The Bowdoin Orient

Three years after graduating from Bowdoin, visual arts major Shaun El C. Leonardo '03 had an artistic experience that made "[art] grad school look like kid stuff."

Each week the Orient spotlights different aspects of the arts and entertainment scene in Portland. This week's installment focuses on venues for vegetarian food.

Students may have noticed someting special in Moulton Dining Hall this week: the 12x24 prints lining main dining room's walls.

Publishing prolifically since his first travel book in 1988, Douglas Kennedy '76 has been praised by reviewers as an author who consistently "knows how to keep the pages turning."

CHRIS ROWE '10 AND ZACH COFFIN '10

While stages on Bowdoin's campus are consistently filled with impressive productions, there are certainly times that students crave some off-campus theater. For those of you who find yourself in this situation, Portland Stage Company in down-town Portland should definitely be on your radar.

CHRIS OMACHI '12 AND LON NUNLEY '12

"So much of being an artist is based on doing it yourself," said Deke Weaver '85 looking back on the trajectory of his career as a multi-media performance artist and college art professor.

SAGE SANTANGELO '12 AND CHELSEA YOUNG '12

Many of us have caught snippets of Bowdoin tours while running to class or through the union or toward the stapler parked on H-L's front desk. In doing so, how many of you have heard the favorite fact that, following only behind San Francisco, Portland holds the second-highest number of restaurants per capita in the United Sates?

Local musicians, physicians and community members will celebrate and support Haiti at a benefit concert at Frontier Café on Saturday, March 13.

EMMA CHIAPPETTA '11 AND MATT SEWARD '11

With the 2010 Winter Olympics drawing to a close, Professor John Gold's upcoming talk "London 2012, Olympic Legacy, and the Challenge of Sustainable Urbanism" holds particular global relevance. Gold's talk and recent research focuses on London's urban planning as the city shifts to accommodate the Summer Olympics in two years' time.

"Show, don't tell," is a mantra repeated in classrooms from middle school through college as teachers push their students to bring narratives to life. After graduating from Bowdoin in 1984, Kary Antholis has taken this advice to heart and brought it to its full potential.

CARLO DAVIS '12 AND SAMUEL PACKARD '12

While Portland is home to a wealth of art, two galleries—curated specifically around educational goals and contemporary issues—should be of particular interest to members of the Bowdoin community.

TIM SULLIVAN '10 AND BARRETT MOORE '10

At the end of his senior year, Michael Wood '06 had the challenging and rewarding theatrical experience to which many Bowdoin thespians aspire; Wood embarked on an independent study in which he directed a production of The Laramie Project, the widely celebrated play about the reaction to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming.

LEAH WANG '12 AND SADIE NOTT '12

This week we headed to Portland and rewarded our taste buds with a transcontinental dining experience. Although Brunswick's downtown is home to an increasingly diverse selection of ethnic food eateries, an African restaurant has yet to make that list. So we set out to find one in downtown Portland.

In the summer of 2004, two years after graduating from Bowdoin, visual arts major Kyle Durrie '02 faced an inspirational lull that would later be recognized as the revolutionary turning point in her creative process. "I was at an artist residency in Skowhegan and I started having a hard time figuring out what I was doing. I'd just had a show in Portland, Maine at Space Gallery and I was really proud of the works I'd put up."

If you could only listen to one album for the rest of your life, what would it be? PN: "Funeral" by Arcade Fire is by far my favorite album of all time snd probably always will be. JS: Gnarls Barkley's "The Odd Couple". Cee-Lo Green is a soul machine.

Next week, as Bowdoin students wrap up the semester's work, the film "Avatar" will hit the big screen and bring special effects artist and class of 1990 alum Dave Fogler's newest creations to life.

Like many artistic alumni, Theo Salter '07 came to Bowdoin with an interest in developing his passion for theater and taking advantage of the academic diversity that Bowdoin has to offer.

Brunswick, Maine, may not show up on the fashion radars, but for fashion designer Ruthie Davis '84, the Bowdoin campus and community provided a blank canvas for her early experimentation with fashion.

