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Arts & Entertainment

Jazz

“Beyond Category”: McMullen’s History of Jazz course explores music and deepens understanding

Last Thursday night, Portland’s State Theatre came alive—velvety bass slipped through the cracks of the drums as an enthusiastic crowd danced, bathed in a violet light. In name, this was Digable Planets’ 30th Anniversary Tour, celebrating the Brooklyn hip-hop trio’s release of their debut album, “Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)” in 1993.

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concert

Southern Maine fall concert preview

If you’ve spent the last four days of cloudy weather riding your bike around campus and listening to “Jackie Onassis” by Sammy Rae and the Friends, you’re in luck. Next Wednesday, Sammy is playing the State Theatre in Portland, and a slate of wonderful artists (and a few comedians) play shows in the greater Portland area in the following weeks.

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BCMA

Music at the Museum celebrates the life and work of Mina Loy

As Mina Loy’s works hang on the walls of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) for just a few more days, a captivated audience listened as the notes of a piano danced about the room, bringing the extraordinary artist back to life this past Tuesday at “Music at the Museum.” The performance featured Artist-in-Residence and Director of the Bowdoin Orchestra George Lopez alongside guest artists Katelyn Manfre and Gulimina Mahamuti, performing at noon and again at 4 p.m.

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BOC

“Un-define the feminine:” Film festival explores identities in the outdoors

Yesterday, students, faculty and community members gathered on the Ladd House patio for No Man’s Land Film Festival’s return to campus, marking the second consecutive year the organization has held a screening at Bowdoin. The event, co-hosted by the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC) and the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center (SWAG), consisted of a series of short films that focused on “un-defining the feminine” in athletics and outdoor adventure.

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Art History

“Metamorphosis and Malice” brings Florentine paintings and modern perspectives to the BCMA

Last month, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) unveiled a new exhibition, “Metamorphosis and Malice: Pontormo’s Three Monochrome Paintings from Renaissance Florence and Related Works.” The exhibition is the first time that all three known monochromatic paintings of Jacopo Da Pontormo—a leading painter in sixteenth century Florence—have been shown together.

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New H-L ramp gallery exhibit highlights ordinary moments of student life

After trekking past rows and rows of bookshelves in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library’s basement, students headed for the Hubbard Hall stacks pass by the library’s ramp gallery. Traditionally an exhibition space for student art, this Monday the gallery unveiled its new exhibit, “Snapshots of Life at Bowdoin,” designed by Cora Dow ’24 and Alexandra Camargo ’25.

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Fun & Games

The Talos Principle: Decoding Humanity

As we sit on the verge of an AI revolution and our emails autocomplete as our art is being generated, it’s easy to feel that the human experience is losing a shred of its aura. Because after being thoroughly throttled by bots on the chessboard, and now reading villanelles penned by poet ChatGPT, we of humble humanity are posed with a question: What do we still have over the machines?

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Film

“Palisadia”: Spritz ’23 leaves Maine for the city

Although it’s not his first film that has screened at Bowdoin, “Palisadia” is Henry Spritz’s ’23 last before he graduates. The film, which premiered in Sills Hall last Friday, tells the story of an actress living in New York City as she navigates both the acting in a movie and her life outside her work, as the experiences begin to increasingly mirror one another.

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Film

Francophone Film Festival returns to Bowdoin for spring

The Francophone Film Festival is back at Bowdoin. After showing three films over three weeks last fall, the festival returned on Tuesday, screening the first film of Francois Truffaut’s beloved Antoine Doinel series, “400 Blows,” to an audience of Brunswick residents, students and faculty in Searles Hall.

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Fun & Games

Playdead: To follow the thread of dread

Playdead is an independent game company that has produced two of the most striking and surreal platformers that the genre has ever seen. The gamescapes of “Limbo,” its first project, and “Inside,” its second, are both abstract, rendered heavily symbolic and may at first seem as obscure as our most cryptic dreams.

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Lecture

‘A Quantum Exchange’: Minter and DeVille discuss memory’s role in art

As a continuation of a series highlighting Joseph McKeen 2022–23 visiting Fellow Toshi Reagon, artists Daniel Minter and Abigail DeVille convened in front of an eager audience in Kresge auditorium on Wednesday evening to discuss their art and involvement in Parable Path Maine, an organization dedicated to artistic expression and community engagement based on Octavia E.

