Since its founding in 1996, Lewiston’s Maine Museum of Innovation, Labor, and Learning (formerly Museum L/A) has engaged in a decades-long educational partnership with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. That’s no surprise, given that the museum called the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Mill Complex home for the last 30 years.

In recognition of that relationship, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is making a $75,000 gift to Maine MILL’s new, stand-alone building, which opens June 27. Visitors to the new museum at 1 Beech St. — housed in another mill, most recently known as the Camden Yarns Mill — will enter through the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Welcome Center.

“We are delighted to partner with Maine MILL as it starts a new chapter in its new home,â€� said ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Garry W. Jenkins. “Both institutions share a commitment to education and access that makes this collaboration a perfect fit. And we love the thought that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will be one part of the rich and complex Lewiston story that guests from around the country and the world will learn about during their visit to Maine MILL.â€�

The Maine MILL gift is the most recent example of the college’s investment in the region. Since Rachel Ferrante ’10 joined the museum in 2021 as executive director, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-Maine MILL partnership has only expanded.

“ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is an enormous asset for Lewiston, as Lewiston is an enormous asset for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� Ferrante said. “We’re thrilled that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is deeply invested in the partnership with Maine MILL and connection to Lewiston.â€�

This partnership reinforces ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ longstanding and deep commitment to Lewiston. For decades, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships has brought campus and community together to enrich the learning experience for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students and the lives of our neighbors in Lewiston and Auburn.

“At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, we examine what it really means to join — as equal participants — within a community’s self-led work, however the community is defining it,â€� says Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center. “This goes beyond superficial forms of place-based engagement. It’s not just, ‘We’re located here so let’s get involved.’ We are committed to doing the deep listening to understand what is really happening in the community and how we might join the community’s work. And we’ve tried to model that kind of accompaniment or presence over decades, which has fostered relationships of trust and accountability.â€�

The museum was founded in 1996 to preserve artifacts and stories from Lewiston-Auburn’s once-prosperous textile mill industry. When Associate Professor of History Joe Hall first took students to Maine MILL — then called Museum L-A — in 2003, there were weaving looms still threaded and covered with “dust fiber hanging like Spanish moss from trees,â€� Hall said. They sat exactly where they had been when the mill was operating. He quickly realized how valuable it was for students to physically observe the industries they were learning about in his courses. It was a way, he said, to show that history doesn’t just happen “in some imaginary cloud world.â€� 

Not long after, trips to the museum became a regular part of Hall’s “U.S. Environmental Historyâ€� course. Numerous other ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty have also brought their students to the museum to supplement courses on everything from economics to Japanese textiles to Francophone history. 

“It’s been great as a way of grounding their learning, but also showing what it is that people here want to teach other people,â€� Hall said.

Students appreciate, Hall said, that the museum is led by a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ graduate. Ferrante oversaw the 2023 rebranding to Maine MILL, a name that aligns more closely with the museum’s subject matter and reflects the institution’s goal to tell more wide-ranging stories from the region. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty have supported that effort; Associate Professor of Sociology Marcelle Medford, for example, led an extensive project collecting oral histories from Black Mainers, now included in the museum’s collection.

“We are focused on making sure that as a community history museum, we are telling the broadest version of our area’s history,â€� Ferrante says. “That also means what history has looked like here over the last 20 or 30 years since the mills have closed. Of course, Black voices have been incredibly important before that time, but are a huge part of Lewiston’s more recent history. Having that represented in the collection felt like a critical missing piece.â€�

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ also connects with the museum through student interns, like Tristan Seavey ’26 of Calais, Maine, who has interned at Maine MILL off and on since his first year on campus. During his last Short Term at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he completed a full-time internship at the museum funded through the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. A double major in history and German, Seavey is also Hall’s student. 

As an intern, Seavey has led museum tours, done archival and operations work, helped with event planning, and 3D-scanned the gallery. He developed a passion for telling stories about people who have been underrepresented in popular history, inspired by Ferrante and Hall’s work. 

The internship “changed the way that I approach history,â€� Seavey said. “Before ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and before working at Maine MILL, it was really just listing off dates and doing timelines. But working with Rachel and also working with Joe and doing my own research, I’ve really had this new perspective on how we tell history in a compelling way.â€�

Seavey’s senior thesis, which Hall advised, retraced the steps of a Black family living in his hometown of Calais in the mid-19th century, ultimately arguing that the impact of the Black community on that area was more important than previously discussed.

Hall watched as Seavey applied what he was learning at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to work that needed to be done in the community, and then returned to the classroom, enriched by the experience. “It was really helpful to see how one person can use what they learn to offer new lessons to others,â€� Hall said.

Additional partnerships between ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Maine MILL include the museum’s annual fundraiser, Soirée en Blanc. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dining, Conferences, and Campus Events handles catering for the events, and many ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dining staff members are from Lewiston-Auburn, Ferrante said, turning the fundraisers into full-circle moments.

“This museum is their museum, and what excites me is that they are helping make their own museum possible,� she said.

This year’s Soirée en Blanc will be held in the new museum building on Friday, June 26, the evening before the museum officially opens, meaning that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will have a hand in welcoming the public to the new space for the first time. 

“One of the things that makes this place so special is the relationships and the community that exists here,â€� Ferrante said. “It’s a huge part of what drives what we do and why we do it and who we do it for.â€� 

With the breadth of Maine’s four seasons, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ campus is ever-changing throughout the year. 

But, even in the most extreme weather, a few things always remain the same — such as the Adirondack chairs dotting the Historic Quad. They stay put through winter blizzards, under colorful fall foliage, and during summer heat, like reliable friends waiting for company.

For Mia Wetzel ’26 of Mashpee, Mass., those chairs evoke a feeling of community representative of her ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ experience. That’s why the biochemistry major, with a concentration in art and visual culture,  chose to depict them in her design for this year’s ivy stone, which features two empty Adirondack chairs surrounded by a cascade of falling leaves.

“The fact that they’re empty, it’s like: There’s an open chair, you never know who you’re going to meet, what’s going to happen,â€� Wetzel said. 