Kate Herlihy '08, the current curatorial assistant at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, recognized her passion for art history midway through her academic career.

As a medium, an expression and a creation, sculpture provides Wade Kavanaugh '01 with a way of interacting with the world around him. Although Kavanaugh's interest in and passion for the visual arts existed long before college, he developed a relationship with sculpture while at Bowdoin, where he majored in economics and minored in visual arts.

For Halley K. Harrisburg '90, the world of art and art history—a world which she continues to explore and redefine—first presented itself to her within the Bowdoin classroom.

For Andrew Gould '00, creative director at EMI records, it is the passion for the music—for the melodies, the industry and the business behind it—that has long been a driving force.

For Ben Butler '00, tracking his artistic passion back to Bowdoin is not a difficult task. "It was by the end of my first year," Butler explained, "my first semester, even, that I found the visual arts to be the only discipline in which I could really bring together all of my interests. Whether it was science, philosophy or Asian studies, the visual arts emerged as the ideal discipline for synthesizing all of my interests. And it still is."

Picture this narrative: a young boy living and making his way in his own mini wilderness. While this may sound like the imagined utopia that many of us reveled in growing up, for alumnus Alex Bettigole '08, this narrative is one that he continues to spin in his bi-weekly Web comic Oak Street Wilds.

There is an “Aha” moment during one of those mesmerizing classes when you realize “This is what you want to be studying. This is where your passion lies.”

Although now living and working in Atlanta, Georgia, architect Scott Ball '87 still points to his Bowdoin experience as one that was and incredibly formative. "As an architect and town planner, primarily what I'm looking at has all grown from trying to figure out how design works in people's lives," Ball said. "And this is an exploration that fundamentally began for me at Bowdoin."

Two weeks after graduating from Bowdoin College in May 2005, Samantha Farrell left behind a rural, Maine summer and moved across the country to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of being a singer-songwriter.

The arrival of a traveling exhibit from the New York University collection will infuse the Bowdoin College Museum of Art with a new shade of cool. The exhibit, titled "New York Cool: Paintings and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection," was curated by New York University professor and art critic Pepe Karmel. Skillfully surveying the disparate New York art world of the 1950s and 1960s, Karmel drew entirely from the New York University Art Collection and included significant pieces by artists such as Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Alex Katz, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.

With the opening of Professor of Art Mark Wethli's show "Recent Paintings" at RedFlagg Gallery in New York City, the Bowdoin arts continue to make a scene in the Big Apple. RedFlagg Gallery, the product of Bowdoin professors Wethli and John Bisbee's inspiration and effort, exhibited works from another Bowdoin artist at its inaugural show. In February, work from 2001 alumna Cassie Jones' "Standard Deviations" was the first art to fill the space.

If social house basements and plates of Super Snack nachos are beginning to get old, students can rest assured that this weekend holds more in store than a typical weekend night. This Friday, the Bowdoin College radio station WBOR will present hip-hop artist Wale (pronounced wah-lay) to the campus. Friday's concert marks the second of two large-scale productions orchestrated by WBOR. The first was the Broken Social Scene concert that lit up Farley Field house this past October. This wealth of music has been incredibly exciting for Bowdoin, according to WBOR concert director Micah McKay '09.

Pickard Auditorium will be the floor for young New York Times best-selling novelist Jonathan Safran Foer on Tuesday. Foer is the author of several short stories and two novels, "Everything is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." He has been hailed as one of the most controversial and influential authors of the decade. With the success of "Everything is Illuminated" in 2002, Foer rose to the top of the best-seller lists. The novel won numerous awards including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize.

Josephine Cameron '98 joins the Bowdoin College Concert Band to bring sounds of the college—both past and present—to the Bowdoin community on Sunday. The concert is the third in a series titled "Friends" in which the concert band has collaborated with notable headline performers. Since her graduation in 1998, Cameron has become well known for her folk song performances and recordings, but her interest and passion for music originated before her college experience. "I was convinced that I would be a music major, and I started out on that path," Cameron said. However, Cameron credits her first year seminar, "Music, Music, and Words," for complicating that plan.

