Hiroya Miura, composer and director of the Bates College Orchestra.

Calling all brass players!

Hiroya Miura, director of the college orchestra and a widely known composer, is presenting the world premiere of a piece, on Dec. 21 in Harlem, that requires two groups of brass musicians to march and interact with the streetscape and the carillon at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. Want to take part? Learn more about “Recordare” and this collaboration with carilloneur Michael J. Smith.

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"Pacific Lands" (2012), an acrylic painting on a printed map mounted on board by Dan Mills.

When Dan Mills talks with artists about showing their work at the Bates College Museum of Art, of which he is the director, he has more insight into their concerns than do some of his peers.

That’s because Mills is a working artist himself. He makes work that employs a variety of media to explore themes and imagery that encompass cartography, humor, imperialism, cartoon characters, landscape and portraiture.

On July 13, Chicago’s Zolla/Lieberman Gallery opened exhibitions by Mills and two other artists, Wilder Buck and Glenn Wexler. The gallery, established in 1976, shows a diverse selection of contemporary artwork.

A week later, at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Michigan Avenue Galleries, Mills is showing his U.S. Future States, a “world atlas” composed of supposed U.S. annexations of various nations — in short, a parody of U.S. imperialism. The opening is at 5:30 p.m. on the 20th, and Mills gives a gallery talk the following day at 1 p.m. The show runs through Sept. 23.

The Perceval Press, actor Viggo Mortensen’s publishing company, produced a hardcover book based on US Future State Atlas series of drawings in 2009.

Mills’ Zolla/Lieberman exhibition, titled Quest, continues the artist’s interest in maps as deliberately constructed art forms that depict a geography as much subjective and psychological as physical and national. Like such other Mills projects as The US Future States Atlas and the Embassy series, the Quest paintings are “characterized by a keen sense of irony and a witty insouciance toward the desires that fuel colonialism and imperialism,” writes Eleanor Heartney in her exhibition catalog essay, “Will to Power.”

“But at the same time, Mills never neglects the visual aspects of his work. His projects straddle the worlds of politics and art, and in the end occupy a region that partakes as much of Matisse as of 18th-century political satirists like James Gillray and William Hogarth. His works appeal to the mind and to the eye, making us smile in order to make us think.”

The Zolla/Lieberman exhibitions continue through Aug. 25. Zolla/Lieberman represents Mills.  Director of the Bates museum since 2010, Mills and his wife, artist Gail Skudera, lived in Chicago and were active in the Windy City’s art community from 1981 to 1994.

With her stoneware bowls in the foreground and art by Liane Fitzgerald '12 in the background, ceramicist Catherine Elliott '12 checks her computer during preparations for the 2012 Senior Exhibition. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

We dropped in at the Bates College Museum of Art one recent afternoon as Bates’ graduating studio art majors were putting the finishing touches on the 2012 Senior Exhibition.

First impressions were misleading. Although the artwork was all in its place, the museum’s sunlit main gallery was deserted. Dust dulled the floorboards and gear was lying around like it didn’t care — hammers, electric drill, extension cords, photo floodlights, a scissors lift.

But the ghost town aspect was quickly dispelled when we went downstairs and found the 14 artists, all women, having a final meeting with Robert Feintuch, senior lecturer in art and visual culture. Feintuch, himself a well-respected painter, advises the studio art majors during the winter semester. Also a well-established exhibiting artist, associate professor Pamela Johnson is the autumn adviser.

Deb Mack '12 works on her sculptural installation for the 2012 Senior Exhibition in the Bates College Museum of Art. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

For Deb Mack, finishing touches included cleaning up broken glass scattered around her work. There was even more broken glass contained in this sculptural installation, combined with terracotta sculptures of fallen leaves — about 200 — and three terracotta human hands, all on a white platform rising about six inches off the floor.

“It’s a commentary about humans and nature” — specifically, the human assault on the natural world, explained Mack, of Irvington, N.Y.

