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.

Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for non-Bates students (free for Bates students and faculty). Please call 207-786-6161 for additional information.

Cooper, a theater major, has adapted and analyzed the one-woman play and is performing it as her honors-thesis project. Director Michael Rafkin, founder of Portland’s Mad Horse Theater, has helped Cooper hone her performance in a Bates residency supported by the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities.

Wagner, comedian Tomlin’s longtime collaborator, wrote this popular play about a bag lady who tries to explain American society to space aliens — an explanation that carries the sole performer through a wild gallery of characters. The piece debuted in 1985, netted Tomlin a Tony for best actress the next year and appeared on film in 1991.

“I really wanted to do a one-woman show,” says Cooper. “It is a huge challenge to be on stage all by yourself — you don’t have anyone to save you, you don’t have anyone to fall back on if you mess up. I wanted to see if I could rise to that challenge.”

“I also really like doing character work,” she says. It offers “a chance to break out of the everyday, try something new, be someone different — try to imagine what it would be like as this separate person. And I think that is what theater is all about.”

At Bates, Cooper has appeared in a number of productions of both the theater department and the Robinson Players, one of the oldest student theater groups in the country. For the theater department, among other roles, she played Guildenstern in last fall’s Hamlet and Ma in 2002′s The Sea Wall — a role for which she spoke for and manipulated the life-size, bunraku-style puppet representing the lead character.

Cooper calls Michael Rafkin “amazing.” She says, “He is very organic in the way he directs. Most directors will say, ‘We’ll tell you exactly where to go on stage.’ But he encouraged me to develop my own insights into the characters and their motivations, and to try different things with their movements, to just experiment with the set.”

Rafkin comes to Bates through a program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that brings expert practitioners in myriad disciplines to campus to work with students. In addition to founding Mad Horse and directing some 30 of that company’s shows, he has been stage director for the Portland Stage Company, the Portland Players and The Center for the Arts and Social Transformation at the University of New England, of which he was a founding member.

Through poster presentations, panel discussions, exhibits and performances, more than 250 Bates College students will take part in the third annual Mount David Summit, starting at 2:30 p.m. Friday, April 2, in Pettengill Hall, Andrews Road.

The summit is open to the public at no charge. For more information, call the Office of the Dean of Faculty at 207-786-6065.

Established in 2002 to demonstrate the intellectual range and depth of student accomplishment at Bates, the event gives students from all classes and disciplines the opportunity to share with the community their research, service-learning and creative work.

This year’s event, the largest yet, will include more than 150 students presenting posters, talks, videos and a one-woman play; another 40 exhibiting photographs; and 60-plus performing in musical ensembles that include the college orchestra.

In sessions from 2:45 to 4:15 p.m. and 4:30 to 6 p.m., students will display and explain nearly 100 research posters in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall. Poster topics will run a wide gamut, including the effects of carbaryl pesticides in Maine, a case study of autism, the potential cancer-fighting effects of a chemical extracted from hyacinth beans and mathematical modeling of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Concurrent panel presentations will take place in ground-floor classrooms in Pettengill. Topics include the acculturation of Somali students in Lewiston schools, a study of the effects of microcredit in developing countries, the abolitionist roots of Bates founder Oren Cheney and an examination of Appalachian Baptist music that includes shape-note singing by the student a cappella group Northfield.

Two performances start at 8 p.m. For her thesis project, Saida Cooper, a senior theater major from St. Albans, Maine, performs Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall.

In the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, Lecturer in Music Philip Carlsen conducts the Bates College Orchestra and guest artists Frank Glazer, pianist, and senior Cass Panuska, soprano, in works by Mozart, Debussy, Corigliano and Franck.

The event title “Mount David” is borrowed from a Bates landmark—the tall, wooded rocky outcropping at the corner of Mountain Avenue and College Street.

Watch for a full summit schedule at the Web site www.bates.edu/mt-david-summit.xml.