"What have I been up to?" Associate Professor of English Peter Coviello smiled as he repeated the question. "Well, like all faculty members on leave, I've been drinking wine in exotic cities and dancing in night clubs across Europe," he joked. "No, no. Well, I have been away." While away from Bowdoin, Coviello traveled throughout Europe to Naples, Berlin, Sussex, Madrid, Paris and London. He plotted his travels to accommodate several academic talks at European universities and also budgeted some time with his family in Naples.

Are pictures really worth a thousand words? In the Becker Gallery at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where professors curate shows in conjunction with their classes to expand on certain issues, the answer is yes. Currently in the Becker Gallery is the exhibit "Hogarth's Women: Virtue and Vice in Eighteenth Century England," a show curated by Associate Professor of English Ann Kibbie in conjunction with her class, "Women and the 18th Century Novel." With the help of Bowdoin's Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Diana Tuite, Kibbie selected prints of the major 18th-century English artist William Hogarth. Hogarth, a painter, printmaker, satirist and social critic, created many series of prints that questioned and explored issues of modern morality.

While many may have preconceived notions about national talent pageants, Adrienne Watkinson, Miss Maine 2008, will put the rumors to rest when she performs a violin concert at Studzinski Recital Hall on Saturday. Watkinson, originally from Topsham, was urged to run for Miss America after Charlie Lane, owner of Maine Sound Stage, saw her performing in Brunswick in 2007. According to Watkinson, she laughed at the idea because it wasn't anything she'd thought of doing before. Lane urged her to consider Miss Maine, however, because the talent portion of both the Miss Maine and the Miss America pageants was a huge component of the competition. Considering her violin talent and the $10,000 scholarship awarded to the winner, Watkinson decided to give it a shot.

Normally, when students think of Farley Field House, they might be reminded of cut-off football jerseys, eye black, and pre-orientation sleepovers. This Saturday night, however, Bowdoin's athletic facility will be transformed when Bowdoin's radio station, WBOR, presents the Canadian indie rock band Broken Social Scene.

Although a liberal arts education often lends a cold shoulder to the specialized world of architecture and urban planning, San Francisco-based architect Liz Ogbu will remind the Bowdoin and Brunswick communities of the socially, environmentally, and functionally significant role architecture plays in today's world on Monday. Ogbu provides a pertinent voice: ten years after her own liberal arts education at Wellesley College, Ogbu has channeled her talent and ambition into revolutionizing the role of architecture and its relationship to the community.

The borders of Brunswick will broaden this Wednesday with the kick-off of the Global Lens Series. This collection of international films is the product of the Global Film Initiative (GFI)'s annual effort to help produce movies made in developing countries and to distribute them to Western audiences.

We all have them, but they are rarely celebrated in our competitive, image-driven culture. "They" are our bodies. Tonight, "Exposure" will reveal, celebrate, and honor all versions of the body

In addition to the sunlight, sunglasses, and Nalgenes which are all staples of Ivies, live music plays an integral role in the celebrations. This year's Ivies concert features Talib Kweli, the well-known and critically acclaimed rapper.

At the end of their Bowdoin career, senior art majors arrange their own exhibitions and bid farewell to the College. Tomorrow, seniors Avery Forbes, Joanna Sese, Nora Meyer, and Doran Rivera will put up their joint exhibition, which showcases their diverse artistic abilities.

Photojournalist Nancy McGirr plans to show Wednesday how even in a place as stifling as a Guatemala city garbage dump, impoverished youth can find a voice.

In her introductory remarks, Professor of Sociology Susan Bell introduced "The Vagina Monologues" author Eve Ensler as a playwright and an activist. It was evident by the conclusion of Ensler's speech that these two roles had become inextricably intertwined.

In her film "Angels of Austria: The Church that Reached Out to Holocaust Survivors," Judy Faust captures the reconciliatory process between the Austrian people and Holocaust survivors.

Since May 16, 1929, when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences handed out its first Oscar awards, the ceremony has grown in popularity, glamour, and prestige.