Since 1878, it’s been tradition for a graduating student to design a decorative stone to represent their class year. Any senior can submit an idea, and members of the senior class vote on the final design. On May 26, Wetzel’s stone joined the ranks of more than 130 stones dotting buildings around campus. In keeping with campus tradition, she helped Ron Tardif, a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Facility Services mason, install the stone on the southeast side of Pettengill Hall. 

Though its design depicts an opportunity for new beginnings, the stone itself reflects not only the departure of the Class of 2026 but also the end of an era for Tardif, who has worked at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ since 2016. He is retiring later this year, making Wetzel’s stone the last ivy stone he will install.

“I feel blessed to have this job,â€� Tardif said. “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is a generous employer. To be able to interact with the students is just one benefit. We have some really good kids here, and I enjoyed installing the ivy stones with them.â€�

For her design, Wetzel wanted to depict something that was personal but also specific to the Class of 2026. She remembered how, arriving at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2022, she realized that her class would be the first since the COVID-19 pandemic to have a fully in-person campus experience.

“That’s when everything started returning to normal,â€� Wetzel said. “I used that as my inspiration — the idea of connection, reconnection, after being isolated or socially distanced.â€�

The Adirondack chairs came to mind as a fitting symbol of on-campus community. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ purchased the chairs in 2020 as a means to encourage socially distanced and safe ways to be together,  so they have always been a feature of Wetzel’s ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. She intentionally included two chairs in her design, representing the inherent connection in being a pair.

As for the personal side of the artwork, Wetzel arrived at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ ready to slow down and form deep connections after moving twice during high school — from Zimbabwe to the U.S., then from the U.S. to Germany — for her dad’s work with the Foreign Service. The chairs, with their wide, inviting seats and spacious arms, reflect the relationships she created on campus, including with her professors, who she said have been incredibly supportive, and friends she met through academics and extracurricular activities. Wetzel was the president of the Asian Students Association for two years, a violinist with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Orchestra, a Student Academic Support Center tutor, and, most recently, an emergency medical technician with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ EMS.

“Sometimes the people you connect the most with are the people you least expected to,â€� Wetzel said. “That’s part of what drew me to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, knowing that there was a friendly atmosphere and that people can talk to whoever, and you might find a connection.â€�

When Josiah Lee Johnson ’29 visited ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as a high school student, he wasn’t sure what it would be like to leave New York City and attend a school that might be so different from his home. Here for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Beginnings, he attended the cultural showcase co-hosted by the Caribbean Student Association (CSA) and Raíces Unidas. While he might have been considering several colleges when the showcase began, it was a decisive event.  

“When the host pulled me onto the stage, the sudden shift from spectator to participant transformed my experience,â€� Johnson said. “Hearing that roar of the crowd wasn’t just a warm welcome, it was an instinctive confirmation that I wouldn’t have to marginalize my own identity to fit in. In that moment of collective energy, the abstract idea of ‘community’ became a tangible reality, and I knew I had found my place.â€�

Johnson chose ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, and this year he found himself back on stage as a first-year student. He was one of more than 60 performers in the showcase which highlights and celebrates  — through performance — diverse cultures of the Caribbean and Latin American students at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. This year’s showcase on April 17 was entitled “Here to Stay: Rhythms that Raised Us,â€� which points to both the past and future cultural influence of Latine and Caribbean cultures in the United States and at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. In addition to traditional dances, there were also contemporary dances, singers, and performances from collaborating groups 2Beats, Bollywood Dance Team, and the Deansmen. Samba Viva, a Brazilian samba ensemble based in Boston, joined the performance. 

Andrea Alfonzo ’27 of Long Island City, N.Y., was deeply involved with this year’s production, both backstage and onstage. A biology major with a dance minor, Alfonzo worked alongside other members of CSA and Raíces Unidas to coordinate the evening of entertainment and community. 

“This showcase has always been incredibly impactful for our community because it gives us the opportunity to express a part of ourselves that we often don’t get to share in other spaces,� Alfonzo said.

Aaron Martinez ’26 of New York City (with family from Ecuador and Puerto Rico) was invited to participate in the showcase during his first year at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, as a model for one of the Carnival costumes. 

“That year somebody was organizing a dance and they didn’t really have that many people. I was like, ‘Okay, I can do it. I know how to move a little bit. Why not?’” 

Before he knew it, he found himself even more involved.

Martinez stepped up as a leader his sophomore year and helped bring a new generation of students to the organization and the showcase. He will graduate this semester with minors in dance and Latin American & Latinx Studies. (He also just completed his thesis for his economics major.)

For some students involved in this year’s showcase, there was a clear urgency to claim space and celebrate culture. 

“I felt a deep responsibility to contribute a role that is both personal and political,â€� Johnson said. “We currently live in a political climate where the rights of immigrants and people of color are under constant scrutiny and support systems are being dismantled. That being said, I wanted my performance to be a deliberate act of reclamation.â€� 

Acknowledging that everything is political, Martinez noted the celebratory elements of the cultural showcase. “It felt amazing to be able to share and spread the message in a way that didn’t feel super political,â€� Martinez said. “It felt like more of a celebration of our culture than a fight or a struggle. I think a lot of the times what’s highlighted is the struggle, but I think there’s a lot to say about the resistance being joy. Joy is resistance.â€�

Alfonzo expressed a similar sentiment, as she looked back at the success of the show that she helped bring together.   

“I feel like a big part of the showcase is bringing joy to each other and celebrating together. That’s my main takeaway,â€� Alfonzo said. “‘Here to stay’ is a way of saying that we belong, that we matter, that we deserve to be here and to stay and to celebrate and to keep showing our cultures and to be proud of them.â€�

Over the past year, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ 11 graduating studio art and visual culture students have spent countless hours working in their own favored media, each creating intricate paintings, drawings, photography, or sculptures for their thesis projects. 

On April 17, they’ll step outside of their Olin Arts Center studios to share their work with the world as At the Table: Senior Thesis Exhibition 2026 opens at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art.

Creating the annual senior thesis exhibition is a big task, but one that brings students, faculty, and staff together in collaboration. The students write in-depth artist statements, sign contracts with the museum, and work with Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture and Lead Preparator at the museum Michel Droge to learn about framing and physically displaying their works.

