Storytelling is the theme of a new Bates College Museum of Art exhibition that opens with a talk by curator and museum director Dan Mills at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, in the museum, located in the Olin Arts Center at Bates, 75 Russell St.

A highlight of the arts center’s 25th anniversary season, the exhibition Tale Spinning features work in media from video to sculpture to watercolor by six renowned artists: Enrique Chagoya, Lesley Dill, Brad Kahlhamer, Shirin Neshat, Nicky Nodjoumi and Alison Saar.

The museum is open to the public at no cost from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and till 7 p.m. on Wednesdays. For more information, please contact 207-786-6158 or museum@bates.edu.

Kahlhamer talks about his artwork at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 5, at the museum. He is also a musician, and with his musical partner Kelsey Barrett offers the mixed-media performance Yondering at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall.

The concert, also featuring multimedia artists Ursula Scherrer and Kato Hideki, is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Tale Spinning, explains museum director Mills, is “essentially an exhibition of artists who, in very different ways, have a strong narrative component in their work. They come from diverse backgrounds, and they tell tales incorporating aspects of their personal and cultural stories, of history and their imaginations. “It is a group of extraordinary artists who spin tales worth seeing.”

Each employs different aesthetic, conceptual and narrative strategies, resulting in imagery and stories that take many forms.

Here is more about the artists:

Enrique Chagoya

Chagoya describes his prints and paintings as “a product of collisions between historical visions, ancient and modern, marginal and dominant paradigms.” From visual vocabularies ranging from pre-Columbian mythology to Christian symbolism to American pop culture, he fashions a layered and provocative commentary on the U.S. role in the world.

Chagoya is a professor in the art and art history department at Stanford University. His work is represented in some of the nation’s most prestigious museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He lives in San Francisco.

Lesley Dill

Dill works in sculpture, photography and performance, using a variety of techniques to explore themes of language, emotion, the body and transformational experience. She is known for incorporating letters, words and the language of great writers into her images. Her work has been widely exhibited and is represented in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions.

In 2008, collaborating with composer Richard Marriott, she created and directed the opera ìDivide Light,î based on the language of Emily Dickinson. They are now creating their second opera, derived from the life and writings of Machiavelli. She lives in New York City.

Brad Kahlhamer

Kahlhamer was born to Native American parents in Arizona, adopted by a middle-class German-American family and raised in the Midwest unaware of his background. His paintings and prints fuse expressionist painting with comics, street culture and the visionary tradition of Native American art.

A New York City resident, Kahlhamer is also a musician whose work includes a new score, commissioned by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, for the 1929 silent film “Red Skins.” He lives in New York City.

Shirin Neshat

Neshat, a native of Iran, makes photographs and videos that use the situations of women in Muslim culture to explore broader issues of memory and identity. She eschews simple polemics in favor of a complex and nuanced approach to the subject. Neshat’s recent work includes parallel videos projected on opposite walls that engage the viewer in a dynamic engagement with the material.

Neshat gained prominence in the mid-1990s with the photograph series “Women of Allah,” in which she overlaid Farsi calligraphy on the hands and faces of her subjects. Perhaps Iran’s best-known contemporary artist, Neshat has work in museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tate Gallery, London. She lives in New York City.

Nicky Nodjoumi

Also born in Iran, Nodjoumi makes paintings and drawings that assemble Persian, modern Iranian and Western stereotypes into scenarios reflecting issues of tyranny, hypocrisy and exploitation. His narratives often feature and poke fun of authority figures in symbolically charged paintings.

He has shown work in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues in the U.S. and abroad, including museums in New York, Chicago and the Middle East. With Neshat, Nodjoumi co-curated the 2008 exhibition “Ardeshir Mohassess: Art and Satire in Iran” at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City. He lives in Brooklyn.

Alison Saar

Saar, the daughter of white writer and art conservator Richard Saar and noted sculptor Betye Saar, an artist of black, Native American and Irish descent, is known particularly for her sculpture. She brings a lively wit and the visual exuberance of folk art to sophisticated symbolic explorations of African and Afro-Caribbean religion, African American history and American politics.

Her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions across the nation and is represented in the collections of such museums as the Baltimore Art Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The exhibition, says Mills, doesn’t hew strictly to conventional approaches to narration. “One of the exciting things about the exhibition is that it can expand for the viewer the notion of how one constructs a narrative,” he says. In addition, “it’s exciting to present important artworks by these internationally recognized artists, works that spin tales about a wide range of compelling topics.”

