Internationally known for his surprising and provocative explorations of culture and consumerism, William Pope.L’s Black Factory is his most participatory, community-oriented project yet. It aims to re-energize discussions about race in America by inviting people to share objects that represent “blackness” to them.

At once a mobile marketplace that trades in provocation and a nomadic laboratory for crafting consciousness, the Black Factory gathers, shapes, and repackages materials and experiences that challenge us to see the creative potential nested within the polarized politics of race in America. Whenever the Black Factory appears and sets up operations, it catalyzes a participatory process of public engagement with issues of cultural difference. It combines sculpture, installation and performance to pose questions about identity, community, and consumption that get under our skin and stay there where they belong.

By collecting, recycling and peddling the ingredients for re-thinking blackness, the Black Factory transforms the tensions and contradictions of race into a dynamic field of possibility. The Factory performs an inward-reaching outreach effort. It encourages us to take hold of the stereotypes of race and class which bind us to our indecision and apathy and to turn them inside out. It challenges us to grapple with the habitual ways in which we consume products, identities and ideologies. It extends open arms to those who feel certain that they have already settled all of these difficult questions, as well as to those who are still actively struggling with them. It asks us to rise to the task of collaborating in the creation of a community built not upon erasing but rather embracing our own differences and contradictions.

The Black Factory previewed at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art last May before leaving for its first official stop at MassMoCA, where it was part of the exhibition Interventionists: Art and Social Change. It will be parked at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ through the end of May, when it embarks on the 2005 nationwide tour.

Black Factory brochure

The keynote speaker on Friday night will be the famous cryptozoologist Loren Coleman who is widely published and viewed as the authority in the field.His books include Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology, Bigfoot: The True Stories of Apes in America; and The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep. He recently founded the Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine where he lives and works.

Often considered a marginalized science or a farcical adventure, the practice of cryptozoology is the quest for unknown, rumored or hidden animals. Its most notorious pursuits include the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman, though it has also revealed animals that are now part of the classified natural world. CZ is a fascinating zone of inquiry for contemporary artists interested in the fertile margins of the history of science and museums, taxonomy, myth, creativity and discovery. The theme out of time place scale provides an opportunity to challenge the taxonomic limitations of hierarchy, linearity, chronology and/or context that museums and art history manipulate to control presentation and reception. Staking out a position or non-site that blurs the boundaries between time place scale and choosing not to deconstruct predominant museum ideologies, this project constructs an alternative mode of address that favors a return to the organized mayhem, wonder, delight, spiritual and intellectual adventurism of pre-Enlightenment curio cabinets.

A catalogue with an essay by noted Indiana scholar Susan Elizabeth Ryan will be published this fall as the first in a series of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art collection catalogues.

Carl Little is the author of numerous art books, including The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent (University of California Press) and, most recently, The Art of Monhegan Island (Down East Books). He is a regular contributor to Art New England and Art in America, where he was formerly associate editor. In 2000 he was presented with the Acadia Arts Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the arts on Mount Desert Island. Little directed the Ethel H. Blum Gallery at College of the Atlantic for eight years and is currently director of communications and marketing at the Maine Community Foundation.

was graduated from Princeton in 1969 with a degree in Art History, then studied with George Segal and George Ortman before completing an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. Shortly thereafter he began building a studio and home in Sumner, Maine which became his full-time residence. Babb has shown widely in New England and New York, including shows at Vose Galleries and Gallery NAGA in Boston, Sherry French, The National Academy in New York City, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Portland Museum of Art, Ogunquit Museum, Arnot Art Museum, and the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art.

Britt Eilhardt ’05 will present a gallery talk in conjunction with Early French Photography: Art and Industry.

The Students in the Vault exhibition and project series is supported in part by the Friends of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art. For information on membership and Friends programming, click here.

One of Maine’s most distinctive photographers, known for her wry images of family life, Melonie Bennett gives a slide talk about her work onTuesday, March 1.

Bennett, whose work is represented in the current ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art exhibition “New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography,” emerged on the Maine art scene during the 1990s with depictions of the sometimes-funny, sometimes-edgy happenings in an extended Maine family.“My photography is on ongoing visual diary of my family and friends and the times we share together,” she writes in an artist’s statement. “I developed my point of view growing up on a dairy farm in Gorham, Maine.”

“To avoid tension we developed ways of coping mostly through laughing, eating and talking,” she writes. “I watched what went on around me at home very closely and this is where I developed the way I see. I love to point things out that I can’t believe are happening in front of me and share them with others.”

Bennett, who emerged on the Maine art scene in the mid-1990s, has shown her work in virtually every leading gallery and museum in the state, in galleries in New York City, and around the Northeast.

Sponsored by the Mellon Learning Associates Program at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, and presented by the Department of Art and Visual Culture, the talk is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6224.

Melonie Bennett Bridget, Brittany and Waldo, 2000 black and white photograph 16 x 20 in.

Pearl John uses large format holography as a medium to examine issues of self-identity. She combines holographic images with text, video and photography to reach toward the meaning that exists at the boundaries between words and images, and between artist and viewer. Her latest series, “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” and “Snack,” produced during a residency at Long Island City’s Center for the Holographic Arts, documents our complex relationship with food and eating. Words are laser-etched into fruit, toast, crisps and peanuts, offering a sense of the many subliminal meanings we project on our food.

Pearl John graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Holography in 1992. Her holograms and installations have been exhibited in Japan, Europe and throughout the USA. She currently teaches laser technology in schools throughout the UK, with the University of Southampton Department of Physics and Astronomy.

For more information on Pearl John’s work, please visit and  

For more information on Hong Lin’s research, please visit the Physics Department’s website.

Pearl John Push, 2001 White light hologram with laser etched mirror 8 x 10 in.