“Art school students across the country are lucky if they get a week-long exhibition for their senior thesis work,â€� says Museum of Art Director Carrie Cushman. “A six-week exhibition in a professional museum is a truly remarkable opportunity for the students at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ — an opportunity that they live up to with equal parts professionalism and ambition. For our part, hosting the show is a highlight of the year as a time when the community gathers together to celebrate and learn from our students.â€�

The process takes place across two semesters; the fall course, taught by Professor of Art and Visual Culture Cat Balco, focuses primarily on rigorous research into various artistic practices, idea development, and the first stages of physically creating the art. That research includes not only learning about specific materials but also exploring how these materials are represented across various sociopolitical and cultural contexts.

The winter course, taught by Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Carolina González Valencia says, is about synthesizing those ideas into exhibition-ready works. 

“We as artists engage in research in many different ways,� González Valencia says.

The entire year-long process is intense, requiring students to leap from a place of boundless possibility and uncertainty to physical creation, with the willingness to redirect their paths when something isn’t working.

“I have a student this semester who is always asking, ‘But how do I know that this will work?’� González Valencia says. “I always tell her, ‘You never know,’ which is very scary, but very exciting. Seeing them struggle with the uncertainty is very beautiful because it’s in that uncertainty that they start finding themselves, finding their voice and trusting it to start building their ideas.�

The chance to display their work in a museum, which ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ offers its graduating studio art students each year, is a fantastic opportunity, González Valencia says.

“That’s something very, very beautiful — that the students get to experience what it’s like to actually put it out there and have people experience it and have their own meaning about it,â€� González Valencia says.

The students worked together to brainstorm the name of the exhibition, which conveys their belief that each artist, with their unique collection of work, deserves to have their ideas heard — to have a seat At the Table. The exhibition opens with a reception at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art on April 17 at 5 p.m. and will remain on display through May 30. Below, learn more about each student’s work, drawn from their artist statements.

Sam Bunar

With her charcoal drawings, Sam Bunar of Harwich, Mass., explores the way that releasing control can lead to artistic expression. She interrogates the self and the cosmos, and how the two interact, with self-portraits portraying her reflected in a mirror, surrounded by cosmic patterns.

“I draw inspiration from the inherently complex and uncontrollable nature of the cosmos, inexplainable forces that humans may never completely understand, yet remain profoundly beautiful,� Bunar writes. “In their vastness, they remind us of the infinitesimal scale of our existence within the boundless universe.�

The loose quality of charcoal drawing reflects this idea of relinquishing control, which Bunar wrestled with in her personal life after a physical injury forced her to release her all-encompassing identity as a soccer player. A double major in art and visual culture and physics, Bunar’s scientific interests also inform her work.

“I tell a story about embracing chaos as I visualize an accent toward metaphysical weightlessness and serenity. It is a conscious state of liberation that allows for intrinsic growth, unhindered by the need to control every parameter and outcome in life. My individual pieces come together to model the cyclic nature of my obsession, perfectionism, and fear of the uncontrollable.â€� 

Audrey Esteves

Audrey Esteves of Cranford, N.J., explores sleep — as a place of rest and warmth and also as a receptacle for exploring memory — through oil painting. She mixes wet and dry oil painting techniques to allow “figures and spaces to emerge� in layers of subtle, hazy definition.

“My body of work strives to imagine recurring moments of rest, wherein memory and meaning are distorted by darkness and lucidity,� Esteves writes. “I want to find warmth in what is unknown and unseen — in what happens when the light goes out.�

A double major in art and visual culture and American studies, Esteves looks to Expressionism and the Italian medieval and early Renaissance periods for inspiration about sleep’s eerie qualities and the narratives and images that the brain imagines in sleep.

“I employ repetition when painting these intimate moments of everyday life, skewing the perspective of sleeping figures, their bedrooms and their objects. This process helps me to answer the questions my body and brain have about what happens in the dark — both within dreams, and the liminal moments between sleep and consciousness.â€� 

Jeremy Felton

With his ceramic works, both art and vessel, Jeremy Felton of Sebastopol, Calif., interrogates the value of a piece.

“Each piece can and should be used, but I think of the visual and conceptual components of my work as valuable in themselves, beyond any functional enhancement,� Felton writes.

Felton, a double major in art and visual studies and philosophy, decorates his pieces with clay, wood, and rocks collected in Maine, imbuing each work with a sense of place. He completes the pieces in a kiln with soda firing, a process in which the draft of the kiln pulls a vapor of sodium carbonate across the pots, leaving dramatic marks of flames across the works.

“Raw clay is exposed when flame is blocked, each surface dictated by its context in the kiln. Many pieces are designed around this process — a ewer and its stand, or a teapot and its cups — each aspect working as negative or subject for its counterpart; a story only revealed when they’re separated.â€�

Aratrika Ghosh

Aratrika Ghosh of Mumbai, India, explores memory, distance, and culture by painting on top of saree — also known as “sariâ€� — garments. Her piece in the exhibition features a harmonium painted across her grandmother’s white, pleated saree, exploring her now fading memory of the instrument she was trained in for 10 years. She paints from memory instead of photographs, employing various degrees of opacity and completion across her works to further illuminate the incompleteness of memory.

“The folds disrupt the image, partially obscuring it, paralleling my fading tactile memory of playing the instrument,� Ghosh, a double major in art and visual culture and mathematics, writes. “What once lived in muscle memory now exists as visual memory — fragmented, softened, and mediated through distance.�

An international student living far from her family, Ghosh uses her artistry to connect with her ancestors and culture, participating in the Bengali tradition of passing sarees down through generations.

“Across my practice, I use inherited textiles to bridge physical separation and emotional continuity. By layering my own memories onto fabrics that pre-date me, I create a dialogue between past and present, absence and presence, inheritance and authorship. The work becomes both an act of preservation and an acknowledgment of loss: a recognition that memory, like fabric, stretches, folds, and inevitably changes with time.�

Mia Goodwin

Mia Goodwin of Freeport, Maine, also explores memory through oil painting. She creates paintings, inspired by her grandfather’s photographs made on film, on large canvases that require bodily movement, mimicking the way that one moves through memories. 

“These photographs encapsulate familial memories, ones that my memory doesn’t directly live in, but still is physically and generationally tied to,� Goodwin writes. “Although these moments predate my own lived experience, they have been passed down through stories, images, and emotional inheritance, allowing them to feel both distant and deeply familiar.�

Playing with color, washes, and empty space, Goodwin, a double major in psychology and art and visual culture, explores how memory takes shape and is warped by time and distance.

