The three tenure recipients are assistant professor Pamela Johnson of the Department of Art and Visual Culture; associate professor John McClendon of the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies; and assistant professor Michael Sargent of the Department of Psychology.

All three live in Lewiston and have taught at Bates since 1999.

Johnson teaches studio art media and techniques. A painter and printmaker, she has recently completed a body of more than 50 mixed-media pieces that use images from fairy tales and nature to explore themes of female identity. She has shown work in solo and group exhibitions at Maine venues including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, in Rockport, and Zero Station, Portland, as well as the Bates College Museum of Art. Her work has appeared at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., Bennington College, Vermont, and Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass.

Johnson received a B.F.A. in art history at the University of Kansas, a second B.F.A. in painting at the Kansas City (Missouri) Art Institute, and her master’s at Bennington College. In 1993 and 1994, she worked as a personal assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, the noted Abstract Expressionist painter. Johnson also studied at Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

McClendon teaches courses in cultural politics, African American philosophers, Africana thought and practice, theory and method in African American studies, and the role of athletics in African American culture. He is interested in the intersections of philosophy, social science and the African American experience, and particularly in African American expressions and adaptations of leftist thought.

McClendon is a widely sought-after public speaker and a prolific author. He has written diverse articles for scholarly journals, reference works and anthologies, served on the advisory board of the journal Cultural Logic, and served as editor of the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience. His book C.L.R. James’s Notes On Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? was published by Lexington Books in January, and he has three other book manuscripts in progress.

Before Bates, McClendon taught in public schools and in academic settings including the University of Missouri and the University of Illinois at Champaign. He received a B.S. in black studies and political science at Central State University in Ohio, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Kansas.

Sargent teaches courses in social and political psychology, research methodology, prejudice and stereotyping, and social cognition. Most of his research focuses on stereotyping and prejudice.

Sargent has written and spoken extensively on the Implicit Association Test, an instrument for measuring attitudes and responses that individuals are either incapable of recognizing in themselves or unwilling to report honestly. He has also written and spoken on issues of race in police work and the legal system.

Before Bates, he taught at the Ohio State University. Sargent received his B.A. in psychology at Hendrix College in Arkansas, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Ohio State.

Twelve art majors cap their Bates College careers with the popular Annual Senior Exhibition, opening with a reception at 7 p.m. Friday, April 9. The exhibit at the Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St., runs through May 30 and is open to the public at no charge.

The exhibition highlights work selected from the thesis projects of graduating seniors majoring in studio art. The program emphasizes the creation of a cohesive body of related works through sustained studio practice and critical inquiry. The yearlong process is overseen during the fall semester by Assistant Professor of Art Pamela Johnson, and during the winter semester by Senior Lecturer in Art Robert Feintuch, who also curates the exhibit and oversees its installation.

In alphabetical order, here are the exhibiting artists:

Julia Allen of St. Paul, Minn., has made cups, bowls and vases of porcelain, exploring varying degrees of distortion in order to find forms that imply fluid motion.

Sarita Fellows of Natick, Mass., has used Nigerian printed fabric as a source of inspiration for intensely colored abstract paintings and etchings.

Jon Greer of Chester, N.H., has worked with abstraction, space and light in his monochromatic paintings of fragmented images of the figure.

Using manipulated and anthropomorphic forms, Paul Heckler of Cross River, N.Y., has made a group of high-fired reduction stoneware teapots.

Alison Locke of Troy, Maine, has done a group of paintings of Martha Stewart that evoke journalistic photography and address Stewart’s multifaceted and controversial image.

Working with images of furniture, Graham Macbeth of Ellsworth, Maine, has made paintings and monotypes that play with ideas of geometric abstraction and representation.

Meredith Nutting of Rockville, Md., has used forms found in tree branches as the basis of abstract paintings that explore color interaction and spatial relationships.

Helen O’Donnell of Mount Desert, Maine, has used etching and drypoint to make images that combine handwritten text, abstract imagery and cartoons, and that question traditional ideas of content and meaning.

Through her work in ceramics, Caitlin Reiter of Mystic, Conn., investigates textured surface patterns in a series of monochromatic functional forms that are hybrids of bowls and trays.

In digital photographs that stress color, Elizabeth Sall of Villanova, Pa., shows still-lifes that she found in domestic situations.

Annie Schauer of Louisville, Ky., has made black-and-white photographs of interiors and landscapes that evoke notions of absence and presence.

K-Fai Steele of Charlton, Mass., is interested in the intersection of banality, humor and awe. Her work in the fall semester culminated in the large-scale installation Me and Jesus in the Perry Atrium. Her more recent work uses a structure inspired by dollhouses.

The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and is closed Sundays and major holidays. For additional information call 207-786-6158.

A senior art major’s thesis project has transformed Pettengill Hall’s Perry Atrium, covering most of its three-story glass wall with translucent paintings that flood this popular space with the glowing colors of stained glass.

“Me and Jesus” is the creation of K-Fai Steele, of Charlton, Mass. Working in brightly colored house paint on large plastic dropsheets, Steele has created a cycle of 22 paintings that explore modern American attitudes about Christ.

The art will be in place through Friday, Jan. 23. Steele will discuss and answer questions about the work at 4 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall.

After studying traditional church depictions of Jesus and other Christian figures during a year of study in Rome, Steele returned to Bates determined to find an approach to depicting Christ that would speak to contemporary American popular culture just as the art of Michelangelo or Titian spoke to the culture of 16th-century Italy.

She settled on a narrative style that rendered concepts from Byzantine and Italian Renaissance art in a distinctly American manner: the bold colors and flattened, symbolic images of cartoons. In addition, Steele puts the Christ figure in that most American of stories, the Hollywood boy-girl romance.

“People can project themselves onto cartoons,” Steele says, and by putting Jesus into a modern relationship with a sort of Ms. Anygirl, “Me and Jesus” raises all manner of questions about the nature of Christ and the ways in which people relate to him, or don’t.

“How do we make sense of Jesus now?” Steele wonders. “And who is this ‘me’ in terms of Jesus?”

Taking a cue from the traditional of church stained glass, Steele decided to use translucent media in her paintings, which are 10 feet square or 10 feet by 20 feet, and hang them over windows. The paintings cover two of the three tiers of atrium windows, leaving the uppermost tier unaffected. The installation took much of last Friday and involved not only Steele but a crew of student and Physical Plant helpers, not to mention a Genie lift — a small cherry picker.

The project is a first for Perry Atrium. With its glass wall affording captivating views of Lake Andrews and the Olin Arts Center at Bates, this three-story space is a popular spot for studying, relaxing and meeting friends. In a testament to the Bates tradition of balancing individual initiative with community interests, Steele made a formal presentation about the installation and asked permission of atrium users to go ahead with it. Permission was granted unanimously.

At the same time, Steele intended that “Me and Jesus” be provocative. “I’m very open to criticism,” she says.. “I’d be happier with criticism than no response whatsoever.”

Steele’s thesis advisor for the project is Assistant Professor of Art Pamela Johnson. The project has received funding from the Barlow Endowment and the Bates Student Research Fund, and has the support of the Department of Art, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty and Physical Plant.