This exhibition highlights the work of contemporary artists who explore these hemispheric histories of indigeneity, gender, activism, and empathy throughout the Américas. These artists forge profound historical, cultural, and political connections between the North and the South, documenting and reflecting powerful moments of activism that, fueled by both joy and rage, have fomented social change across borders.
Featuring works from the collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art spanning nearly two thousand years —from approximately 1300 BCE to 400 CE—Flora et Fauna examines how ancient Mediterranean societies understood and depicted the natural world.
Members of Bowdoin College’s Class of 1825, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow created some of the most popular literary works in nineteenth-century America. In response to Hawthorne's novels and Longfellow's poetry, artists created many remarkable paintings, sculpture, and prints. Conversely, the authors drew inspiration from art and objects of all ages, often using them as narrative devices. This exhibition explores how the two authors and their compelling stories influenced American visual culture during this period.
This exhibition features works of art that resist the rendering of human lives into objects of consumption, data sets, and/or algorithms. The exhibition touches on subjects from the recent and not-so-recent past, looking at how art helps build our capacity for empathy when our worldviews are often shaped by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the Internet.
Monhegan’s history offers lessons for us all. This exhibition brings together artworks, objects and representations of ecological inquiry, and historical documents and photographs to chart forest conversion and recovery on the island.
This exhibition features thirty-five photographs—self-portraits or portraits of other artists—which reflect radically new propositions for what a portrait might be. They foreground the idea that identity is fluid, bodies are malleable, and strangeness is common. Whether confessional or slyly secretive, each of these photographs offers new revelations to the viewer. Working against systems meant to define, categorize, and normalize, these artists have reclaimed the portrait to express themselves and realize a vision of self otherwise foreclosed.
"Currents: Art Since 1875" tells new stories, asks provocative questions, and challenges assumptions about the human experience through works of twentieth and twenty-first century art.
This exhibition of art in the Atlantic World considers empire-building across Europe, North America, and their colonies, and how it shaped interconnected global networks from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
