years. 

As the summer drew to a close, the event’s leaders’ began to shift their attention from contacting organizations to recruiting students to lead and participate in the individual excursions. 

Nan Ding ’19 led a group of six students to the Falmouth Land Trust. She became involved as a leader after signing up for Common Good Day with a small group of friends, and said she appreciates the democratic and inclusive nature of the day.

“What I really like about Common Good Day is that everyone…can lead a group, and it’s randomly assigned, so you don’t have to sign up for a particular group,” she said.

Ding’s group worked with a member of the Falmouth Land Trust to build a fire ring and three foot bridges for the organization.

“[The man we worked with] appreciated our work and we appreciated him hosting us. It was a very nice experience,” Ding said. 

Avitia-Jacques said she believes the most important part of the day is its impact on student participants, especially first-year students who are still getting to know the Maine community. 

“For a lot of first years, it sets the tone for service, and having that mindset is important to different people at Bowdoin. For me as a first year, Common Good Day was the only volunteering that I did, so it gave me an entryway to learning about the McKeen Center,” she said. 

Kenneth Lamm ’20 said he plans to do more work with the McKeen Center following his involvement with Common Good Day. 

“It’s nice and very organized. It was a great feeling after you finished,” he said.