A double major in art and biology, Mack hopes to attend medical school after Bates. Her route to this artwork began with an interest in anatomy and in sculpting human hands, which led to leaves.

She originally considered melting glass to use somehow in the piece, but “broken glass seems to better emphasize the fragility of the situation resulting from human-nature interactions.”

Also OK with breakage, up to a point (sorry), was Catherine Elliott of Edina, Minn. A double major in studio art and politics, Elliott is a ceramicist whose stoneware bowls show a kind of rough elegance, or elegant roughness, and a subtle hand with color.

Elliott has studied at Bates with Paul Heroux, widely known for his exquisite ceramic vessels, and she shares his dedication to making work both beautiful and usable. This attitude accepts the possibility of breakage in the line of duty.

“If my mother calls and says she’s broken the cat bowl” — that is one pampered cat — “I just say, ‘Great, I can make you a new one.’ ”

One thing Kit Sheridan of Providence, R.I., learned about her art during 2011-12 is to make less of it. Robert Feintuch, the senior lecturer who works with the studio art majors during the spring semester, at one point jokingly accused Sheridan of “horror vacui” — Latin for a fear of empty space — which led her to crowd her canvasses with pigment.

Ceramacist Catherine Elliott '12, in the background, looks at some of her stoneware bowls on display in the 2012 Senior Exhibition in the Bates College Museum of Art. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

So she eased up and left more white space. “That was one of the best things I got from him,” said Sheridan. In fact, though her works aren’t hung in the order of their making, you can see the progress from dense to open to happy middle ground.

Always self-conscious about making abstract art — was her work “just doodles,” she sometimes wondered — Sheridan turned a corner this year thanks to Feintuch and Johnson. “I’ve become far more confident with abstraction.”

A Mainer from Belfast, Claire Banks compiles paint chips, Mylar, wallpaper, newspaper and paint into abstracts that explore interactions between colors and between hard and soft boundaries. Like Sheridan, Banks too got transformative guidance from her advisers.

Johnson encouraged her to consider the long tradition of using found objects in art. Feintuch “had confidence in me and encouraged me to push forward and trust my gut, just to try things out and see what happened,” she says.

“It’s been a process to push myself to my limit and then let go of control. That’s when the artwork starts to happen.”

Two of the exhibiting seniors are photographers. Katharine Maxwell of Newton, Mass., belongs to the cult of the Holga, a low-cost, low-tech camera cherished for the wayward focus, light leaks and other unpredictable effects it imparts to an image.

Catherine Elliott '12, center, looks on as Deb Mack '12 puts the finishing touches on her installation in the 2012 Senior Exhibition in the Bates College Museum of Art. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Maxwell’s Holga explores the obscure yet compelling interplay between emotion, memory and physical spaces. Her mother’s work as an architect sensitized Maxwell to the forms of created spaces — “but instead of how architecture can be designed, what interests me is how it can be experienced and interpreted,” Maxwell said.

Sometimes quite representational, sometimes not so much, Maxwell’s evocative images at first seem depopulated. But once you really look, “there’s a clear presence of people,” she says. Yes, that is a foot, and yes, she did shoot it while taking a bath.

Where Maxwell explored inner responses to outer places, a photo installation by Liana Blum from Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., layered up external references like pancakes.

In her black and white images depicting mostly women, somewhat undressed, Blum looked to 14th-century painter Simone Martini for his treatment of haloes; to fashion photography for both emotional and print-surface tonality; and to early religious symbols — moths, dragonflies, flowers — of “temporality, preciousness and transience,” she says.

“The thing I love about creating art is that I can keep putting different thoughts and references into a piece, and then see how they all play off each other,” she says. “In the end, people pick up on different elements and are able to derive meaning from the work that is individual to them.”

Ellie McDonald of Manchester, Mass., was more linear in her artistic time travel. In pencil and charcoal, she drew two images for each piece: a copy of a portrait by a master artist such as Dürer or Degas paired with her own interpretation of that image, drawn from a live model.

