Jenkins discusses the process of printmaking on May 4 and the current Senior Exhibition on May 11. Kim will talk about artist Marsden Hartley on May 18. All talks are open to the public and will be held in the upper level of the Bates Museum of Art, Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.

Jenkins’ first talk seeks to illuminate the often-mysterious mediums of silkscreen and lithography. Focusing on a small group of works from the collection and using a PowerPoint presentation, the talk will detail the processes of each medium step by step. The goal is to enable viewers to better to visualize the evolution of a work, and better appreciate the amount of work put into making prints.

Jenkins will next focus on a tour of the Senior Exhibition. The talk includes information on the yearlong thesis process required of art majors, an overview of the organization and installation of the show, and insights into Jenkins’ and her co-exhibitors’ art.

Finally, Kim will talk about artist Marsden Hartley, based on research she conducted during a museum internship. Born in Lewiston, Hartley is recognized as one of America’s greatest modernist painters. Kim will explore Hartley’s wanderings and his unique vision that emerged from his relationship with nature and human interactions.

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.

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.

Opening June 12 at the Bates College Museum of Art are exhibitions of work by two prominent artists with Maine connections, and a third exhibition revealing a compelling response to HIV/AIDS.

The exhibition Medium and Abstraction explores influences at work in the wood reliefs of the late, beloved Maine artist Bernard Langlais. Rarely seen images by a pioneer in American modern art are displayed in Landscape Drawings from the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection.

Finally, a therapeutic approach to self-portraiture for women infected with the AIDS virus is the theme of the major summer exhibition Our Positive Bodies: Mapping Our Treatment, Sharing Our Choices.

The Langlais and Hartley exhibitions close on Oct. 3, and Our Positive Bodies remains up until Dec. 11. Open to the public at no cost, the museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. It is closed on major holidays. For more information, please call 207-786-6158 or visit the museum Web site. The museum is located at 75 Russell St.

Langlais is known for his vigorous explorations of the sculptural possibilities of wood, using found objects ranging from toothpicks to driftwood, and for the intimacy he established with the character of the medium, through both direct manipulation and an understanding of weathering and other random factors.

Born in Old Town in 1921, Langlais fused his Maine upbringing with ideas from the New York avant-garde to create bold abstract wood reliefs.

Bates senior Erin Gilligan ’09 curated Medium and Abstraction to focus on a select group of Langlais’ works from the 1950s and ’60s and to introduce a broader context of influences, through the inclusion of such items as wooden assemblages by Louise Nevelson and portraits of Langlais by Alex Katz.

The works come to the Bates museum courtesy of Aucocisco Galleries of Portland.

The Hartley exhibition features ink and graphite drawings covering a wide range of subjects and a time span of several decades. Hartley was born in Lewiston, and during his lifetime expressed the hope that a memorial collection be established in his hometown.

In 1951, eight years after his death, the heirs of the Hartley estate left artworks and effects to Bates College, and a subsequent gift of 99 drawings was made to the college by Hartley’s niece, Norma Berger, in 1955. It is the largest collection of the artist’s work in this medium.

The 2009 exhibit showcases selections from the latter group of works. It is the largest collection of the artist’s work in this medium. Many served as studies for some of the artist’s most important paintings.

Our Positive Bodies: Mapping Our Treatment, Sharing Our Choices originated in Nairobi, Kenya, in an effort to help HIV-positive women cope with the likelihood that they would die prematurely and leave their children behind. The exhibition focuses on “body mapping,” a process that uses the creation of life-sized, silhouette self-portraits to express the feelings, memories, treatment and identities of those likely to die of AIDS.

These celebratory portraits are designed to encourage women affected by the disease to explore their options for maximizing their well-being and to better understand how the attitudes and behavior of others affects their ability to stay healthy.

During four days in September, the Bates College Museum of Art will host both the world premiere of a documentary about artist Marsden Hartley and a symposium about Maine folk art.

The museum and the Connecticut-based film production company 217 Films present the hourlong Visible Silence: Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet in screenings at 7 and 9 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

As a gift to the citizens of Lewiston honoring one of their most famous sons, admission is free, but tickets are required. For reservations or more information call 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Three days later, the museum hosts a daylong symposium on the history and techniques of Maine folk art, beginning at 9:15 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 28, in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Produced by the Maine Folk Art Trail, “Traditional American Folk Art in Maine” will examine folk-art forms as diverse as hooked rugs, scrimshaw, quilts, paint-decorated furniture and schoolgirl needlework.  For more information visit the Web site or call 207-786-6400.

