Paper conservator Christopher Sokolowski (ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ class of 1990) will discuss his path to the field of conservation, current work, and interesting projects along the way.

With an MA in Art History from U-Mass Amherst and a MS in Art Concservation from Winterthur/University of Delaware, Sokolowski has worked at the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is currently with the Northeast Document Conservation Center.

Sponsored by the Museum of Art.

Thomas Denenberg ’90,Chief Curator and William E. and Helen E. Thon Curator of American Art at the Portland Museum of Art will speak about his career. Thursday, March 15 at 7:00 pm in Olin 104.

One of the originators of Conceptual art, Agnes Denes approaches art from a multi-disciplinary approach transforming explorations into unique works of art. Her work analyzing the relationship of science and art made her a pioneer of ecological art and one of the first artists to initiate the environmental art movement. Her current work involves ecological, cultural and social issues.

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

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.

Del is a filmmaker, photographer, theorist, and “gender terrorist” whose work “consistently and intentionally subverts, destablizes and challenges the binary gender system,” pushing the boundaries of current conventions of gender and sexual differences, and the social hierarchies that enforce them.

Recent photographic projects include Sublime Mutations (2000), andThe Drag King Book, co-written with Judith “Jack” Halberstam (2002), which represents over twenty years of work engaging with difference and its embodiment.Writes Del: “Some photographers are documentarians, simply recording what happens as it happens. My approach is to create the space for the photograph to become an event in itself. And to blur as many boundaries in the process as is possible–within the two dimensions of the medium. Oh yes, and sexy too.” Volcano’s work has been shown in many exhibitions: “Female Turbulance” in Belgium; “Gender Fusion” in Slovenia; and “Venus Boyz” in Sweden.

This lecture is sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art, Art Department, The Program in Women and Gender Studies, and OUTfront.

Herman references the culture of consumption in the imagery she utilizes and the presentation concepts she has employed to display objects ranging from ink-jet printed cookies to her series of embossments on hand-made chewing gum.She has exhibited her work broadly, and in 2001, her “Limited Edition Cookies” were included in the exhibition entitled Digital: Printmaking Now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Herman’s work has entered such collections as The Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. á la carte, Herman’s 1999 solo exhibition at Adam Baumgold Gallery, was described in The New Yorker as “appetizing silliness.”