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Soon after students voted to make the bobcat the official Bates mascot in 1925, the Varsity Club stated its eagerness “to see a monument erected which will consist of a granite shaft with a life-size Bobcat in bronze before the present college year is ended.”

That year passed, as did 83 more, before Bates commissioned and happily dedicated, during Reunion 2009, the bronze Bobcat seen in this slide show. Designed by Maine artist Forest Hart, it’s atop a boulder near Leahey Field, where it exchanges greetings with people along the walk to and from Merrill Gymnasium and Underhill Arena.

The Bobcat Statue

• Artist: Forest Hart of Monroe, Maine
• Size: twice life size (60 inches long)
• Medium: bronze (copper, silicon, magnesium). The sculpture comprises 25 separate pieces welded together
• Thickness: quarter-inch
• Weight: 250 pounds
• Foundry: Lands End Sculpture Center, Paonia, Colo.
• Artist’s quote: “What struck me the most was the enthusiasm and passion of the Class of 2004. What wonderful, positive energy. I was proud to have been chosen and proud to be a part of the project.”

Making the Bates Bobcat real was the Class of 2004′s potent cocktail of organizational skill, passion, and perseverance. They raised about $27,000 for their Senior Gift in 2004, asking the College to use it to create a bobcat sculpture. (Other fundraising efforts raised the total to nearly $50,000 by 2009.)

At the time, Bates officials tried to refocus the class gift — a bobcat still wasn’t in the plans. “They asked us to choose something a little less ambitious,” class co-president Tanya Schwartz ’04 recalled during the dedication on June 13.

But the class didn’t yield. Instead, “we rallied,” Schwartz said. True, it was a long rally, at five years, but co-president Eduardo Crespo ’04 said he was always confident that “our class’s work ethic and passion for Bates would take us all the way to today.”

The soft-spoken Hart, having met Crespo and Schwartz at the Reunion dedication in June, was dazzled. “Seems to me they could do anything they set their minds to,” he said. “A Bobcat sculpture or world peace.”

Five years ago, faced with the Class of 2004′s high seriousness, Bates channeled their energy by forming the College’s first Public Art Committee, which in 2007 drafted a policy to guide all such projects. Then, a Bobcat Selection Committee of faculty, staff, and 2004 alums guided the process, including a public presentation in spring 2008 by three artists chosen by the committee, including Hart.

Each artist’s proposal was in turn shared with the Class of 2004, which embraced Hart’s realistic interpretation of an athletic predator on the move, one that echoed the College’s official Bobcat logo. “I love that the Bobcat is in motion — [it] speaks to the ever-evolving and dynamic nature of academics and Bates College,” wrote Julia Allen ’04 in an e-mail response to Hart’s presentation.

(Hart, who lives in Monroe, halfway between Bangor and Belfast, has a strong background in taxidermy but knows his live cats, too. “I’ve made five bobcat sightings in the last 10 months,” he said.)

Albeit long, the process was pure Bates, “democratic and egalitarian,” said Mark Bessire, former director of the Bates Museum of Art and chair of the Public Art Committee and now director of the Portland Museum of Art. When you have a solid process marked by “intelligence and spirit,” he said, “you end up with great art. Process equals excellence.”

In the end, the project’s success belies the 84-year-old notion of institutional rigidity, Crespo told the audience. “The one thing that was present all along [was] this institution’s capacity to welcome excellence and change.”

By H. Jay Burns, photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen unless noted

Codraro uses painting to focus on spatial relationships in the human form. “I am challenged by its many connections and its inherent landscape. Places where vertebrae meet, where the human body hinges, these are the areas that continue to inspire me,” she explains. “I have come to realize that like the human form, whose shapes and shadows constantly change, my work can only be about moments.”

It’s Dec. 16, and they’re coming. Scores of visitors stream into the Manhattan headquarters of Christie’s, the purveyor of highbrow art and culture, for the two-day sale Icons of Glamour and Style: The Constantiner Collection.

The 320 photographs on the block represent the “most important collection of fashion photography that we know of,” says Joshua Holdeman ’93, international director of 20th-century art at Christie’s.