More about Visible Silence: Independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton of 217 Films produced the documentary about Hartley, a Lewiston native who went on to become one of America’s signature artists. Maglaras wrote, narrated and directed the film.

Lewiston Mayor Laurent Gilbert will introduce the 7 p.m. screening, and Maine Gov. John Baldacci has proclaimed Sept. 25 as “Marsden Hartley Day.”

Hartley has long been considered a father of American modernist art. In May, a Hartley painting sold for $6.31 million, setting an auction record at Christie’s in New York for an American modernist work and overtaking a record previously held by a work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

The Bates museum is home to the world’s largest collection of Hartley artifacts, and Visible Silence features more than 45 of Hartley’s paintings and drawings — from his earliest work as a child to the last painting found on the easel in his studio in Corea, Maine, the day he died in 1943.

Hartley was deeply attached to his hometown, Lewiston, and to the Androscoggin River, and these locations play a key role in the film. Hartley traveled extensively, but always returned to Maine and, at the end of his life, considered himself “Maine’s painter.” He requested his ashes be strewn along the Androscoggin when he died; and this important and poignant moment is dramatized in Visible Silence.

Next stops in the national tour of Visible Silence include the University of Southern Maine in Portland; Boston; and New Britain, Conn.

The world premiere of 217 Films’ first Maine-made movie, Cleophas and His Own, based on a story by Hartley, took place in Lewiston in 2005.

More about “Traditional American Folk Art in Maine”: Nine folk-art experts are scheduled to speak at the symposium, including authorities such as Leonard Brooks, the director of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Museum, New Gloucester, and Maine state historian Earle Shettleworth Jr. The symposium will also exhibit Maine-specific folk-art works.

For centuries, Maine residents without formal training or art education made art. Objects such as quilts or hooked rugs often served functional as well as artistic purposes and over the years became integrated within families, communities and culture.

The symposium is held in conjunction with the current museum exhibition [intlink id="11411" type="post"]Flourishing Folk: New England Decorated Works on Paper and Document Boxes from the Deborah N. Isaacson Trust[/intlink], which runs through Dec. 14. This exhibition represents Bates in the Maine Folk Art Trail, a collaborative effort among 11 museums and historical societies statewide to guide visitors to the best of Maine folk art.

Thanks to the coordinated statewide exhibition, Mainers and visitors will be able to follow the Maine Folk Art Trail from York to Lewiston to Searsport to see samplings from these diverse collections.

Coming to the Bates College Museum of Art in October are an exhibition of prints by Robert Indiana and a symposium relating the visual arts to cryptozoology, the study of unknown, rumored or hidden animals.

To mark the opening of his exhibition Robert Indiana: The Hartley Elegies, renowned Vinalhaven artist Robert Indiana offers a lecture at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, at the college’s Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. The exhibition consists of 10 prints made in homage to Marsden Hartley, a pioneering American modernist with whom Indiana finds artistic and personal kinship. The exhibition runs through Dec. 17.

A reception follows. Admission to the museum and its special events is free. For more information, call 207-786-6158 or visit the museum on the Web.

The Indiana event is part of a rich schedule for Parents and Family Weekend 2005 at Bates. Also on tap for the weekend are the annual Cultural Extravaganza produced by Amandla!, a student organization exploring issues of African and African American culture; a talk by political humorist Al Franken and a student art sale to benefit the Katrina Relief Initiative at Bates.

Treating issues of cryptozoology, science and art, the symposium Out of Time Place Scale takes place at the museum Friday and Saturday, Oct. 28-29. Friday’s keynote speaker is cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, an authority in the field and the founder of the Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, where he lives. An exhibition relating to cryptozoology opens at the museum in June 2006.

Dedicating much of his art to the visual power of words and numbers, Robert Indiana may be best-known for his image of the word “LOVE” set in two lines with a tilting “O.” Originally created in 1964 for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card, the image became a symbol of the 1960s counterculture. It appeared on a U.S. postage stamp in 1973 and has been adapted for a variety of media, including sculpture.