Long recognized for the strength of its drawing collection, the Museum of Art reveals multiple dimensions of that medium in major exhibitions this summer.

As part of a statewide initiative exploring the art of drawing, the exhibition Emerging Dis/Order: Drawings by Amy Stacey Curtis, Alison Hildreth and Andrea Sulzer features new work by respected Maine artists who explore themes of memory and loss, order and chaos, and emerging and converging human behavior.

Meanwhile, drawings, watercolors and illustrated letters from one of America’s most famous artist families constitute Andrew and Jamie Wyeth: Selections from the Private Collection of Victoria Browning Wyeth.

Emerging Dis/Order opens with a museum reception at 4 p.m. Friday, June 10, and shows through Sept. 10. Opening the Wyeth exhibition is a lecture by Victoria Wyeth at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, June 11, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St., immediately followed by a reception in the museum at 4. The exhibition runs through Oct. 2.

On view through Aug. 30 in the museum’s Synergy Space is Selected Drawings and Photographs from the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection. Located in the Olin Art Center, the museum is open to the public at no cost from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.

Emerging Dis/Order is part of 2011′s Where to Draw the Line: The Maine Drawing Project, a statewide visual arts initiative, developed by the Maine Curators Group, that represents a unique collaboration between Maine’s arts organizations. As part of the project, museums and galleries across Maine are offering exhibitions that focus on the process of drawing and how artists use it as a vehicle for creating diverse forms of visual expression.

Selections from the Private Collection of Victoria Browning Wyeth comprises an extraordinary selection of artworks by Andrew Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth. The show is assembled from the personal collection of Victoria Browning Wyeth ’01, and includes portraits of family members and neighbors now known as models for Andrew Wyeth, as well as Maine and Pennsylvania landscapes.

More about Emerging Dis/Order

Curtis, best-known for her interactive “solo-biennial” installations in unused mill spaces throughout Maine, has previously used drawings to support her themed installation projects. More recently, however, she has become fascinated with the possibilities of drawing as a medium in its own right, and her work has developed in profound ways.

Hildreth, well-known to Maine audiences as a printmaker and painter, also produces remarkable drawings, such as her Forthrights and Meanders, which are both narrative and journey. An artist interested in exploring interconnections between species and intersections between art and science, she says that “making art is my journal, a record of what compels and absorbs me. It is a method of questioning, investigating and discovering.”

Sulzer is acclaimed for making exceptionally detailed drawings that imbue dense, repetitive marks with, she says, “vertiginous, unsettling sense of space.” She is interested in the “way that memory fractures, distorts and collapses time and, in particular, how modern memory is overwhelmed by fragments that are impossible to ground in personal experience.”

“The Maine Drawing Project serves two purposes,” explains William Low, curator at the Bates museum. “First, it’s an opportunity for Maine art institutions to show the extent of the wonderful drawing collections that audiences do not often see. Second, it’s an effort to show the variety of artwork being produced by contemporary artists who are using drawing in new and interesting ways.

“Drawings are often an overlooked and underappreciated medium, often regarded as only ‘practice’ for finished works of art” in other media. “But many artists draw as their primary medium. And drawing is not just pencil on paper.”

Such collaborations among institutions result in a whole greater than the sum of the parts, notes Dan Mills, director of the Bates museum. “Doing so fosters partnerships, understanding and sharing of resources. The result is terrific for the statewide cultural community, and museum-goers can view a remarkable breadth and depth of drawings.”

More about Andrew and Jamie Wyeth

“One of the truly exciting aspects about working with Victoria’s collection is that many of the drawings have never been exhibited before,” says Low.

Including sketchbooks and early studies for prominent paintings, the exhibition affords “a rare opportunity to work with a collection that explores the working process of Andrew Wyeth,” he adds.

The collection is of particular interest also because of its personal nature, as it includes illustrated personal correspondence between Andrew Wyeth and his granddaughter. “It’s a pleasure to work with Victoria, whose enthusiasm and intimacy with the works brings extraordinary insight,” says Low.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts.

Like the Wyeth show, Selected Drawings and Photographs from the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection consists primarily of drawings, Mills adds. “Together, the exhibitions offer an extraordinary opportunity to view drawings by generations of artists with a strong association to Maine.”

Robin Starr ’85, director of the American and European paintings and prints department at the Massachusetts auction house Skinner Inc., returns to Bates to discuss her career in the arts at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 30, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Part of the Alumni in the Arts series, co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Visual Culture and the Bates College Museum of Art, the talk is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.