“I hope my paintings give a feeling of lost time and space. These thinned areas of paint act as visual pauses, mimicking the moments memory cannot fully retrieve. Ultimately, the absence becomes just as meaningful as what is rendered. I hope they allow the onlooker to reflect on what was lost through time. My paintings function as sites of collective reflection, inviting viewers to project their own histories, absences, and emotional memories into the work.�

Ella Hannaford

In her self-portrait photography, Ella Hannaford of South Portland, Maine, is both art and artist. She photographs herself on the coast of Maine, where she grew up, incorporating elements of reflection such as mirrored tiles placed across her face in order to blur the lines between body and landscape. 

“I engage self-portraiture and performance as methods capable of confronting the boundaries of the body and landscape — where a body reads as terrain or a landscape behaves like a portrait,� Hannaford writes. “Here, looking becomes implicated, carrying intimacy and scrutiny at once.�

She primarily photographs during Maine’s off-season, challenging notions of how the coastline is defined and exploring “how a landscape shifts once it is no longer performing itself.�

“Control over my image is not given but produced through creative and embodied risk. Printing large-scale extends that negotiation outward, inviting a physical encounter in which viewers must register their own looking and position in relation to the image. The exchange holds intimacy and distance, recognition and uncertainty — held in suspension.�

Bissan Kablawi

With her mixed-media works combining oil painting, threadwork, sewing, fabric, gelatine, and layered surfaces, Bissan Kablawi of London expands the boundaries of tatreez, the centuries-old practice of Palestinian embroidery that she learned from her grandmother Badriyeh. 

Kablawi stitches and sews directly onto canvas and embroiders over oil paintings, “creating a dialogue between heritage and contemporary interdisciplinary studio practices,� she writes. “In the repetitive act of stitching, a historically feminised and unrecognised form of labour, I mirror and induct myself into the legacy of Palestinian women preserving culture and identity in diaspora.�

Kablawi explores the tension of diaspora, weaving symbols representative of traditional Palestine among fractured images representing her memory and imagination of Palestine. The slow nature of embroidery, she writes, is an “act of care, resistance, and identity-making.�

“My cultural preservation work represents more than tradition; it is testimony to our existence, perpetual and immemorial. In stitching, painting, and reimagining Palestinian art practices, I join Palestinian artists whose work asserts our presence and rejects our collective erasure.â€� 

Simon Klompus

In his pen drawings, Simon Klompus of Williamstown, Mass., combines anatomically accurate depictions of bones from different species to highlight the elements that unite all biological creatures.

“While we strive for fulfillment, financial success, and material goods, we often forget the raw, biological fragility that underlies and ties all organic things together,� Klompus writes. “I create drawings that allow me to play with the composition of differing species, often creating something illogical and awkward, though occasionally shockingly plausible.�

Through this “creative paleontology� practice, Klompus begins by creating drawings exploring each animal’s bones individually, then randomly selecting a group of the drawings and assembling them.

“The build up of something semi permanent through the use of thousands of small fine lines is reminiscent of our bodies’ construction. When viewed from further back, the intricacy disappears until what is left is form and shadow. Yet upon closer viewing, the form’s creation is nothing more than a great many lines.â€�

Qwynn Kobertz

Qwynn Kobertz of Framingham, Mass., uses coding and 3D printing to create interactive, sculptural, and participatory games. Kobertz’s work asks questions about how we interact with technology such as, “Do we all live in a hyperrealistic computer simulation? Does it even matter if we do?�

The 3D-printed sculptures are based on ecological features such as countershading, a color pattern animals use to blend into their surroundings. Kobertz’ thesis project is an interactive game in which participants stand in front of a projected live video of themselves and must move their body to fit into continuously changing outlines superimposed over the video, with at least 70% accuracy to advance to the next outline.

“In playing or engaging with the projector screen in some way, participants are moving around in physical space, but their behavior is being dictated by or following rules conceived in the land of ones and zeros. The ecology inspired sculptures enter into the same play area as the participant, and in doing so complete their lifecycle from digital conception to physical sculpture and then finally being brought back into a semi digital space by the player.�

Maia Schifman

Maia Schifman of Minneapolis, a double major in biochemistry and art and visual culture, crafts stoneware pieces from hand, forgoing a pottery wheel to instead meticulously pinch and smooth the pieces into shape.

“Stoneware is durable but not indestructible,� Schifman writes. “I like the idea of creating something with materials that will last centuries, like archeological findings displayed in museums hundreds, sometimes thousands of years after their original owners’ lifetimes.�

Schifman’s pieces reflect the textures and forms of nature, using Japanese glazes like celadon and shino that draw inspiration from nature. 

“These forms are practical containers to hold food and drink, but the goblet, or chalice, has a spiritual meaning as well: symbolically, the chalice represents the deep feminine capacity to hold complexity, intuition, and emotion. It is a vessel in which transformation occurs and is the physical embodiment of the part of the psyche that holds and nurtures creative and transformative energy.�

Grace Thomas

Grace Thomas of Bethesda, Md., creates tunnel books, crafted from a series of cut-paper panels placed atop each other to create an optical illusion of depth, painted with gouache. In her pieces, Thomas compares societal behaviors, such as excessive screen time, to cannibalism to evoke a sense of discomfort and disgust, reflecting on how we consume and are consumed.  

“The intense reaction and curiosity cannibalism brings out of people allows me to call attention to situations and experiences we have intense feelings for but have been numbed to,� Thomas writes. “These range from hegemonic systems, to interactions with material culture, to societal norms, and to the consuming nature of my own emotional and mental states, which I translate into images.�

Thomas draws inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki, beloved Japanese filmmaker of such animated classics as My Neighbor Totoro and co-founder of Studio Ghibli.