A resident of the Maine island of Vinalhaven, Indiana published The Hartley Elegies in the early 1990s. The imagery comes from Hartley’s 1914-15 “German Officer” paintings, created after the death of the soldier Karl von Freyburg, an event that devastated Hartley. In his distinctive hard-edged style, Indiana unites military symbols and geometric forms with references to Maine, America, war and history to create a series of symbolic portraits.

“With the largest holding of Hartley materials in the state, the Bates Museum of Art is pleased to present the ‘Elegies’ in recognition of Indiana’s and Hartley’s ties to Maine and their stature as American artists,” said museum director Mark Bessire.

To commemorate the college’s 150th anniversary and the museum’s 50th, the museum is introducing the Collection Project, a series of books and exhibitions looking critically at the museum’s art collection. The Hartley Elegies begins the project with the exhibition and a hardcover book with an essay by art scholar Susan Ryan.

Cryptozoology, the study of animals that roam the unmapped regions between reality and legend, has given us the quests for the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman. But it has also revealed animals that are now part of the classified natural world.

Cryptozoologists are often maligned as crackpots or publicity hounds — until a “real” discovery is made and previously skeptical scientific authorities shamelessly celebrate the “find,” as in the cases of the giant panda, the komodo dragon and the coelacanth. Then cryptozoologists go on to the next search and the cycle begins again. This consensus subjectivity offered in the guise of objectivity is the linchpin linking the practices of cryptozoology to those practices of contemporary art.

It’s a pursuit, says Bessire, “where the disciplines of science and art share a mutual focal point: a desperately desired visual encounter.”

Coleman’s books include Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology (Linden Publishing, 2002); Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America (Paraview Pocket Books, 2003); and The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2003), of which he is a co-author.

Artists attending the symposium include Rachel Berwick, Ellen Lesperance, Mark Dion, Sean Foley, Alexis Rockman and Jeffrey Valance. A publication and film series will be produced in conjunction with the 2006 cryptozoology exhibition. The exhibition is curated by Bessire and Raechell Smith, director of the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, and is organized by the Bates museum and the Block Artspace.

The third annual Cultural Extravaganza takes place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. The show celebrates the African cultural heritage through dance, drumming, spoken word and fashion. This year’s show features performances by students as well as guest artists Prophecy Dance Works of New York City. Appropriate for all ages, the event is free and open to the public. For more information please contact Melisa March at this mmarch@bates.edu.

The art sale benefiting the Katrina Relief Initiative takes place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall. Refreshments are available. A $20 donation buys a piece of art or refreshments served by the Ronj, with proceeds going to the KRI fund.

The weekend also includes a series of sporting events pitting Bates against Tufts, including Saturday’s 1 p.m. football game on Garcelon Field.

The Bates College Museum of Art presents a symposium on Marsden Hartley, a Lewiston native and a pioneer in modern American art, on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 5-6.

The symposium complements the current exhibition of Hartley’s work at the museum, Marsden Hartley: Image and Identity. The symposium and exhibition are open to the public at no charge. For more information, call 207-786-6158.

The symposium begins at 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 5, in the Benjamin Mays Center at Bates, 95 Russell St. Donna M. Cassidy, professor of American and New England studies and art history at the University of Southern Maine, will present the keynote speech, “‘Yankee Queer’: Marsden Hartley’s Maine Folk and Regional/Sexual Identities.” A reception will follow in the art museum, in the nearby Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Saturday’s events will take place in the Olin Arts Center, Room 104. They begin at 10 a.m. with presentations by Marcia Brennan, an art historian at Rice University, and Randall Griffey, a curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. A 1:30 p.m. panel discussion will include all the speakers along with Liz Sheehan, the Bates museum’s assistant curator of academic and exhibition initiatives, and Erica Rand, professor of art and visual culture and chair of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at Bates.

Hartley (1877-1943) was an innovative modernist associated with the New York circle of photographer Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O’Keeffe. The symposium is intended to explore how his homosexuality, an often disregarded but important factor in his life, affected his work.

“We want to affirm the place of gender studies in the curriculum and also as an entry to the study of art history,” Sheehan says. “Although the Bates College Museum of Art was founded around a collection of Hartley art and documentary materials, we haven’t addressed his work in that context. It’s overdue, especially considering that much of the work we have can be described as homoerotic.”

