Collection Project III
Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 7pm

For Project III, student interns were invited to curate an exhibition from the collection. The exhibition is a continuation of the Museum’s Collection Project series of exhibitions and publications looking critically at our art collection with fresh eyes and new scholarship. In Project III, we will be tracking a diverse group of exhibitions over several years that look critically at our collection from the eyes of students, faculty, and curators utilizing new database tools for collection research. In this exhibition, five interns were invited to create thematic cluster exhibitions from works acquired by the Museum in the past few years. Cluster topics explore a variety of ideas and include gender, race, medium, and provenance. 
Curatorial Interns: Charlotte Coulter '09, Erin Gilligan '09, Forbes Litcoff '09,  Emily Monty '10, & Jessica Salzer '09

Stories of the Somali Diaspora:
Photographs by Abdi Roble
Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 7pm


Self-taught photographer Abdi Roble continues in the long tradition of documentary photography with his ongoing, ambitious mission to record the Somali diaspora. Roble arrived in Columbus in 1990. While learning English, he worked at minimum-paying jobs, before taking on steady work selling cameras at Midwest Photo Exchange. He also started photographing the city’s growing and vibrant Somali community. For the last five years, Roble has been engaged in creating a visual archive as part of the Somali Documentary Project, which he founded in 2003 with Doug Rutledge, Stanley Kayne, and Tariq Tarey.

Bessire to leave for Portland Museum of Art

It is with mixed emotions that we announce that Mark Bessire, director of the Museum of Art, will leave the College in February to assume the directorship of the Portland Museum of Art. This is a wonderful opportunity for Mark and we celebrate his appointment. But we are sad to have him leave Bates, where he has made significant contributions as museum director and as advocate for the arts on campus.