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lecture

‘Arrivals & Departures’: Mark Wethli looks back on his career

This past Monday, dozens of current and former students, faculty members and other community members filled Kresge Auditorium to celebrate the career of Professor of Art Mark Wethli. Wethli gave a talk in honor of his career at Bowdoin entitled “Arrivals & Departures: An Artist’s Talk,” where he enumerated eighteen vignettes that framed his career at Bowdoin through a term he referred to as “patterns of making.” The talk was varied in style, including everything from Wethli recalling the story of the life-sized model of a Piper Cub aircraft he created out of wood with his father to him reading singular jokes, which were met with laughter from the audience as he delved into his next topics without pausing.

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Portrait of an Artist

Portrait of an Artist: Mira Pickus ’25

From Purity Pact to Masque & Gown, Mira Pickus ’25 has made an impact on Bowdoin’s stage within her first two years on campus. Pickus is best known for her comedic roles as a sketch and stand-up performer in Purity Pact, a comedy group made up of women and non-binary students on campus, but her work has touched countless aspects of the theater community from acting to technical design.

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Lecture

Moon in full: Marpheen Chann’s coming-of-age story

When Marpheen Chann tells people that his first book is a memoir, he is usually met with confusion. “I kind of get this quizzical look,” Chann said. “‘You wrote a memoir at age 30, 31?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ve experienced a lot.’” Chann is a gay, first-generation Cambodian adoptee of a white, Christian, working-class Maine family.

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Editing Life and Film

Eighth Grade: A Box of Little Things

This contains spoilers for “Eighth Grade.” “Can you help me burn something in the backyard?” “…Yes.” Kayla (Elsie Fisher) and her father Mark (Josh Hamilton) sit in lawn chairs before a campfire. Kayla sets a time capsule with the fire, an old shoebox her fifth-grade self had stuffed with little mementos and trinkets, upon which she wrote with multicolor foam letters “TO THE COOLEST GIRL IN THE WORLD.” There’s a blankness on Kayla’s face as her father asks her if there was anything inside.

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BCMA

Small but mighty: Introducing the BCMA’s new bronze statue exhibition

This March, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) debuted its new exhibition “Figures from the Fire,” displaying priceless bronzework pieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. “[The exhibition] brings together approximately 20 ancient Greek and Roman bronzes from the Wadsworth Atheneum and puts them in conversation with a group of other artworks from the ancient world from Bowdoin’s own collection,” Co-Director of the BCMA Frank Goodyear said.

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Lecture

Graphic details: An evening with Alison Bechdel

On Tuesday night, members of the Bowdoin community dusted the snow off their jackets and poured into Kresge Auditorium for the long-awaited arrival of Alison Bechdel, who delivered this year’s Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture. Bechdel is a celebrated cartoonist and graphic memoirist whose notable works include “Dykes to Watch Out For,” “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” and “Are You My Mother?” Her graphic memoirs are considered by many to be touchstones of the form and have found particular resonance with queer audiences, so much so that “Fun Home” was adapted into a critically-acclaimed Broadway musical in 2015.

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Editing Life and Film

Minari’s Racial America

My family owns a small Mexican bakery and restaurant and has run the place since 2008. It was a consolation after scrambling from the recession, a way to build back up—home lost, business bought. Growing up there I met a lot of strangers over the years, some of whom became good family friends.

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Fashion

Guests and students perform at the African Fashion Show

On Saturday, the Africa Alliance hosted its African Fashion Show with music and outfits from countries all across the continent. Though the fashion show is an annual tradition for the Africa Alliance, the introduction of outside guests and performers made this year’s show a unique event for both audience members and participants.

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Live Music

Jazz Bassist Duane Edwards and ensemble perform new album “Birds” in Studzinski Hall

On Friday evening, Duane Edwards played selections from his new jazz album “Birds” with a talented ensemble in Studzinski Hall. Despite the inclement weather, attendance was strong and the audience’s reviews were enthusiastic. “[My favorite part of the performance] was the way they closed it out with the Nirvana cover,” Brooks Peters ’23 said.