Starr began her career at Skinner in 1987, working as an assistant and then a specialist in American and European paintings and prints. She appraised art works, implemented an art history internship program and auctioned works to various institutions and charities, including the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

In 2009, Starr was named department director.

She graduated from Bates with a bachelor of science degree in art history and physics, a major that she designed. Starr wrote her senior thesis on “Neuron Activation Autoradiography and the Application of Scientific Evaluation in Art Historical Research.”

She earned a master’s in art history from Williams College, during which time she worked as a lab intern in the painting department of the Williamstown Regional Art Conservation Lab and as a student archeologist at the Abbey of Psalmodi in Saint-Laurent-d’Aigouze, France.

Prior to joining Skinner, she was a lecturer of art history at Boston College and Massachusetts College of Art.

She is a frequent contributor to Country Living Magazine’s column “What Is It? What Is It Worth?”

With galleries in Boston and Marlborough, Mass., Skinner is a leading auctioneer and appraiser of antiques and fine art. Skinner’s departments include American and European furniture and decorative arts, fine ceramics, silver and fine jewelry, couture, fine musical instruments, Asian art, Judaica, American Indian and ethnographic art, and toys, dolls and collectibles.

In 2004, Skinner set a world record for a painting sold at auction, when a previously unknown Fitz Henry Lane work was auctioned in Boston for $5.5 million.

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The NEH Preservation Assistance Grant will enable the museum to obtain expert assessments of how best to preserve the collection, which came to the museum in the 1950s.

Hartley was born in Lewiston in 1877. About a century ago he joined a circle of artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin, who were represented by the renowned photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. By bringing a distinctively American energy and outlook to cutting-edge European trends in art, they established an American modernist school that remains tremendously popular and influential.

At Bates, the Hartley materials compose one of the museum’s two founding collections, and they continue to inform its approach to acquiring and exhibiting artwork, and to educational programming. The grant, explains museum curator Bill Low, enables the museum to “get a simple, comprehensive assessment of the collection done. We can then use that as a springboard to other treatment grants and larger support.”

Representing a Lewiston native and artist of international renown, the Hartley collection is a valuable Bates asset. “Like the other collections here, it’s an important teaching tool,” Low says. In addition, “it has really served as a foundation for the other collecting that we do.”

Though living elsewhere for most of his life, Hartley often visited Maine in the summer and settled in the Down East village of Corea a few years before he died, in 1943. Though he spent little time in Lewiston as an adult, he “wrote and spoke very nostalgically about his hometown,” says Low, “particularly later in his life when he really wanted to dedicate himself to becoming the painter of Maine.

“He wrote quite beautifully about his love for the Androscoggin River and the people here, and being a young man here.”

In his lifetime, the artist expressed a desire that there be a memorial collection of some sort in Lewiston after his death. In 1951, the heirs of the Hartley estate gave Bates personal effects from Hartley’s home in Corea, including drawings by other artists in the Stieglitz circle. In 1955, his niece, Norma Berger, made an additional gift that included 99 Hartley drawings.

“The Hartley drawings cover a wide range of subjects and constitute the largest collection his work in this medium,” says Low. “They document his travels and some also serve as studies for some of his significant paintings.

“As a result this collection is frequently sought out by scholars as part of the research into Hartley’s practice. The collection has been included in important exhibitions over the years.”

Overall, Low explains, the collection is “quite broad.” It includes textiles that Hartley collected, correspondence, poems and essays, jewelry, and a camera, as well as Hartley’s personal library and a large holding of his writings, which reside in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at Bates.

The grant is part of a special NEH initiative, the “We the People” program. It is designed to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture. “It’s a valuable recognition of the significance of this project,” Low says.

Maine artist Joel Babb, known for his wilderness paintings and panoramic cityscapes, speaks about the use of color at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center at Bates College, 75 Russell St.

Titled Color Theory in Painting Practice, the lecture is open to the public at no cost and is sponsored by the Bates College Museum of Art. Babb’s work is displayed at the museum through March 27 in an exhibition called Joel M. Babb: The Process Revealed.Museum hours are 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.

Babb graduated with an art history degree from Princeton in 1969 and earned a master’s degree from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts School and Tufts University. He also studied with artists George Segal and George Ortman.

Babb’s body of work includes wilderness images and photorealist historical allegories. (His depiction of the first successful organ transplant is displayed in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School.) But he is best-known for city panoramas that depict flattened, wide-angled views of Boston and Providence.

In the 1970s, Babb built a studio in Sumner, Maine, which became his permanent residence and inspiration for his large wooded landscapes.

