The Bowdoin College Museum of Art features renowned art from around the world, and its Becker Gallery allows professors and students to use these resources to add a new dimension to their courses. This gallery in particular provides a crucial link between Bowdoin academics and the art museum.
"The Becker Gallery features a changing series of exhibitions devoted to current courses," said Associate Professor of Art Pamela Fletcher. "It's a space used to bring together the museum and curriculum from all the different disciplines across campus."
Kate Herlihy '08, an art history major, explained the concept of the Becker Gallery to visitors during the museum's opening weekend. "The range of works at first seems a little bit random, but my job was to get people to understand the general idea of the gallery," she said.
"Because it's a teaching gallery, it's more about the juxtapositions of one piece to another, making you think about things more than just making them obvious," she said. "You hang works up and they say different things depending on what they're next to."
The gallery's current exhibition, "Becoming a (Woman) Artist," is in conjunction with Fletcher's course Women and Art. In the class, students curate their own shows, complete with catalogues, wall placards, and pieces tied together by a chosen theme.
"It's kind of two classes in one, because it teaches students how to curate a hypothetical exhibition. But the larger theme of the class is women and their relationship to art," said Herlihy.
"Becoming a (Woman) Artist" spans from the 19th century to the present, a time in which the definitions of artistic identity and success underwent enormous change, according to Fletcher.
"The moment of history when the image of the artist changed from professional businessman to bohemian coincided with the point at which women were gaining more access to opportunities to be an artist," said Fletcher.
The exhibit uses thematic groupings that highlight some of the issues women have faced throughout history. The works revolve around three major themes: art and craft, the nature of artistic identity, and the status of the female nude.
The works also show how many contemporary artists are engaging with traditional limitations in intelligent and creative ways.
"The narrative is not only about overcoming obstacles and achieving success," said Fletcher, "but more thinking about the ways that those attributes and constraints both shaped possibilities for women artists in historical moments and are still evoked by women artists today."
For example, one wall exhibits crafts made by women artists. Historically, women's creativity was channeled into decorative arts such as embroidery. The works on display show women artists "picking up on this motif in unexpected ways," said Fletcher.
For example, Anna Atkins' "Cyanotype, From the Great Observatory, Chatsworth, August 26, 1851," is an attempt to capture accurate images of scientific specimens.
The photograph "pushes at that limit of women's creativity," said Fletcher.
The haunting, nude self-portrait by Anne Harris, which greets visitors as they enter the gallery, is intentionally placed next to Pablo Picasso's etching "The Nude Model." This juxtaposition challenges the traditional image of the artist in his studio accompanied by a nude female artist.
"She is representing herself both as artist and as model but she's thinking about creativity and sexuality through a particularly female perspective," Fletcher said.
The wall placard next to "Study of a Man as Boxer" by Alice Farrar notes that "when women were admitted into mixed life drawing classes, they were given strict guidelines on maintaining the proper atmosphere: 'looking neither to the right or to the left, they will never meet with annoyance, and will gradually form around them a pure, straightforward atmosphere."
Farrar's academic charcoal drawing of a nude model appears in stark contrast to John Singer Sargent's "Three Studies of a Standing Nude Male," a subject with which he would have been more comfortable and familiar than Farrar.
"The Becker Gallery really helps bring out obscure works in the museum's collection," said Herlihy.
"Becoming a (Woman) Artist" will be on display until it is replaced with works in conjunction with Professor of English Aaron Kitch's seminar "Shakespeare's Afterlives," which will open November 27, 2007.