Stunning examples of the book illustrator’s art, including rare Abstract Expressionist silkscreens and life-size bird prints by John James Audubon.

A video series exploring the notion of dialogue.

Paintings by Will Barnet, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Marguerite Zorach and other acclaimed artists associated with Maine.

These are a few of the temptations the Bates College Museum of Art offers in exhibitions opening with a 6 p.m. reception on Friday, Jan. 14, and ending March 25.

The museum, located in the Olin Arts Center at Bates, 75 Russell St., is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. It is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.

The shows are: Bound to Art: Illustrated Books from the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, an eclectic review of book illustrations based on volumes from Bates collections;

Dialogue, a video series, featuring artists from Amsterdam, Boston and New York;

and Selections From the Collection of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, representing a Maine museum devoted to American art and holding a superb assortment of works by Maine-related artists.

“Each of the three exhibitions is terrific in distinct ways, from the impressive overview of the archives’ holdings of illustrated books, to the important modernist works in the Ogunquit exhibition, to the profound and entertaining videos in the ‘Dialogue’ series,” says museum director Dan Mills.

“Together, they offer a quite extraordinary array of art spanning the centuries and a wide variety of media.”

Two 6 p.m. events related to the exhibitions are scheduled at the museum. On Thursday, Feb. 17: Dialogue video artist Rachel Perry Welty discusses her work.

And on Monday, March 7: Kat Stefko, director of the archives and curator of Bound to Art, leads an informal conversation about books in the exhibition.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

A reception celebrates the exhibits at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30, in the museum. Nemett, chair of the painting department at the Maryland Institute College of Art, talks about his work and signs his 2009 book Paintings, Poems, and Passages at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, in Olin Arts Center’s Room 104.

Babb’s exhibit, The Process Revealed, shows until March 26, 2010, while Nemett’s Drawings from Italy remains up until Dec. 18. Open free of charge, the museum’s hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday.

Through Babb’s exhibit, curator Bill Low investigates the roles of both the act of drawing and the drawings themselves in the production of paintings. Commonly thought of as by-products of the act of creating paintings, drawings are works of art in their own right. Illustrating the creative process by pairing preparatory drawings with finished paintings, this exhibition reveals the stages of work that go into resolved art. The exhibition will display works from three of Babb’s many areas of interest: cityscapes, wilderness landscapes and figural works.

Nemett presents landscape drawings made during travels to Italy. He 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.

Babb, who lives in Sumner, received a B.A from Princeton University and an M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University. In 2003, his work was the subject of a major exhibition at the Bates museum titled Intimate Wilderness. He has shown at Vose Galleries and Gallery Naga in Boston; Sherry French Gallery, Gerold Wunderlich and the National Academy Museum in New York City; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Frost Gully Gallery, Portland Museum of Art and the Ogunquit Museum of Art in Maine and Trudy Labell Fine Arts in Florida.

Nemett, a graduate of the Pratt Institute and Yale University, has also exhibited widely, including the National Academy Museum in New York, the Rochefort-en-Terre Museum of Art in France and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya, Japan. He is also the author of a novel, a textbook and a collection of both writings and art. He has been on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 1971. In 2006, he worked as an artist in residence at Bates.

Learn more about these exhibitions and the Bates College Museum of Art.

This 1920 photograph shows millworker Elizabeth Gagne amidst the Bates Mill spindles. Photograph courtesy of Museum L-A.

Rachel Degrosseilliers remembers the chain-link fence that encircled the Bates campus when she was growing up in Lewiston in the 1940s and 1950s. “Bates College was like an island,” says the Franco-American millworker’s daughter. “We regarded Bates as the elites, the intellectuals. The fence seemed to say, ‘Keep out.’”

Degrosseilliers, director of Museum L-A, is telling this story in her office in the vast Bates Mill complex along the Androscoggin River. Next to her sits Jessica Dumas ’06, curator of the young museum dedicated to preserving Lewiston-Auburn’s industrial and cultural history. On the opposite wall is a design concept for Weaving a World: Lewiston’s Millworkers, 1920–1980, a traveling exhibit researched by a team of students working with David Scobey, director of the College’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

Downstairs, in a loom room-turned-gallery, is Portraits and Voices: Workers of the Seven Mills, a multimedia exhibit co-designed by Bill Low, assistant curator of the Bates College Museum of Art.

