The vibrant arts community at Bates takes the spotlight as the college celebrates the 25th anniversary of its Olin Arts Center in 2011-12.

The celebration kicks off Oct. 6-14 with a family arts festival, a residency by New York City’s Asphalt Orchestra and an exhibition showcasing the Bates College Museum of Art‘s collection.

Open to the public at no charge, the festival begins at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 8, at the arts center, 75 Russell St. Activities include face painting and balloon animals. Bates students will present visual art, music and dance. A barbecue lunch will be offered (free to the first 100 arrivals).

Among performers are the high-intensity New Vaudeville act Two and the avant-garde marching band Asphalt Orchestra, which will lead tours of the building and perform in concert. The art museum will be open.

Asphalt performs in the Olin Concert Hall at 2 p.m. Admission is free, but tickets are required. For more information, to RSVP for the barbecue or to reserve concert tickets, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu. Asphalt’s residency has been made possible by a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts and through partnerships with L/A Arts and Portland Ovations.

The exhibition 25: Selections from the Permanent Collection opens Friday, Oct. 14, and runs through Dec. 17. Paul Cezanne, Mary Cassatt, Charlie Hewitt and Robert Indiana are among the many artists featured.

25: Selections from the Permanent Collection and the Museum of Art.

Olin Arts Center

Built with support from the F.W. Olin Foundation and opened in 1986, the Olin Arts Center houses the departments of music and of visual art and culture. Overlooking scenic Lake Andrews, the building contains classrooms; studios and other facilities for visual and musical artists; the Museum of Art; and the 300-seat Olin Arts Center Concert Hall.

“In the 1980s, music and art majors were very recent additions to the Bates curriculum,” says Jim Parakilas, chairman of the college’s Arts Collaborative and the James L. Moody Jr. Family Professor of Performing Arts.

“As latecomers, we found ourselves headquartered in remote corners of the campus — more or less out of sight, which is hard for artists to bear, and out of earshot, hard for musicians to bear. The Olin Arts Center provided not just wonderful facilities to work in, but also the most beautiful way for us to show everyone that the musical and visual arts meant business at Bates.”

A retrospective of prints by Charlie Hewitt, a Maine artist of national stature, opens with a reception at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 28, at the Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St.

“Scrape, Cut, Gouge, Bite, Print . . . The Graphic Work of Charlie Hewitt 1976-2006″ offers a comprehensive look at Hewitt’s printmaking, the field for which this dynamic artist is best-known. The 80 or so pieces in the show include site-specific work created for the occasion and images selected from the holdings of the Bates museum, which is the repository for Hewitt’s prints.

The exhibition remains on view until March 18, 2007. Admission to the museum and its events is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6158 or e-mail the museum.

Hewitt is admired for an emotional energy expressed through an iconic vocabulary that taps his Catholic upbringing and his own background in manual labor (nails, screws, wood, rebar) as well as the human heart, hands and fists.

“Hewitt’s two-dimensional work gives visual meaning to the word ‘intensity,’ ” longtime Maine art critic Phil Isaacson wrote in a recent Maine Sunday Telegram review. “It has a profound and disturbing emotional wallop.”

A native of Lewiston and now a Portland resident, Hewitt is the rare Maine artist whose images reflect the spirit and culture of Maine’s people more than its landscape. He is a nationally recognized printmaker, painter and sculptor with work in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.

The show is part of The Maine Print Project, a statewide collaboration celebrating more than 200 years of printmaking in Maine. The Bates exhibition is also part of a second collaboration, dedicated to Hewitt and undertaken with the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. In July, that institution opened the exhibition “Charlie Hewitt at Work: Twenty Years of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture,” which closed Oct. 15.

The Bates exhibition marks three decades of Hewitt’s graphic work and two decades since he returned to Maine from New York City to work at the renowned Vinalhaven Press, on Vinalhaven.

Born into a blue-collar family in Lewiston in 1946, Hewitt is the product of a culture whose pillars were church, work and family, as William Low, the exhibition’s curator and a member of the Bates Museum of Art staff, writes in his introduction to the “Scrape, Cut, Gouge” catalog. “These influences and experiences have infused Hewitt’s artwork throughout his career,” Low writes.

Hewitt’s work is about “recording the time we are in,” as the artist told Low. Works in the Bates exhibition include the unsettling “Bowery” and “Illumination” series, inspired in part by the French poet Rimbaud. The “Spanish Labor” series, as Low notes, bridges both an important national issue and Hewitt’s own familiar territory of responses to faith, family and labor.

The Bates College Museum of Art is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and is closed Mondays, Sundays and major holidays.