The Hartley collection includes more than 90 drawings, family photographs, jewelry, travel souvenirs and ephemera. Hartley’s works are believed to reflect the many social and historical changes he observed during his lifetime. Though the collection gives great insight into this artist who often felt like an outsider, it also raises many other questions about him, providing a substantial foundation for discussion.

Participants will examine gender issues relating to his work and, more broadly, the application of gender-studies methodology to the study of art history, says Sheehan.

Cassidy is the author of “Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940″ (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997) and “Marsden Hartley: Region, Race, and Nation,” scheduled for spring 2005 publication by the University Press of New England.

Brennan’s topic is “Marsden Hartley: Mysticism, Masculinity, and the Paradox of Oneness.” She is the author of “Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (MIT Press, 2001) and a sequel volume, “Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction,” due out this fall.

Griffey is the associate curator of American art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and teaches at the University of Missouri there. His writings on Hartley include the 2001 article “Marsden Hartley’s Lincoln Portraits” in the magazine American Art. His symposium topic is “‘Such Beautiful Idealists’: Marsden Hartley’s Brief Foray Inside a ‘Finnish-Yankee Sauna.’ ”

The concluding panel discussion will bring Hartley’s work and issues into the present, while questioning contemporary investigations into sexuality and art. Rand teaches courses on contemporary culture with particular attention to sexuality, race and gender — and, within those areas, to queer and trans sexualities and genders. Her current research will culminate in the book “The Ellis Island Snow Globe: Sex, Money, Products, Nation,” forthcoming in 2005.

The symposium is part of an effort to lay the groundwork for a major exhibit in 2007 that will explore Hartley along with other gay artists working in Maine around the same time.

The Upper Gallery exhibit at the museum through Dec. 18 is Videodrome II, curated by New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art and the second incarnation at that museum of an exhibition of works exclusively in video. Inspired by director David Cronenberg’s investigation of the integration of television into daily reality in his 1983 cult-classic film Videodrome, the exhibition acknowledges video’s primacy as a medium in contemporary art.

Video has a unique capacity to submerge viewers through such medium-specific characteristics as its reliance upon light to generate atmosphere and the requirement that it be viewed over time.

The 27 artists come from Japan, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and elsewhere. The works of one artist per day will be presented over 29 days, and during two “open call” days visitors can request that a particular work or compilation be screened.

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Jerome Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Museum admission is open to the public at no cost. It is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and is closed Sundays and major holidays. For more information, call 207-786-6158.

An exhibit of some three dozen works by Carl Sprinchorn, renowned for the art he made while exploring the Maine wilderness over four decades, opens at the Bates College Museum of Art with a reception at 7 p.m. Friday, June 7. The exhibit runs through Aug. 23. Admission to the museum, located in the Olin Arts Center on Russell Street, is open to the public free of charge.

Titled Carl Sprinchorn: King of the Woods, the exhibit includes paintings, drawings and watercolors representing all aspects of Sprinchorn’s Maine — lumbering operations, hunters and trappers, dramatic skies and spectacular foliage. “The Spectator” and the painting commonly known as “Lightning Over Millinocket” are two of the most familiar works that will be on display.

Gail R. Scott, a Presque Isle-based independent scholar and curator known for her research on pioneering modernist Marsden Hartley, guest-curated the exhibit for the museum and wrote the 64-page, fully illustrated catalogue (retailing for $20).

Through the exhibited works and her catalogue essay, which combines biography and insightful analysis of the artwork, Scott constructs a masterful introduction to Sprinchorn (1887-1971). Between his first Maine visit, in 1909, and when he left for the last time, in 1952, she writes, “Sprinchorn returned again and again, drawn like a magnet to its deep woods. It was Maine, more than any other rural place that he visited or lived in, that nurtured the meditative, solitary aspects of his psyche.”

Scott traces the progression of Sprinchorn’s Maine art from his early (and only) seascapes, through the Monson snow paintings that established his grip on the Maine wilderness, to the mature depictions of lumbering operations and unspoiled settings made during his years at Shin Pond.

“Sprinchorn’s agenda . . . in his best work is twofold,” Scott writes. “He wants us to be absolutely certain about the authenticity of the subject being represented, but he takes great pains to arrive at this end by what are essentially the same means employed by an abstract artist: figure/ground relationships that have nothing or little to do with normal perspective; expressive, rather than local color harmonies; and application techniques that relish the pure act of painting.”