Babb’s work has been displayed at Vose Galleries and Gallery Naga in Boston; Sherry French Gallery, Gerold Wunderlich Gallery and the National Academy Museum in New York; and in Maine, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Portland Museum of Art and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

By Alison Lizars ’11 and Naima Murphy ’10

A reception opens an exhibition focusing on alumni gifts to the collections of the Bates College Museum of Art at 6 p.m. Friday, Jan. 15, in the Olin Arts Center at Bates, 75 Russell St.

Under the guidance of museum staff, three Bates students serving as curatorial interns organized the exhibition Collection Project 4: Selections From Alumni Collections. Artists represented in the exhibition include Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Mary Cassatt and Walker Evans.  The show runs through March 27.

The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.

Also showing are Joel Babb: The Process Revealed, which uses the work of Maine artist Babb to explore the role of drawings in the making of paintings; and Barry Nemett: Drawings from Italy, landscapes made by Nemett, a Mellon Fellow at Bates and chair of the painting department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Both shows close on March 26.

Collection Project 4 focuses on alumni gifts that have made a significant impact on the museum. “Alumni giving is vital to the growth of the museum’s collection,” explains Anthony Shostak, BCMA curator of education. “We took the opportunity to honor the intentions of the gifts, and to bring out some fine collections.”

Such collections include art both given by the alumni and purchased with funds that they donated. “Alumni endowments are critical for the growth of collections and for the quality of teaching opportunities the museum can provide to students at Bates as well as from local schools,” says museum curator William Low.

The curatorial interns are seniors Molly Richmond of South Freeport, Maine; Emma Scott of Philadelphia; and Andrea Svigals of Guilford, Conn. They were supervised by Low and Shostak.

“The students play a pivotal role in developing the exhibition,” says Shostak. “Each chose a set of collections to research, selected a short list of objects from those collections and have written didactic labels to accompany the images.

“This work gives the interns a glimpse into the minds of collectors,” says Shostak, as well as “a more thorough understanding of how gifts come into the collection and how specific works fit into the oeuvre of each artist.”

Each intern will give a public gallery talk during the run of the exhibition.

The three are taking a museum internship course that is part of Bates’ art and visual culture curriculum. As well as curating exhibitions, the internship can include collections management and education.

“We’ve been involved in every step of the process,” Scott says. “We’ve selected works, researched artists and their works, written to donors and so forth. This internship has showed us the time frame and the amount of energy and attention to detail it takes to create a show.”

She adds, “I’m a double major in studio art and French. So this internship is exciting because it gives me the curatorial side of putting together a show, while next semester I’ll learn the artist’s perspective, since studio art majors have a show in the museum as our final project presentation.”

Svigals worked with museum collections given by Dr. and Mrs. Robert Johnson, Bates class of 1936, and by Arnold Smoller of the class of 1951. “They include a diverse range of work, yet I’m primarily choosing to display photographs and various print mediums,” she says. Her favorite works include the portfolio of Peter Milton prints made as illustrations for Henry James’ ghost story “The Jolly Corner”; and Robert Birmelin’s etching, “Two Sets of Fingers.”

Artists in the show with Maine connections include Louise Nevelson, John Marin, Ann Harris and Neil Welliver.

The event has been rescheduled since it was first announced and will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, in Room 104, Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. Nemett’s exhibition opened on Oct. 10, in conjunction with Joel Babb: The Process Revealed.

Nemett’s lecture is open to the public at no cost and is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Visual Culture and the Learning Associates Program. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.

Open free of charge, the museum’s hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday.

Nemett, who is showing landscape drawings at Bates, has received numerous awards, including two from the Alfred and Trafford Klots Residency Program to paint in Brittany, France, and a Ford Foundation grant to support his work in Italy.

Also an author and poet, he has penned a novel, a textbook and most recently, a collection of writings and art titled Paintings, Poems, and Passages. This work will be available for Nemett to sign in the art museum, also in Olin, immediately following the lecture.

Showing with the Nemett exhibition is Joel Babb: The Process Revealed. Curated by the museum’s Bill Low, this exhibit uses the Maine artist Babb’s work to investigate the roles of both the act of drawing and the drawings themselves in the production of paintings. That exhibit shows though March 26, 2010.

Little, winner of the 2000 Acadia Arts Achievement Award, has authored several books on art, such as Edward Hopper’s New England (Pomegranate Communications, 1993) and The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent (University of California Press, 1999)

Little also writes for regional and national publications including Art New England and Art in America. He contributed an essay to the catalog for the exhibition Bernard Langlais: Independent Spirit at the Portland Museum of Art in 2002.

