Marsden Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine and became one of America’s greatest modernist painters. Hartley loved traveling. France and Nova Scotia are two distinct places gave Hartley inspiration.

In France, Hartley caught Cézanne fever, and in Nova Scotia, he found a fundamental goodness and nobility of humanity. My talk, based on research conducted during an internship with the museum during the winter 2010 term, will offer insight into Hartley’s wanderings and how his discovery of his unique vision emerged from his relationship with nature and human interactions.

This gallery talk will focus on a tour of the Senior Exhibition 2010. Audiences will learn about the year-long thesis process an art major works through, and what it entails.

I will present an overview of how the show is organized and the hows and whys of its installation. As my own work is featured in the exhibition, I will be delighted to field specific questions about my work, and offer insights into those of my co-exhibitors.

See their art.

With their many stages of production, the mediums of silkscreen and lithography are often mysterious to art audiences. This short gallery talk will focus on a small group of works from the collection and utilize a PowerPoint detailing the processes of both mediums, step-by-step.

Through this, the audience will gain more appreciation of the amount of work that is put into each print. Also, by knowing the steps of the printmaking process, audiences will be able to visualize the evolution of what they are actually looking at the next time they see a silkscreen or a lithograph. Works drawn from the collection will be used to illustrate the range that each process can produce.

Saturday, November 6, 2004
Olin Arts Center Room 104, 75 Russell Street
10:00 AMMarcia Brennan, Rice University

“Marsden Hartley: Mysticism, Masculinity, and the Paradox of Oneness”

Marcia Brennan, Assistant Professor of Art History, received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1997. She taught at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, before joining the faculty at Rice University in the fall of 2001. Her book Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics, was published by the MIT Press in 2001. A sequel volume entitled Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, The New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction, will be published by the MIT Press in the Fall of 2004. In addition to teaching courses in twentieth century American and European art, she is a Faculty Affiliate in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender.

Randall Griffey, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
“‘Such Beautiful Idealists’: Marsden Hartley’s Brief Foray Inside a Finnish Yankee Sauna”

Randall Griffey is the Associate Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. His 1999 doctoral dissertation for the University of Kansas was entitled Marsden Hartley’s Late Paintings: American Masculinity and National Identity in the 1930s and 40s. For the recent Hartley retrospective organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Griffey contributed the catalogue essay “Encoding the Homoerotic: Marsden Hartley’s Late Figure Paintings” and served as resident curator for the exhibition’s final stop at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In 2001, his article “Marsden Hartley’s Lincoln Portraits” was published in American Art. Griffey also serves as Associate Visiting Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where he teaches courses on modern and American art.

12:00 Lunch break

1:30 Panel Discussion
Marcia Brennan, Rice University
Donna M. Cassidy, University of Southern Maine
Randall Griffey, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Erica Rand, Professor of Art and Visual Culture and Chair, Program in Women and Gender Studies

Moderated by Liz K. Sheehan, Assistant Curator of Academic and Exhibition Initiatives, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art

Her articles on early twentieth-century American art (on Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley) have appeared in Smithsonian Studies in American Art, American Art Journal, Winterthur Portfolio, and numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogues, and she is the author of Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).She also served as a senior consultant for the art section of The Encyclopedia of New England Culture (forthcoming Yale University Press) and has a new book, Marsden Hartley: Region, Race, and Nation, forthcoming from the University Press of New England, spring 2005.

Friday, November 5, 2004

Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell Street
6:00 PM

Donna M. Cassidy, University of Southern Maine, Keynote speaker
“‘Yankee Queer’: Marsden Hartley’s Maine Folk and Regional/Sexual Identities”

Museum reception to follow, Olin Arts Center.

The Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art provides an intimate look into the life of this enigmatic modernist painter from Maine. With ninety-nine drawings, dozens of family photographs, jewelry, travel souvenirs, and ephemera, this personal archive provides a wealth of information about the artist’s life. Yet the collection raises as many questions as it answers.On November 5 and 6, Hartley scholars will speak at a symposium organized in conjunction with the current exhibition Marsden Hartley: Image and Identity, which examines the artist’s autobiographical practices. Topics to be discussed include the construction of regional and sexual identity in Hartley’s Maine work; the reception of, and criticism around, Hartley and his modernist contemporaries; and wartime politics and the representation of the male body. A panel discussion following the lectures will bring the conversation to the present, questioning contemporary investigations into sexuality and art.

Free and open to the public

Since its dedication in 1986, The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art has maintained a special relationship with the college’s Department of Art & Visual Culture. Part of this is a commitment to supporting the work of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students through our Annual Senior Exhibition. The exhibition highlights work selected from the thesis projects of graduating seniors majoring in Studio Art.

Thesis projects vary from student to student, each pursuing an individual interest. The emphasis of the program is to create a cohesive body of related works through sustained studio practice and critical inquiry. The year-long process is overseen by Art faculty, and culminates in this exhibition.

• More about the Senior Exhibition 2010

Steve Mazlin, a neurologist by day, enters the world of 21st century amateur astrophotography by night, creating images of deep space objects including galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters. He recently became a partner in Star Shadows Remote Observatory, which operates out of New Mexico, and through an arrangement with UNC Chapel Hill, also operates out of a professional installation in Chile (CTIO).Mazlin’s images have appeared in Sky & Telescope, Sky Watch, Beautiful Universe, GEO International, as well as the Holy Grail of astrophotographyers: the Astronomy Picture of the Day (link to ) website .

Visit Dr. Mazlin’s website at

Read more.

Thursday, February, 25, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. in Olin 104

Joel M. Babb, who’s work is featured in the current exhibition The Process Revealed, will discuss his approach to utilizing color based on years of research and practice.

Babb graduated in Art History from Princeton in 1969, studied with George Segal and George Ortman and spent a year in Munich and Rome before going to Boston to get an MFA from the Museum School and Tufts. There his style changed from abstraction to a contemporary realism. He has exhibited with Vose Galleries and Gallery Naga in Boston, Sherry French, Gerold Wunderlich, The National Academy in New York City, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Portland Museum of Art, the Ogunquit Museum in Maine, Arnot Art Museum, Frost Gully Gallery, Trudy Labell Fine Arts in Florida, and was the subject of a major exhibition at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art (link to )