As for the exhibit title, she notes, Sprinchorn is often discussed in relation to his close friend and more renowned colleague, Marsden Hartley. (The Bates College Museum of Art was founded as a repository for works by Hartley, who was born in Lewiston.) She recounts how, when Hartley proposed that Sprinchorn find him quarters at Shin Pond so they could paint together, “Sprinchorn firmly and emphatically replied, ‘You can be King of the Coast. I will be King of the Woods.’ ”

Scott edited two volumes of Hartley’s writings and is author of the biography “Marsden Hartley” (Abbeville Press, 1988). Other Maine artists she has written about, along with Sprinchorn, include Harold Garde and Lucy Hayward Barker. Scott is a member (commissioner) of the Maine Arts Commission and a former chair of the Maine Alliance for Arts Education.

The Sprinchorn show in the Upper Gallery of the Bates College Museum of Art runs simultaneously with two exhibits in the Lower Gallery. “Collection Highlights” includes eight Hartley drawings and several recent acquisitions, mostly by Maine artists such as Brett Bigbee, William Thon and Winslow Homer. Also on display is a work by the 19th-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Corot — a “cliché-verre,” created by scratching an image into a coated glass plate that is then placed on photo-sensitive paper and exposed to light.

“The Energy of the Dance” is a photographic exhibit by Michael Philip Manheim, of Beverly, Mass. Manheim uses multiple exposures to depict dancers in action — in this case, performers from the renowned Bates Dance Festival, at which the photographer was an artist-in-residence last summer. More information about his work can be found at the Website http://www.michaelphilipmanheim.com

In addition to works and other materials relating to Hartley, a Lewiston native, the museum’s holdings include a robust print collection and notable works by Maine artists with national significance, such as Dahlov Ipcar, the late William Thon, Neil Welliver and Charles Hewitt. It is the flagship museum for the Maine Art Museum Trail.

Admission is free. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. and 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Sun. For additional information, please call 207-786-6158.

“This year’s senior thesis exhibition includes photographs, sculptural reliefs, geometric abstractions, digitized prints, text-based paintings, sculptures and an installation with an audio component,” says Robert Feintuch, a lecturer in the art department and the seniors’ adviser. “The work addresses a range of subjects and the exhibition reflects the variety of students’ interests. I think it looks terrific in the museum.”

The artists are:
• Krista Chase of Milwaukie, Ore. who made a series of paintings and drawings that investigate natural light, geometric abstraction and a color palette derived from the observation of clouds.

• Elizabeth Coulson of Devon, Pa., with sculptures made from unusual materials such as plungers, peanut butter, feathers and jelly beans.

• Kelly Jackson of York, Pa., who exhibits abstract paintings and drawings that explore the use of printed and handwritten texts as compositional elements.

• Adina Mori of Los Angeles, Calif., who has created a series of black & white photographs depicting Barbie nude. The doll is shown in a variety of poses ranging from a classical nude to a contemporary porn star.

• Megan Simmons of Buffalo, N.Y., whose wall sculptures in silver wire are based on close observations of branches; a related group of prints is based on branches and leaves.

• Jay Surdukowski of Concord, N.H., who has created a multimedia installation from photo-mechanical images, a piano with music floating out, and elements drawn onto the museum wall. The work is a comment on genocide and is based on the structure of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” with 32 graphic pairings that correspond to the musical score.

• Jillian Welenc of Beverly, Mass., who has made enlarged laser prints in response to a note she received from a one-hour photo developer that labeled some of her photographs “unsuitable.” She combines images of the photographs with text to comment on the concept of “unsuitable” in relation to the male and female forms.

Meanwhile, the museum’s Lower Gallery is given over to highlights from the museum collection. Among them are eight Marsden Hartley drawings from the Hartley holdings that the museum was founded to preserve. There are also recent acquisitions, several by Maine artists such as Brett Bigbee, William Thon and Winslow Homer.

Also on display is a work by the 19th-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Corot — a “cliché-verre,” created by scratching an image into a coated glass plate that was then placed on photo-sensitive paper and exposed to light.

The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. and 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Sun. For additional information, please call 207-786-6158.