The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) opened its doors to the public for the first time in over a year this semester, and the staff has many plans to rekindle engagement in the spring. There are two main initiatives set to roll out early next semester: an anti-racism strategic plan and the museum ambassador program.
The newest exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), ‘There Is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women In Art,” opened on Thursday. Elizabeth Humphrey ’14, the exhibition’s curator, and former BCMA Curatorial Assistant and Manager of Student Programs, was inspired to create the exhibition due to a lack of representation of Black women in the Museum’s collection.
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) opened its doors, with mandatory masking policies in place, to Bowdoin students and the public on July 1, 2021. According to Curatorial Assistant and Manager of Student Programs Sabrina Lin ’21, the reopening was equally anticipated by students and staff.
On April 9, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) reopened with limited hours, allowing students living on campus and in residence an opportunity to explore the exhibitions on view. Up until this point in the semester, the Museum has only offered limited engagement opportunities for classes and individual research projects.
On Thursday, April 8, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) virtually welcomed Iraqi archeologist and former Iraq Minister of Culture Dr. Abdulameer Al-Hamdani to give a presentation on the significance of Iraqi heritage and culture.
On Thursday evening, the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum welcomed Andrew Hartsig ’95, director of the Arctic Program at Ocean Conservatory; Susan Kaplan, professor of anthropology and director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center and Laura Henry, professor of government, to discuss the most prominent difficulties and environmental challenges in the Arctic region today.
For photographer Rhea Banker, qamutits, or Greenlandic ice sleds, are more than just a vehicle for traversing an unforgiving arctic landscape—they are objects that tell unique cultural stories. In her virtual lecture, “Qamutit: Portraits in the Landscape,” hosted by the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum on Wednesday night, Banker spoke about her work in the Arctic, where she photographed Greenland and the ice sleds that dot its terrain.
On Wednesday, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) welcomed Dr. Sarah Guérin, to speak in a Zoom lecture about the connection between West Africa and Western Europe during the medieval era. Guérin, an assistant professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania, researches on African-European trade routes.
On Wednesday the College announced that the new building that will house the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum will be named the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies in honor of trustee emeritus John A Gibbons Jr.
Despite having donating over 500 pieces to Bowdoin’s collection, Edward Perry Warren’s name was not known by most students—that is, until Brooke Wrubel ’21 decided to delve deeper into the career of the prolific American antiquities collector.
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) has unanimously approved and released an Anti-Racism Action Plan with hopes of pushing the Museum towards greater equity and inclusion.
“This statement represents a recommitment on the part of everybody who’s a member of the [BCMA] staff since everybody had an opportunity to read drafts and contribute recommendations,” said Frank Goodyear, co-director of the BCMA, in a Zoom interview with the Orient.
On Wednesday, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History Kate Gerry gave two talks about her recent exhibition on the Wyvern Collection—one of the most important privately owned medieval art collections in the world. The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) secured a long-term loan of 100 of its objects through an anonymous lender.
The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum started planning its move to a virtual format as soon as Bowdoin closed its doors in the spring. Genny LeMoine, the curator and registrar of the Arctic Museum, is leading its virtual programming focused on goals of greater at-home accessibility and a stronger online presence.
On Wednesday, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) hosted the first installment of “Art Up Close”—a five-part series where students, staff and faculty come together to discuss art. The first webinar brought together 20 community members to discuss “Protest Art and Black Lives Matter.”
Claire Traum ’21 and Lucy Siegel ’22, two members of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Advisory Council, developed the idea after gaining experience with webinars during summer opportunities.
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) must abide by the College’s color-coded campus status levels. Currently, at “yellow” status, first-year writing seminar students and their accompanying faculty members can enter the BCMA for a class visit; at “orange” status, only faculty and staff may enter; at “red” status, only essential staff members may enter the building.
When you walk into the Boyd Gallery on the second floor of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), you encounter “Fast Fashion/Slow Art”—an exhibition that scrutinizes the contemporary garment industry through videos, installations and collaborations with contemporary artists and filmmakers.
“Pasado y Presente: Twentieth-Century Photographs of a Changing Mexico” is the first Latin America-focused exhibition featured at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) in the past 15 years. The collection of photographs, curated by Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Carolyn Wolfenzon Niego’s intermediate Spanish class, opened on January 7 and will be on display through March.
At first glance, the lower floor of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) looks like any other art exhibition: paintings, drawings, statues and other various forms of artwork are scattered throughout, set against yellow walls and accompanied by plaques detailing each piece’s history and artistry.
Joshua Johnson, one of the first professional African-American artists, spent the majority of his career painting portraits of white families in Baltimore, Maryland. He is only known to have painted two portraits of African-American men, which have been separately owned since the 19th century.
In 1860, Bowdoin Medical School alumnus Henry Byron Haskell facilitated the shipment of five Assyrian reliefs from the site of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq, to Brunswick, Maine. These large stone pieces from the Northwest Palace of King Ashurnasirpal II, built in 879 BCE, traveled on camelback and steamship to arrive where they are now.
Over a century after its emergence, modern art is more relevant than ever. The movement often thought of in a strictly historical context is apparently less removed from our contemporary world than it appears.