“I am not interested in creating gory or disturbing images,� Thomas writes. “Rather, I want to draw my viewer into my work through bright and interesting colors and then allow them the space to take in all the details.�

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Theater’s production of Everybody sold out every performance at Gannett Theater last week — waitlists at the door, eager audience members finding out they’d gotten seats  five minutes before curtain — and the room earned that anticipatory urgency. Associate Professor of  Theater Courtney Smith, the scenic and projections designer, built a world that wrapped around you rather than played in front of you. It was immersive and a little disorienting, in exactly the right way.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2017 play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, takes a risky leap of faith in inviting its cast into a game of role swapping. Before each performance, the cast members playing “Somebodyâ€� draw lots to decide who plays Friendship, Cousin, Kinship, Stuff, Everybody. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ production also added a few other roles to the lottery, Strength, Beauty, Mind and Senses.

All these different roles, memorized by everyone and shared by the whole cast, could lead to dozens of different possible versions in any given production. The performance you witnessed would have been the only time it happened exactly that way.

Director and Associate Professor of Theater Tim Dugan shaped an ensemble that held that strangeness without flinching. For Adam Joseph (AJ) Matos ’26 of Springfield, N.J., and Noah Skinner ’26 of Sugar Land, Texas, the play was part of their senior theses, working with a cast that had to be ready for anything. As lighting designer, Skinner lit a world that had to feel ancient and urgent at once. There were many big questions on hand, including the nightly guessing game of who would play who? The answer? Everybody.

The cast includes: Mo Al-Jabry ’28, Graham Austin ’28, Aidan Bergeron ’27, Julian Boutin ’28, Jack Fisher ’29, Connor Gerraughty ’26, Josie Kim ’27, Jenny Liu ’29, Emily Maffezzoli ’29, Samantha Manogue ’26, Ruby Marden ’27, AJ Matos ’26, and Patrick Stronski ’27.

The following were also involved in the production: Costume Designer & Director — Rebecca Armstrong; Associate Costume Designer — Marcel Nagy ’28; Sound Designer — Emily Duncan Wilson (Brandow Family Fund Guest Artist); Associate Directors — Kate Norry ’28, Nicole Rossilli ’27, Elaine Wang ’27; Stage Manager — Sarah McOsker ’28; Associate Stage Managers — Queenie Tsang ’28, Colin Kenny ’28; and Associate Projections Designer — Evan Cox ’26.

During the first-ever ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Curates event in March, faculty, staff, and students, and President Garry W. Jenkins, became “curatorsâ€� as they gathered to select a new addition to the Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Carrie Cushman, director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art, devised the idea for the event, which she hopes will be the first of many. 

“This program enabled us to start a conversation with the community about what it means to be a collecting institution in the 21st century,â€� Cushman said. “We were able to educate students, faculty, and staff on the strengths of our own collection and to build communal investment in its future.â€� 

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Curates event was centered around the museum’s recent exhibition Shellburne Thurber: Full Circle, which ran from October 2025 to March. Curated by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art Assistant Curator Samantha Sigmon, in collaboration with Thurber, the exhibition featured works from across the New England-based Thurber’s decades-long career as a photographer, primarily capturing images of homes and the people who occupy them.

“Thurber is known for crafting photographs of interior spaces that capture people’s personalities and presence,â€� Sigmon said.

Prior to the launch of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Curates, museum staff had selected three works  — respectively titled “Phantom Limb: My Dresser Top at Night,â€� “Newtonville, MA: Blue Couch with Multiple Portraits of Freud,â€� and “Self Portrait Sitting on the Porch in New Hampshireâ€� —  from the exhibition for potential acquisition, made possible by the Barbara Morris Goodbody Collection Endowment Fund, to the museum’s collection of 8,000-plus objects. But, they planned to purchase just one work — and that’s where the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community came in. Cushman and Sigmon invited faculty, staff, and students to the museum for an evening to tour the exhibition and vote on which work they should select. 

“Everyone was visibly excited to take part in voting and hearing more about the artist and each of the three works,â€� Sigmon said. “The experience truly enlivened our galleries. I’m thrilled that we could lift the curtain regarding how our collections are built and include our audience in such an integral museum responsibility.â€�

Attendees were eager to learn more about the museum and offer their input on the selected photographs.

“ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Curates was an inspiring and creative way to connect the campus community with the art museum while showcasing its exhibitions,â€� said Krystie Wilfong, associate college librarian for collection management and scholarly communications. “Hearing Samantha speak about the identified works offered a fascinating behind-the-scenes perspective.â€�

The event was an opportunity to renew interest in the museum’s permanent collection specifically, while also “demonstrating accountabilityâ€� to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community, Cushman explained. 

“I appreciated Carrie’s explanation that events like ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Curates were meant to be part of an intervention in the colonial practices that had shaped art collecting,â€� said Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Prof of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies.

Though each piece received a similar number of votes, attendees ultimately selected Thurber’s “Self Portrait Sitting on the Porch in New Hampshire.�

“Knowing that an artwork I voted for will become part of the permanent collection makes the experience feel especially meaningful,” Wilfong said.

Featuring the photographer herself on a porch, harshly lit by a bright sun, the photo is distinctively different from Thurber’s usual compositions of interior spaces.

“The artist sits on the porch of her family lakehouse, a place incredibly entangled with her life and work. … She is not looking directly at the camera, and we see her in an everyday moment that captures her in a way a more polished portrait might not,â€� Sigmon said. “To me, it is as if we are right there next to Thurber in mid-discussion. Thurber’s power to transport us into the photograph really draws people in.â€�

“Self Portrait Sitting on the Porch in New Hampshire� nicely complements the museum’s preexisting repertoire of artist self-portraits and contemporary photography, Sigmon said. It’s also a unique holding from Thurber, who has rarely displayed her portraits of friends, family, and herself despite capturing many throughout her career.

“It was an honor to display this work and her other portraits at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art,â€� Sigmon said. “As the curator, I love that we get to keep a photograph that sets us apart from her previous exhibitions elsewhere.â€�

Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Theater Martin E. Andrucki, a beloved and brilliant teacher and scholar who secured a seat at the liberal arts table for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater, died Feb. 8, 2026, at age 80. A faculty member for 47 years, Andrucki was among the longest-serving ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professors in the college’s history.

Raised in the Bronx, N.Y., Andrucki earned a bachelor’s degree in English, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Columbia University and a doctoral degree in English from Harvard University. 