Despite the collection’s significance, Holdeman and his Christie’s team at 20 Rockefeller Center are concerned about the sale. The economy is imploding, and buyers are skittish. (Later in the winter, Christie’s and rival Sotheby’s would both announce layoffs.) Will these fashion and celebrity images, made by photographic legends such as Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, actually sell?

At least today, not to worry. During an electric first night, Newton’s life-size, four-panel gelatin silver print of Vogue runway models, Sie Kommen, Paris (Naked and Dressed), fetches $662,500. The final sale total is $7,721,875.

• View the sale results from Icons of Glamour and Style

Holdeman was an art major at Bates — he studied painting as well as art history — then left for New York, where he’s worked his way up the gallery and auction ladder while trying retain to a certain equilibrium. “The world is a crazy place,” he says, so he’s guided by principals he saw in action daily at Bates: “There’s no substitute for hard work and ethical, straightforward behavior.”

Holdeman represents clients in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S., helping them develop and manage their collections. Managing client expectations is a constant challenge because — understandably — “many people believe their objects are worth more than they are.” His best clients, he says, “let me do my job.”

On this night in New York, Holdeman is constantly on the phone — sometimes two phones — working with clients, assessing the dynamic situation. Every client bid reflects a certain level of trust in Holdeman’s assessment of a dynamic situation. It’s these relationships that give Holdeman great professional pleasure.

“It’s all about the people,” he says.

Many breathtaking specters have descended upon the Bates campus in recent years, but few can top the apparition of Chairman Mao cloaked in his legendary, larger-than-life jacket.

We are told that this piece of public art was the creation of a sculptor both famous and influential in his home country of the People’s Republic of China. But what makes an artist famous and influential in that country? And on which side of that fame and influence do he, the artist, and Bates, his host, stand?

The question is tantalizing because Chairman Mao was once a political and ideological sworn enemy of the College’s homeland and because his historical significance is still being fought over passionately. The “public” of this art we have on hand is indeed “political.”

Or perhaps I am missing something. Perhaps Chairman Mao has transcended political and ideological divides the world over, now that his country has become downright capitalist. Perhaps it’s just the folly of morons stuck in the political, ideological, and precapitalist past to argue fine points. If we forget about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, the College may even receive a gift of an endowed Chairman Mao chair in a well-placed department.

After all, Chairman Mao was not such a thoroughgoing revolutionary in his lifetime. In the biography Mao: The Unknown Story, we learn that in Yan’an, the famous Chinese Communist hideout, the local cotton was rough and uncomfortable, “so softer cotton was imported for senior cadres. Mao, outwardly, dressed the same as the rest, but his underwear was made of fine material…. The maid did not qualify for any underwear or socks at all, and kept getting colds as a result.”

Does our own Mao jacket include his underwear made of fine material? It’s been frightfully cold lately.

The reaction on campus that I like most came from our own students. Two women stood in front of the jacket and pondered its identity. After some deliberation, they decided it looked like a Chanel suit.

Bravo! Though I have never heard of cotton Chanel suits, perhaps the rusty metal jacket nestled against Pettengill Hall really does represent Communist Mao’s warm, fine outfit, suitable even for his capitalist offspring. Therein must lay the political correctness of this particular objet d’art..

By Atsuko Hirai

Atsuko Hirai, the Kazushige Hirasawa Professor of History, joined the Bates faculty in 1988.

Campus reaction to Mao Jacket is a variant of what was expressed in the anonymous note that lay beside the sculpture until destroyed by rain: “Why is this man honored who killed so many of our men. Shame on our college.”

My guess is that if the piece were by a contemporary American sculptor, displayed a Western suit coat, and was titled George W. Bush, the near-universal reaction would be that representing the president as a rigid hollow metal shell was an act of savage critique.

Yet this work by contemporary Chinese artist Sui Jianguo has repeatedly been taken to be glorifying Mao in particular and communist rule in general, as if there could only be one Chinese thought pattern, irrevocably rooted in Marxism. My own suspicion is that, at this moment, it would be easier to find American artists praising George W. Bush without ironic intent than it would be to find Chinese artists wholeheartedly praising Mao Zedong.