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Lecture

Stromae’s “L’enfer”: Roxanne Panchasi talks mental health and celebrity

On January 9, 2022, French television broadcast a live news interview with renowned Belgian singer Paul van Haver, better known as Stromae. During the last few minutes of the broadcast, Stromae answered the final question of the interview, which was directed towards his struggles with depression, by singing his latest song “L’enfer.” A year later and 3,398 miles away in Brunswick, Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Simon Fraser University Roxanne Panchasi hosted a talk at the College discussing the significance of the moment.

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Comedy

Chloe Hillard Delivers Stand-Up Comedy At Bowdoin

Chloe Hillard, a comedian who writes for multiple television shows including “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” delivered a stand-up comedy show on Saturday night in a packed Jack Magee’s Pub. The show is a part of a series of events the College is putting on in celebration of Black History Month.

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Portrait of an Artist

Portrait of an Artist: Julia Jennings ’23

Since being cast in the role of a murderous old woman during her freshman year of high school, actor, writer and director Julia Jennings ’23 has only grown in her understanding and appreciation of theater. From studying at the National Theater Institute (NTI) in 2022 to, more recently, writing and developing a play titled “In the End, we all go to Providence,” Jennings has been involved in many different facets of theater production, ranging from writing to acting to stage management.

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Editing Life and Film

Aftersun: Is This Our Last Dance?

This contains major spoilers for “Aftersun.” Before I started writing this, I rewatched the ending of “Aftersun.” I’m shocked it was only five minutes that made me smile (again) and laugh at the brilliance of the artistry, of the command of the form, to see that here is a director (Charlotte Wells) who is moving the medium forward and will help keep film alive—only to then burst out into uncontrollable sobbing.

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Visual Arts

Art-Chopped competition brings crowd and seeks to mend student-athlete divide

Last Thursday, students of all class years flocked to Jack Magee’s Pub and Grill in Smith Union to witness Bowdoin’s first ever “Art-Chopped” competition. The event, piloted by Assistant Class Dean Roosevelt Boone and Assistant Director of Student Activities Eunice Shin, aimed to provide students with an outlet to showcase their artistic capabilities.

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Portrait of an Artist

Portrait of an Artist: Tracy McMullen

Professor of Music Tracy McMullen’s journey into jazz was neither direct nor without resistance. Raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, McMullen’s introduction to jazz came from a high school stage band visiting her elementary school. “For me, it’s definitely mysterious how I had this love of jazz,” McMullen said.

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Lecture

Artist-in-Residence Abigail DeVille talks public art installations and marginalized communities

On Wednesday, Artist-in-Residence Abigail DeVille explored the relationship between marginalized communities and America’s past of oppression through a lecture on her sculptures and site-specific installations. DeVille is a Halley K Harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence—the sixth artist to participate in this program.

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BCMA

“In Light of Rome” brings “exceptional” photography collection to the BCMA

Harpswell resident John McGuigan began his collection of early Roman photography as something of a side project to his work as an independent art historian. Now, more than a hundred of these photographs fill the Halford Gallery and the Bernard and Barbro Osher Gallery on the first floor of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), representing one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind.

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Editing Life and Film

A case of right movie, right time.

“Whisper of the Heart” isn’t a Ghibli movie on a grand scale. Unlike the epic nature of “Spirited Away” or “Princess Mononoke,” this one is small, intimate and down-to-earth. Director Yoshifumi Kondo is interested in the moments between breaths and frames scenes with more interest in subtlety rather than monumental motions.

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BCMA

Mask mania: New BCMA exhibit explores Papua New Guinean funeral masks

This fall, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) opened its new exhibition of Papua New Guinean funeral masks titled “The Masks of Memories: Art and Ceremony in Nineteenth Century Oceania.” The exhibition shares the powerful history of the masks, detailing their creation on the island of New Ireland, their significance as cultural artifacts and the way in which they were acquired by the BCMA.

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literature

Scarily literary: The Foundationalist’s Halloween flash fiction contest

On Halloween Monday, leaflets containing two “spooky stories” cropped up in campus spaces. The Foundationalist, a Bowdoin-founded intercollegiate literary journal, selected and distributed  these zines as part of their first annual “Spooky Flash Fiction Contest.” “We imagined it [as a] fun [opportunity], to write a story anonymously and then hear someone talking about that thing that you wrote on the other side of the Thorne Dining Hall table,” Foundationalist editorial board member Jack Wellschlagler ’23 said.

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