For McDonald, the project was explicitly about strengthening her eye and hand. “Doing the copies helped me immensely,” she said. “It helped me understand the idealization of the subject. And it helped with my draftsmanship and articulating parts of the face I hadn’t noticed before.”

It was an exercise in rigor for her models, too, who had to hold poses for long sessions. Two hours was the longest she would push them, McDonald said. And while she was drawing, if the pose permitted, “I’d let them watch TV or sleep.”

Ceramicist Catherine Elliott '12 checks the arrangement of her work in 2012 Senior Exhibition in the Bates College Museum of Art. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

So it was probably inevitable that at some point, a bunch of Bates dancers would pull up their leg warmers and put on a show in the Big Apple. The question was, when?

And the answer is: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 24 and 25, at an arts center in Brooklyn. Spoke the Hub Dancing, in Park Slope, is the site of the first New York Bates Alumni Dance Concert.
“Alumni,” by the way, doesn’t tell the whole story. While nine dance alumni will perform or present choreography, so will a current student, New York City native Victoria Lowe ’12; and dance faculty Carol Dilley, program director and associate professor, and visiting assistant professor Rachel Boggia.

As Dilley tells it, the concert was the product of a dressing room conversation during one of those interesting things that dance alumni cause — the April 2011 reunion that brought nearly 200 of them to Bates from as far away as London and San Francisco.

Chatting in the dressing room were Erin Gottwald ’98 of Brooklyn and Liliana Amador-Marty ’91 of Glen Rock, N.J. Knowing that they aren’t the only Bates-pedigreed professional dancers in the tri-state area, they realized that a New York City performance was a natch.
Dilley leaped on the idea, bringing to bear the resources of the theater and dance department — including her faculty colleague Michael Reidy, who will be lighting the show. But what really sped the plow was Gottwald’s connection with Spoke the Hub.

Especially in a beehive like New York, “negotiating for a performing space is a big important piece, and it’s hard for a non-local to do,” says Dilley. “You need a way in.” Cue Gottwald, who has taught, performed and curated shows in Spoke’s 65-seat blackbox space, one of several arts operations in a former soap factory.

Gottwald performs in a couple of pieces on the seven-work program, including a revised version of “Peace, My Heart,” a tribute to the late Bates dancer Polly Howlett ’76. The piece was choreographed by a classmate and premiered in a memorable episode during Parents & Family Weekend 2011. Performing it next weekend, in addition to Gottwald, are Amador-Marty, Stephanie Brunson Matthews ’92 and Alissa Horowitz ’08.

Matthews and Amador-Marty will be joined by Alison Oakes Charbonnier ’92 for the joint composition “Drive.” Horowitz, too, presents her own choreography in “Episodes,” performed with Victor Lazaro. And coming from Boston to present a piece for three dancers is Kate Nies Brigham ’02.
Dilley and Boggia, meanwhile, offer “Phantom Ice.” This work in progress is set to music for cello and tape recording by Bates composer William Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music. The cello part will be performed live by Madeleine Shapiro, a well-known avant-garde musician much admired by Dilley.

(In fact, Dilley notes, she is bringing Shapiro to campus in March for a residency culminating in collaborative performances during the March 30ñApril 2 Winter Dance Concert.)
Concert organizers hope that off-campus alumni dance concerts won’t stop with the Spoke the Hub event. Gratifying for performers and audiences, such events, too, can only benefit the Bates dance program — which is about to graduate its first four majors in May.
“It’s a great networking thing for alumni on the outside,” says Dilley, “which tells students on the inside that when they walk out of Bates, they’re not walking into a big empty space — they’re walking into a living network of help.

“And in the dance world, that’s pretty darned necessary.”

“Now that Bates has a dance major, there’s a different sense of duty for alumni,” adds Gottwald. “It’s a major and it’s official, and we’re part of that tradition. This will just solidify our connection to the Bates dance program.”