Not surprisingly, it’s easier to perceive ambiguity in art that comes out of one’s own cultural background. Foreign political art, in particular, tends to be seen in terms of one’s own limited understanding of other people’s complications. When the sculpture stood in New York City, a critic asked angrily how it was different from displaying the jacket of a Waffen-SS officer, with the implication that such a display would be instantly stopped.

But what if the Nazi uniform sculpture bore the name of Anselm Kiefer, famous for a career built out of dark broodings on Germany’s poisonous modern history? Would that convert the sculpture into a horrific memorial warning, or would its straightforward representation still be inherently glorifying?

When Jasper Johns’ flag paintings are exhibited overseas, should they be equipped with warning labels reading, “May Not Be Simplistic Patriotic Statement,” to help out foreign viewers?

In the end, I’m inclined to think that if any significant percentage of the Bates student body actually looks hard at a piece of sculpture and develops personal opinions about it, that’s all good news.

By Dennis Grafflin

Professor of History Dennis Grafflin, the first permanent appointment in non-Western history, came to Bates in 1981.

Since its dedication in 1986, the Bates College Museum of Art has maintained a special relationship with the college’s Department of Art and Visual Culture. Part of this is a commitment to supporting the work of Bates students through the museum’s annual Senior Exhibition. The exhibition highlights work selected from the thesis projects of graduating seniors majoring in Studio Art.

Thesis projects vary from student to student, each pursuing an individual interest. The emphasis of the program is to create a cohesive body of related works through sustained studio practice and critical inquiry. The year-long process is overseen by Art faculty, and culminates in this exhibition.

The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, a touring exhibition of photographs chronicling the migration of Somali refugees to Maine and other U.S. locations, opens at Bates College with events beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23, in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

The 55 black-and-white images created by Somali-born photographer Abdi Roble will be exhibited at the Bates College Museum of Art through May 29. The show opens with a 5 p.m. lecture about the U.S. intervention in Somalia, followed by Roble and his collaborator in a book project speaking at 6 p.m. Both events take place in Olin’s Room 104. A reception in the museum follows at 7 p.m.

Museum admission is free. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, but is closed on major holidays.

Since the early 1990s, civil violence has forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis out of that African nation. Roble, who left Somalia in 1989 and now lives in Ohio, has documented the Somali diaspora for five years.

His images trace the refugees’ long hard journey from refugee camps in Kenya to such cities as Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Portland, Maine. One group of photographs tracks a single family’s journey from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to California, and their subsequent resettlement in Maine.

Michael Paulovich, a retired Marine Corps colonel who served in Somalia with a diplomatic security team during the U.S. presence there in the early 1990s, offers the lecture “Challenges in Humanitarian Intervention: Cultural Lessons from Somalia 1992-1994″ at 5 p.m. Jan. 23. For more information, please visit the Web site.

Paulovich will be followed at 6 p.m. by Roble and writer Doug Rutledge, discussing their collaboration on the book The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, based on the images Roble is showing at Bates (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

In a 2007 Associated Press article, Roble explained the importance of capturing the refugees’ experiences while they were happening. “If you have no record, you have no history,” he said. “We lost everything. We have no museum, no galleries, no record.”

In photographing the refugees, Roble told the AP, he found himself humbled by the stories he witnessed. The images represent “classic American stories of people landing in this country. It’s exactly the same, it just happened in a different time.”

Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art and Arts Midwest in partnership with the Ohio Arts Council, the exhibition appeared previously in Columbus and Minneapolis.

Roble was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1964 and came to the United States in 1989. He has freelanced for the Columbus Dispatch and the Columbus Post, and his images have appeared in Leica View magazine.

In 2003, with Rutledge and others, Roble founded the Somali Documentary Project, with the goal of photographically documenting members of the Somali diaspora while they are still engaging in the cultural practices of their homeland. For more information, see www.somaliproject.org.

Also opening at the museum on Jan. 23 is Recent Acquisitions: Collection Project III. Running through March 30, the exhibition was assembled by five Bates students invited by the museum to learn about curatorial practices. These interns created themed “cluster exhibitions” from recent museum acquisitions, exploring such ideas as gender, race, medium and provenance.

Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Amy Stacey Curtis, Louis Hine, Cindy Sherman and Bates faculty members Paul Heroux and William Pope.L.