Four Bowdoin students will be honored in a Maine art show opening this weekend. "Next Generation IV," a biennial exhibition showing the work of roughly 20 junior and senior art majors enrolled at Maine colleges, opens at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport this Saturday.
Four visual arts majors from Bowdoin—seniors Alex Bassett, Tommy Wilcox, Alexa Lindauer, along with junior Sam Gilbert—have been selected by the CMCA to show work at the exhibition. Also represented are students from Bates, Colby, the College of the Atlantic, Maine College of Art, and various University of Maine campuses.
The four Bowdoin students in the show learned about the Rockport exhibition through a visual arts department e-mail.
"I already had these works and thought 'Why not?' when the application was mentioned in the art department e-mail," Bassett said.
In fact, all four Bowdoin students submitted work that they had completed earlier in their college career. Wilcox's pieces in the exhibition are four of the eight images in his photograph series titled "Famous," which he completed last fall.
Gilbert has two pieces in the show, despite being abroad in Tasmania this semester.
"Two of my paintings were selected—'Anticipation' and 'Biette Farm'—both of which I painted during my landscape painting class with Jim Mullen last semester," Gilbert wrote in an e-mail to the Orient. "I completed both of them before I even thought about submitting work to the exhibition."
Bassett completed her selected work, an oil and chalk pastel drawing titled "Turkeytails," last summer during her time spent on Orrs Island.
"I drew the incidental, miniscule moments occurring on the trails," she said. "The turkey tails were less than a couple of inches across. Sometimes after I took a picture and started drawing, I forgot how small they were until I saw them again on the trail."
Lindauer has work being shown from her first, sophomore, and senior years. Among her selected works are a charcoal-on-plywood series from her sophomore year titled "Trailworkers," and a group of photobooth portrait monotype prints made during her first year.
"There is a good representation of pieces in different media—sculpture, metalwork, multimedia, oil and acrylic painting, charcoal and ink drawing, photography, and printmaking," said Lindauer.
The CMCA space lends itself to a wide array of media. A three-story building, it is currently showing an exhibition of work from elementary, middle, and high school students from Maine in its downstairs gallery, and a state fair and festival-themed exhibition titled "On and Off the Midway" in its top-floor gallery. "Next Generation IV" will be shown in the Main Gallery on the middle floor.
"The exhibition is really cool—the space is a really neat site, wood floors on the top floor and lots of natural light," said Bassett. "Very bright, classic space."
For many students in the show, having art hung and shown by independent art directors is a new and valuable experience.
"I learned a lot from having to prepare for it, and even got yelled at by the director of the show for not giving her all the things she needed to hang my work," said Bassett. "But she knew it was my first show that I didn't hang myself, so she was very helpful in referring me to the hardware store down the street. It was definitely a learning experience."
The reception for the opening of Next Generation IV will be this Saturday, April 4, from 2-4 p.m. at the CMCA. The show will be exhibited until April 18.