Andrucki’s arrival at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for the 1974–75 academic year coincided with theater becoming a major for the first time. Yet the department, which at the time housed both theater and rhetoric, was at a low point due to retirements and departures. “It was on the verge of expiring,â€� recalled Andrucki in 2021. Some at the college were openly questioning the legitimacy of theater as a liberal arts discipline. 

As with other young professors who joined ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in the 1970s and 1980s and helped to build academic programs, Andrucki arrived brimming with gusto; an early student described him as bringing “a fierce intellect and a wise-ass New York City sense of humorâ€� to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The task before him 50 years ago, Andrucki recalled, was to “create a curriculum that emphasized literature and theory and producing serious drama on our stages. We wanted our majors to be broadly educated in theater and drama and to see theater as one of the liberal arts.�

During retirement events in 2021, proof of his success resounded in the words of theater alumni. Theater at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ “equipped me with hands-on experiences I apply nearly every day in life,â€� recalled Bobbi Bell Birkemeier ’78. “Time management and making deadlines, thinking quickly on one’s feet, improvisation, how to take criticism and direction in a positive fashion, how to direct and delegate, and how to ‘play nicely with others’ in working collaboratively.â€�

And from his first days on campus, his students felt Andrucki’s intellect and generosity, his lofty standards coupled with a belief in their potential for success. “Marty was completely invested in our work in the classroom and onstage,� Sarah Pearson ’75 said in 2021. “Marty made me believe that anything was possible, and his confidence in me — in all of us — was invaluable and gave me the boost I needed to face the next stage of life.�

“He always seemed to focus on the big picture, the big idea, if you will. Plot. Character. Thought. Diction. Music and spectacle,â€� said James Lapan ’86. For Amanda San Roman ’17, Andrucki was a “steady and grounding force in my ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ experience. His subtle humor, wealth of intelligence, and supportive nature never went unnoticed by anyone he interacted with.â€�

Andrucki rose swiftly through the academic ranks. In 1975, he was promoted to assistant professor and that year began his decades-long service as department chair. He earned tenure in 1983, was promoted to full professor in 1990, and in 2001 was appointed to a Dana Professorship, one of the most prestigious faculty honors at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Though ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater was ripe for renewal in the mid-1970s, Andrucki was building on a firm foundation. Two years before his arrival, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ had named its theater on College Street in honor of Lavinia Miriam Schaeffer, who retired in 1972 after leading the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater program since 1938.

As Andrucki noted in 2021, Schaeffer was a champion of the Little Theater Movement that emerged in the early 1900s in the U.S., which emphasized authenticity over grandiosity, “aiming to produce challenging drama in an intimate atmosphere,� he said. The vibe always resonated with Andrucki. “Let’s remember Lavinia and those values as we move ahead,� he said in 2021.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he taught courses on theater history, dramatic literature, directing, and playwriting. He directed more than 50 theatrical productions at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, in the U.S., and abroad. His directing ranged widely: classical and Shakespearean works such as Antigone, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; European modern and political theater including Three Sisters, Endgame, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle; American and contemporary plays such as Bus Stop, The Skin of Our Teeth, Eurydice, and Love/Sick; as well as original and experimental projects including his own Marie and the Nutcracker and the radio-play production Radio Waves. 

His can-do spirit inspired his students. In 1981, he scoured local junkyards to find the right prop for a production of Sam Shepard’s The Unseen Hand: a busted-up 1957 Ford sedan, hauled straight into the Schaeffer Theatre carpentry shop, where Andrucki chose to stage the avant-garde play.

Every other Short Term from 1999 to 2019, Andrucki and Kati Vecsey, senior lecturer in theater, led students to Budapest and Prague for the course “Central European Theater and Film,� the college’s longest-running off-campus Short Term program. “And yes, Marty learned to speak and read Hungarian,� said Vecsey, a Hungarian herself, noting the difficulty that English speakers have with the language.

“Marty and I watched many great, and many boring, theater productions together over the years,� Vecsey said. “When we would go to the theater, Marty always made sure to get an aisle seat, to make sure he had a quick way to escape if the show was unbearable.�

Learning Hungarian was just another example of Andrucki’s smarts, streetwise and otherwise. “There was this mysterious skill that fired his intellectual life,� Vecsey said, “a capacity to explore new territories without forgetting the old ones.� Andrucki brought “profound knowledge, wisdom, and humor into every room [he] entered, both as a director and as a professor,� said Maddy Shmalo ’19.

While he could be the smartest person in the room, Andrucki was often the most welcoming. “He seemed an untouchable mad genius to me at times, but at the same time a friend to sit and shoot the breeze with,� Chuck Richardson ’86 said during the 2021 retirement celebration.

A course with Andrucki, recalled writer Elizabeth Strout ’77 during a 2019 visit to campus, was not only one of her favorites, but also influenced her writing as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fiction. In the course, Andrucki guided his students through plays by classic American playwrights like Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. “He loved those people so much that I loved them,â€� Strout said. 

From reading the plays, Strout learned a valuable lesson about writing authentic dialogue. 

“When you write dialogue in a story or a novel, there has to be a translation between what people are actually saying to the page. You can’t write what people are actually saying, because it’s too boring. You’ve got to translate it to the page in a way that sounds authentic.�

In 1979, Andrucki was named a Mellon Fellow to conduct research into the teaching of theater. In 1987 he joined a directors’ forum at Columbia University, doing advanced studies with Liviu Ciulei, Lee Breuer, Adrian Hall, and others. He was a professor of English at the Harvard Summer School from 1993 to 1996. In 2002, he earned a Fulbright Scholar award for research in Hungary.

He wrote four plays, including Manny’s War. Staged at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2000 in collaboration with The Public Theatre of Lewiston, the play helped a local man, Murray Schwartz, reconcile his feelings of failure as a World War II soldier.

Schwartz, like Andrucki, was a New Yorker transplanted to Maine. He had headed to war with pride as an avenging Jew, and earned a Combat Infantry Badge, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts, but then felt shame when, as a prisoner of war captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he resorted to stealing a fellow prisoner’s bread. “The play caught the inner struggle,â€� Schwartz said. “Not the generals’ strategies, but the betrayal of the will.â€� 

As Andrucki wrote in ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Magazine, the play’s opening night at Schaeffer Theatre saw Murray Schwartz “watching his wartime pain, psychological and physical, played out on stage. He was surrounded by family and friends, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ people and Lewiston–Auburn citizens, a full house serving witness to a fellow American’s story.â€� The play was nominated for the New Play Award of the American Theatre Critics Association. 