At Bates, Little will focus on Langlais’ current exhibition in the context of his greater oeuvre. The exhibition Medium and Abstraction, curated by Erin Gilligan ’09, focuses on a selection of Langlais sculptures from the 1950s and ’60s that show a particular influence of the New York avant-garde. The inclusion of wooden assemblages by Louise Nevelson and portraits of Langlais imply a larger context of influence for his work, which Little will discuss.

Langlais, born in Old Town, Maine, in 1921, embarked on an art career at a young age. His early work is predominantly paintings and collages. In 1956, Langlais and his wife bought a summer cottage in Cushing, Maine. While completing renovations, Langlais began experimenting with wood, and developed his self-proclaimed “painting in wood” technique. He is most famous for whimsical animal sculptures and tableaus created with a fusion of painting and wood carving.

Also featured in the museum are the exhibitions Landscape Drawings from the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection and Our Positive Bodies: Mapping Our Treatment, Sharing Our Choices. The Hartley exhibition showcases ink and graphite drawings by this famed artist born in Lewiston, Maine, who wished to have a memorial collection in his hometown.

Marsden is known as a pioneer of American modernist painting in the early 20th century. Our Positive Bodies originated in Nairobi, Kenya, and focuses on “body mapping,” a palliative process through which life-sized silhouette self-portraits of women affected by AIDS are used to divulge feelings and memories.

The Langlais and Hartley exhibitions close on Oct. 3, while Our Positive Bodies remains up until Dec. 11. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and closed on major holidays. Admission is free.

For more information, please call 207-786-6158 or visit the museum Web site at www.bates.edu/museum.xml.

Now in its second season at Bates College, the 2009 Global Lens film series features the Macedonian film I Am From Titov Veles in showings at 8 p.m. Friday and Sunday, Sept. 18 and 20, in Room 105 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Hosted by the Bates College Museum of Art, the series continues on Fridays and Sundays at the same time and location throughout the fall. Admission is $5. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

Written and directed by Teona Strugar Mitevska, I Am From Titov Veles is a contemporary story that follows three sisters who take different paths out of their decaying hometown (2007; 102 min. In Macedonian with English subtitles).

The Global Lens series is produced by the nonprofit Global Film Initiative, created to promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema. Although American film continues to thrive in the global marketplace, filmmaking in the developing world has suffered from shifting economic conditions in financing and distribution. As a result, audiences in the United States have been denied the rich cultural lessons these films have to offer.

Mitevska’s film is set in the scarred town of Veles, where the sisters long to escape the suffocating environment of their dying community. Burdened by memories of their late father, Sapho struggles to secure a visa to Greece, Slavica desperately searches for a rich husband and Afrodita harbors hopes for love and children. Mitevska blends stark realism with memorable performances to create a vivid landscape of life and longing in post-communist Macedonia.

Mitevska was born in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1974. As a child she acted in commercials and dramas in the theater, television and radio. She later trained as a painter and obtained her bachelor’s degree in graphic design. In 1998, she enrolled in the MFA film program at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts. Her first feature film, “How I Killed A Saint,” screened successfully at festivals around the world. I Am From Titov Veles is her second feature film.

Here’s the remaining Global Lens schedule at Bates:

Mutum, a coming-of-age story set in rural Brazil and directed by Sandra Kogut (Sept. 25 and 27).

My Time Will Come, a murder story directed by Ecuadorian director Víctor Arregui and focusing on a doctor at the city morgue forced to confront his connection to the living and the dead (Oct. 2 and 4).

The Photograph, Indonesian director Nan Triveni Achnas’ story of the unlikely but powerful relationship between a young prostitute and an elderly portrait photographer (Oct. 9 and 11).

Possible Lives, a haunting and suspenseful study of grief and letting go by Argentinian director Sandra Gugliotta (Oct. 16 and 18).

Sleepwalking Land, which follows an orphaned refugee on a journey with an elderly storyteller to find his mother after a devastating civil war. Directed by Teresa Prata of Mozambique (Oct. 30 and Nov. 1).

Song from the Southern Seas, by Kazakh director Marat Sarulu, a film described as “darkly somber” and “tender and wistful” that deals with suspicion and cultural differences between longtime friends (Nov. 6 and 8).

Those Three, by Iranian director Naghi Nemati, tells of friends who desert their military training and attempt to survive in the wilderness of northern Iran (Nov. 13 and 15).

What a Wonderful World by Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaïdi closes the series with a film illustrating the complex web of connections between a prostitute, traffic cop and contract killer in modern Casablanca (Dec. 4 and 6).