Image: Bates College Museum of Art, New York
The annual collection rotations are being introduced to mark the fortieth anniversary of the opening of Bates College Museum of Art in the Olin Arts Center. The Museum’s Lower Gallery will now be devoted to these annual presentations of the permanent collection. The inaugural exhibition traces the story of collecting at Bates in three parts focused on the origins, expansion and future of the collection.
The presentation includes works by Katherine Bradford, Ashley Bryan, Lois Dodd and David Driskell, among others, alongside art from Pre-Columbian civilizations, Edo-period Japan, Early Modern Europe and nineteenth-century Africa. The Bates College Museum of Art permanent collection originated with the bequest of the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection in the 1950s. Building on the legacy of the Lewiston-born modernist painter Marsden Hartley, one of the Museum’s strengths remains a commitment to artists living and working in Maine.
Decades of gifts have expanded the global reach of the collection to include representative works from Pre-Columbian civilizations, Edo-period Japan, Early Modern Europe and nineteenth-century Africa. The collection continues to grow in ways that diversify the material, conceptual and cultural scope of the museum holdings. Examples of works that push the boundaries of the collection while addressing contemporary social issues and events include a brick sculpted from human hair, screenprinting on glass and a drawing made with soil.
Taken together, ‘Rooted and Rising’ reflects on the unique strengths of enduring academic collections while considering new roles, directions and stakes for museum collecting in the twenty-first century.