Andrucki was a prolific writer. He wrote a series of 15 critical essays published by the Portland Stage Company on topics ranging from love and lying in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love to the handicap of virtue in Ted Tally’s Terra Nova. Among his hundreds of essays were 108 audience guides as a humanities scholar and dramaturge for two of Maine’s professional theaters, Portland Stage Company and The Public Theatre.

His writing appeared in Modern Philology, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, and The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. In the early 1990s, he was host and writer of Wide Angle, a weekly television show on Maine Public focused on Maine filmmakers. 

Not all his writing was theater-focused. In January 1981, he wrote a nostalgic essay recalling his childhood in the Bronx, and the memories of heating a home with coal, a fuel that made a resurgence during that historically cold winter. “It’s the childhood I really had,â€� he wrote. “For me, the rattling chute and dusty bin, the gritty ashcans and the pungent smell, are all redolent of New York in the last days of its unruffled pre-eminence, when televisions had round screens and no one had heard of the Sun Belt.â€� 

Heating with coal in his Maine home created a connection with his son, Max, then 3 years old, the young boy being dazzled by the heat that poured forth from a pile of black rocks, “a moment of connection between my childhood and his, a New York memory for my son from Maine.�

When he retired in 2021, Andrucki had served ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for 47 years, a tenure matched only by the late Karl Woodcock, professor of physics. To honor his career, the college’s black box theater was then named the Martin Andrucki Black Box Theater. 

Andrucki treated theater, and his teaching of theater, as both an intellectual discipline and a lived experience. “I teach because I like working in a profession and at a place where intellectual and aesthetic values prevail, where telling the truth, as one understands it, is the objective,� he said, during a retirement event. Drawing on the thinking of the late Princeton scholar and poet Michael Goldman, he went on to explain theater’s power to deliver “total education.�

For students, that meant discovering their “entire being rather than the intellect alone.â€� Theater, Andrucki said, “engages the whole self,â€� whether as actor, director, designer, or playwright, in the deepest sense of education: the Latin educare, to lead forth, to draw out what is already present and waiting to be revealed. “Which is what college is supposed to be all about.â€�

Carolina González Valencia, associate professor of art and visual culture, was tired of the ways that she saw representations of women like her mother on the screen. She was weary of the ways that she did not see her mother Beatriz on the screen. She hated seeing dynamic people like her mother — who is funny, creative, and opinionated — portrayed as quiet and humble domestic workers. Her mother has a “big personality,â€� and González Valencia, who is accustomed to using art and film to reach an audience, wanted to create a narrative that captured the complexity of her mother’s experience — as a domestic worker in the U.S., but also as a full and complex person. 

The result is How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps, which is in final post-production this month, and will be complete by the end of the year. A recent grant from Unbound Philanthropy gave the final push to bring the film toward completion. In its early stages, though, the biggest obstacle was finding how to authentically tell a story featuring domestic workers that felt new … and true. 

When González Valencia began the process, she sat down to talk to her mother, Beatriz Valencia, about her work. In these early conversations, she saw her mother shrink into a prescribed role. There didn’t seem room for her mother’s complexities to show up in a film when she approached it as a documentarian. She also was aware of “the complicated waters of having this power of representing another person.â€� González Valencia began really thinking about how to approach this project — meant to represent a domestic worker in the U.S. — collaboratively. 

González Valencia has frequently drawn on collaboration to access authenticity. In an installation in Beirut in 2018, she posted a question (“Are you afraid you’ll keep moving forever?â€�) on flyers that hung across the neighborhood where she was in residency and invited responses via text. Her 2019 “Video Postalesâ€� featured photographs and videos shared by artists to accompany lines from González Valencia’s writing. The result was surprising and beautiful — accessing something more true than she could have created alone. Tapping into her collaborative instinct as well as her background in performance art, González Valencia engaged her mother in some improvisatory exercises. 

“Let’s pretend I’m a journalist and I’m here to interview you and you’re a very, very accomplished person,â€� González Valencia said to her mother during the early stages of the film. “What do you want to be very accomplished at?â€� Her mother immediately responded that she would want to be a famous writer. What emerged was a central fictional character around which the collaborative genre-bending film took shape. 

As soon as the fictional writer emerged as a character that Beatriz played, her mother spoke more freely and truthfully to her daughter. “That fiction allowed us to be more honest,� González Valencia said.

González Valencia likely already knew that this film was going to push against boundaries. Documentary is a complicated genre that sometimes poses as simple or straightforward. 

“I was really interested in pushing what we can do as a documentary. It’s a form that needs to be questioned because it comes from a legacy of a very colonial way of looking at the ‘other.’â€� González Valencia was not traveling to a new land to represent another culture, but she knew that she could still fall into the patterns of misrepresentation if her mother was not empowered as a collaborator.

González Valencia notes that other artists have blurred genres — drawing from fiction to access the truth. Author Claudia Rankine, for example, is creating a sort of “collageâ€� in her writing, which has served as a model for González Valencia in her art. She also cites two Belgian filmmakers as influences: Chantal Akerman, who explored her own relationship with her mother in genre-blurring documentary films, and Agnès Varda, who blurred fiction and fact in her documentary films. Models like these allowed González Valencia to collaboratively create a documentary about her mother as a domestic worker, who is playing the role of a famous writer in parts of the film. 

As the semester wrapped up, González Valencia traveled to Splendor Omnia just outside of Mexico City, which she described as a dream studio. This is her first feature-length film, so the experience at Splendor Omnia will not only allow her to finish the film in a very high-end way, but it is also offering González Valencia an education. “It’s kind of like a school to me,â€� she said. 

How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps is the result of what happened when González Valencia and her mother dared to let go of the factual in favor of the truth. Of course deciding upon an approach for the film was only the very beginning. González Valencia’s project has received a slew of grant support. The production of the film has been made possible by support from sources that include the Sundance Film Festival, Abundant Futures Fund, and the LEF fund. The most recent $50,000 grant from Unbound Philanthropy enabled the film to move into post-production.