In a presentation entitled “The Transnational Framework of Modernism’s Many Emergences, 1900-1950,” author and collector Laurette McCarthy and former Executive Editor of MIT Press Roger Conover ’72 discussed the history and impact of the exhibition, which was curated by the museum’s co-director, Anne Goodyear.
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum were awarded a $239,344 federal grant from The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) last week. The IMLS award description says the museums will use the funds to “improve both physical and digital access to the collections of its two museums.”
The College matched the federal fund with an additional $249,000 to support the project.
For some, “art” refers to old paintings in heavy frames hanging in a museum. For others, art is a means of expression. For Bowdoin’s new Curatorial Assistant and Manager of Student Programs Elizabeth Humphrey ’14, art is personal.
Bowdoin students need look no further than Coles Tower or the VAC fishbowl to see examples of Bauhaus architecture. This year, Bauhaus’ hundredth anniversary will bring this legacy to the fore on Bowdoin’s campus.
Founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius, the revolutionary modernist art school proclaimed its aim “to create a new building of the future that will unite every discipline … as a clear symbol of the new belief to come.”
What followed was a movement that forever changed definitions of art, design and architecture, stretching across the world and across the century.
The bronze figures of Sophocles and Demosthenes, set in niches on the facade of the Walker Art Building, are turning 125-years-old. As the Bowdoin College Museum of Art celebrates the quasquicentennial anniversary of its iconic home, students, faculty and community members gathered on Tuesday evening to celebrate the legacy of art and visual culture at the College.
Visitors are packed in the Becker Gallery, chatter filling the air as community members and students alike wait in anticipation to see the new exhibition, “Fashioning Modernity: Art and Independence Among Yorubas in Nigeria,” on display at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA).
The dome of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) rings with music as a full, rapt audience experiences sound interwoven with sight. On this February night, the performance series “Music at the Museum” continues yet another successful run.
Enter the latest exhibition at Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), and it may not be what you expect. In ‘Material Resources: Intersections of Art and the Environment,’ notions of what environmental art ought to look like are challenged within moments of arrival.
Sixteen striking black and white photos are hung on the three gray walls of the Becker Gallery in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), occupying the intimate space and transporting the viewer to Germany in 1968.
Frequent visitors to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art recognize Dan Dowd as a familiar face. Over a decade long career as a museum security officer, his standing silhouette has become one with the pristine gallery walls, a guardian figure quietly watching over the collection.
The 3,000-year-old stone slabs sit in silence, mostly. Weighing in at almost 2,000 pounds each, it took a lot to get them here—a boat ride down the Tigris to Basra, a skip over to Bombay, then, via ship, onward to Brunswick, Maine.
Like undulating ripples of water swept by a lingering breeze, swirls of black lines converge and disperse in linn meyers’ site-specific drawing “Let’s Get Lost.” Complemented by an interactive sound installation “Listening Glass” by Rebecca Bray, James Bigbee Garver and Josh Knowles, the piece transforms the Walker Gallery at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art into a multi-sensory metaphor for artistic process, ephemerality and time.
Paintings and artifacts are not the only treasures one can find in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA). Behind the exhibition walls, a passionate team of scholars and creators embody the institution’s wealth of culture, resource and opportunity.
When we think of art museums, an image of lonesome paintings hanging on pristine, white walls often comes to mind. However, Associate Professor of Classics and Curator for the Ancient Collection James Higginbotham challenges this conventional approach in the new exhibit on display at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, “In the Round.”
“We have a tendency in the modern era to relegate art to the walls.
Political propaganda, classical tales and five centuries of history are on view at the student-curated exhibition “A Handled History,” showcasing the prestigious Molinari medals collection. Not to be underestimated for their intimate scale, the selection on display is a compact cultural testament to object-collecting and materiality.
For the last 27 years of his career, the 19th-century artist Winslow Homer lived and worked amongst the jagged outcrops and tempestuous tides of Prouts Neck, Maine. The new exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, “Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting,” reshapes visitors’ understanding of the iconic American painter.
The newest exhibit at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) consists of one room with couches, chairs, bookshelves, two iPads and a chalkboard. “Reading Room: Experiments in Collaborative Dialogue and Archival Practice in the Arts” is a social practice art exhibit, part of an art discipline that views the creation of a social situation as art in its own right.
Both the visual and nonvisual are on display in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s newest exhibition, “Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art.” Alongside its array of diverse and often abstract works—from beaded curtains hanging from doorways to auditory works of art—the gallery contains a series of “audible labels” played through an innovative device developed specifically for this show.
With the help of new technology, the Assyrian reliefs in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art are moving back in time. Projected color on the ancient reliefs recreates the way they would have looked in the ninth century BCE, before their paint wore off.
It took 15 students, 20 hours, 25 pounds of drywall screws, 7,000 rubber bands and the vision of Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis to create the unconventional drawings soon to be on display in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
As many Americans reassess the cultural codes surrounding sexual assault, students and faculty turned back in time yesterday evening to reflect on the glamorization of sexual violence in foundational European art within its historical context.
Organized by Andrew W.
When viewed in a modern context, the Soviet propaganda posters in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s (BCMA) newest exhibit provide not only insight into the rise and fall of the Soviet Union but also a framework for understanding the present.