“We wouldn’t be able to do this without Bates College,” Degrosseilliers says. “But this is not just Bates, the savior, doling out help to the community — it’s a real give-and-take. We give their students great educational experiences. They help us build our community’s history.”

The infamous fence between Bates and Lewiston-Auburn has been literally and figuratively gone for more than a decade, dismantled mostly by Don Harward, whose presidency was marked by greater Bates engagement with the local community, especially through service-learning. Hence the existence of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, dedicated in 2002, the year of his retirement.

As the center matures, the scope of its programming has expanded. Last year the center funded 14 initiatives, for a total of $144,984, to support its mission to create durable, academics-based community relationships. (The center also oversees the Bates–Morse Mountain Conservation Area, not to mention routine campus event management and traditional volunteerism.)

But more than a money source, the center has an activist soul — its goal is to create “transformative experiences for students and faculty based on collaboration and democratic citizenship, not only service,” says Scobey, a former Rhodes Scholar who directed the University of Michigan’s Arts of Citizenship program before coming to Bates. Scobey calls these town-gown collaborations “collaboratories” because they represent “rigorous, innovative educational work. The partnership with Museum L-A is one of these.”

David Scobey, director of the Harward Center for Community Parnterships, calls town-gown partnerships "collaboratories," a word that emphasizes the intensity of the partnerships. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

In turn, the sustainable nature of the collaboratories captures the faculty’s serious attention. “Responsive and willing” is how curator Dumas describes faculty interest in Museum L-A projects, while Scobey notes that faculty engages about half of Bates’ 1,700 students in “significant community-based learning,” from internships to research.

The integration of service and citizenship into academics distinguishes the Harward Center from most of its national peers, whose work primarily involves coordinating extracurricular volunteerism. Bates’ distinctiveness was underscored by the center’s recent $100,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The grant specifically invites Bates to join a select and diverse group of Kellogg grantees into the national discussion of civic engagement. Of that select group, “Bates is the only entity focusing on civic engagement in undergraduate education,” says Scobey, who is also the Harward Professor of Community Partnerships at Bates.

The foundation of the Harward Center / Museum L-A partnership was laid in 2004, shortly after Degrosseilliers was hired to create a museum with artifacts rescued from the vacant mills that were once the cities’ economic and cultural heart. “It was nice to show machinery,” Degrosseilliers says, “but a big part of the history was missing: the millworkers’ stories.” Contacted by the Harward Center, Degrosseilliers leapt at the opportunity to have Bates students, guided by professors eager to teach them about ethnographic fieldwork, interview retired textile workers.

Michael Wilson ’07 did some of the 96 interviews, including one with Cecile Burgoyne, who claims to be the first woman to wear bloomers to work. “She’s sassy and fresh, and she’d laugh and slap me in the side,” he smiles. Their friendship — Burgoyne came to campus to see Wilson perform in Little Shop of Horrors — prompted the math major to delve further into community work. “I caught the bug,” Wilson says.

In a loom-room-turned-gallery in the Bates Mill complex, Museum L-A last year presented its first exhibit, Portraits and Voices: Workers of the Seven Mills.

He added a second major, in American cultural studies, and earned honors for his thesis, which Scobey advised, on Museum L-A’s effect on civic engagement. Wilson is now an AmeriCorps VISTA member developing service-learning partnerships at the University of Southern Maine.

“I left Bates charged with a passion for democratic community,” Wilson says. Scobey, he adds, “gave me a language for a desire I hadn’t been able to articulate.”

Museum L-A’s mission resonates personally with Dumas. Like Degrosseilliers, she’s a Mainer, raised in Saco, whose heritage is French Canadian. As a student, she and Wilson did research for the museum’s current traveling exhibit, Weaving a World, and learned how immigrants became integrated into the Lewiston community. “It opened my eyes to my own history,” says Dumas. A history major eager to enter the museum field, she joined the museum’s four-person staff last year.

Already a Museum L-A volunteer, Bill Low won Harward Center funding — from a program that underwrites “publicly engaged” projects by faculty and staff — to support his contributions to Portraits and Voices. The museum’s first major exhibit, it featured portraits of retired millworkers taken by cultural anthropologist and photographer Mark Silber and oral histories by Andrea L’Hommedieu, then of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives.

Low helped to bring it all together, from organizing didactic materials to producing the exhibition catalog. “It’s a natural fit for people from Bates to use our skills this way,” he says. “Public service is Bates tradition. And this is our community.”

By Virginia Wright

Freelancer Virginia Wright contributes frequently to Bates Magazine.