González Valencia has high hopes for the impact that her film can make. Primarily, she wants to contribute to ongoing conversations about narrative structure, domestic work, and immigrant rights. 

“I don’t believe in the single story,â€� González Valencia said. And when you are part of a group that gets represented by a superficial, single story, the stakes are higher. “I’m interested in being part of the conversation that complicates it, that shows that there is not one story.â€�

González Valencia and her mother are certainly pushing back against a single narrative created “from the perspective of pain and trauma.â€� González Valencia hopes that this film can show that “when we talk about immigrants, when we talk about domestic workers — we are people full of joy and laughter.â€� Especially now, she hopes the creativity and joy of the film — which includes a musical sequence —  will “help people to feel closer.â€� 

Shortly after Courtney Smith joined ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in the fall of 2024 as an associate professor of theater, he floated an idea for a production that was both over-the-top ambitious and absolute catnip to his colleague Sally Wood, a visiting lecturer in theater who was trying to decide what play to direct in the fall of 2025.

His suggestion would require help from an unprecedented number of campus partners and doing due diligence to be compliant with local, state and federal regulations — and test Schaeffer Theatre like nothing else in its 65-year history.  What Smith had said to Wood was: “You know what would be really awesome? Metamorphoses.â€�

Wood is used to pulling things off. When she’s not in the classroom or in one of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ performance spaces, she’s working with professional theaters and actors all over the region, including Portland Stage Company and the Theater at Monmouth. But the 1998 play, an omnibus interpretation of Ovid’s Greek mythology written by MacArthur Award winner Mary Zimmerman, has one foundational issue that makes it seriously complex to pull off. There’s just one set. But it’s a swimming pool. As much as Wood was thrilled that Smith was game for this project,  she said would not have suggested it. 

“Just because it’s too much to ask,� she said, sitting on the stage this fall as the dress rehearsal was about to get started for what would be a sold-out run of Metamorphoses encompassing Halloween weekend. “It’s so big.�

To do it right, you need to build a pool on a stage that can handle, say, 22,000 extra pounds in the form of water, as well as performers who don’t mind getting wet. That means lots of laundry. Major technical challenges. Because of all Metamorphoses requires to bring it to life, Wood said the play is rarely produced except in academic settings. It can be done without the full soaking experience, say with kiddie pools or some sort of reflective surface, she said. 

“And I think it still works. But there’s magic in the water. Real magic. When people see it, it’s like, they always remember it. And I don’t know of any other play that has that kind of stamp.â€�

+Click here to learn more about what Graham Austin was thinking during this scene

The actors are in and out of the pool throughout the play, with one character drowning in a shipwreck, along with his crew (ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dancers in this case), another conducting a seduction in the water, King Midas hanging out poolside with a drunken Bacchus, and even a god’s offspring undergoing modern therapy while spinning across its surface in a round pool toy. 

The first time Wood saw Metamorphoses was in New York at the Circle in the Square, with Zimmerman directing (the writer/director would go on to win a Tony for that production in 2002). “I remember just not breathing,� Wood said. “I’ll never forget just not breathing, for like an hour and a half, and being so sad when it was over.�

“I’m convinced it’s the water,� Wood added. “The play on the page is beautiful and really good, but there’s a trance. It’s crazy. There’s a literal transformation that happens once you get in there.�

And it happens for the actors. “I loved getting in that swimming pool,â€� said Graham Austin ’28 of Basalt, Colo., a likely theater major, who like the more than a dozen student cast members played multiple roles.  As Phaeton, son of Apollo, he is the character getting therapy in the pool, and Austin played the part with the gusto of Sean Penn as the iconic Spicoli of 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “It was a highlight of every time I did that play. Just overall, fantastic time in that thing.â€�

Engineering the pool into being was a major feat that started in August, about a week after another theater and production veteran, Mike Quinn, started his new role at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as technical director. He and Smith, who served as production manager, lighting and projections designer, and faculty advisor for students on the technical side of the production, are splitting some of the duties formerly performed by longtime ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater leader Michael Reidy before his recent retirement from his position as senior lecturer in theater and managing director of Theater and Dance.

A Maine native who spent 14 years in scenery construction and technical design in New York, Quinn had been working in Portland since 2023 with various venues and organizations.  At the dress rehearsal, Wood joked that Quinn might not have taken the job if he’d known what his first month would be like, but Quinn said he’d been warned. “He [Smith] said, you’re going to have to build a pool if you take the job.â€�  

Getting the specifications right  — no one wanted to capsize the Schaeffer stage — was key. In the end, the depth of the empty pool was 24 inches, but the water itself couldn’t be that deep. 

“It is not a 16th over 16 inches,â€� Quinn said. “As prescribed by the structural engineer.â€� 

“We had to task a fairly wide group of people to make sure that as an institution we were checking boxes and crossing our ‘t’s and dotting our ‘i’ s,â€� said Chris Streifel, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ director of capital planning and construction. “There were all kinds of different codes and building ramifications that we had to work through structurally.â€� 

Because the audience needed to be able to see into the pool, Schaeffer also had to be reimagined as a venue. Risers were constructed in the wings of the stage in lieu of the regular seating . This limited the audience size somewhat, but made for an intimate experience; during particularly splashy scenes, audience members in the front row might have gotten a little damp (although crew members whisked through between scenes, wielding mops to put the water back into the pool). 

Getting the chemistry of the water just right kept Quinn busy as well. At first the team hoped to keep it fresh with herbal and natural remedies, but after draining it over October break, they opted to add chlorine, since there were many bodies moving in and out of it during rehearsals. But not too much. “We did not want it smelling like the Y,â€� Wood said. At ABC Pool and Spa Center on Lisbon St., one of the workers groaned when Quinn stopped by; queries from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ had apparently become that much of a regular thing. “I think they were like, ‘Oh my God, why don’t you guys just get it together?’â€� said Wood.

+Click here to learn more about what was going through Eirene Furr’s mind as she acted in this scene

The pool was both a weird quirk and an inspiration for Eirene Furr ’28, a rhetoric, film, and screen studies major from Washington, D.C., who plans to focus on playwriting. She came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ after four years at the Chicago Academy of the Arts and has been in many productions, but none like this. “It’s not like an August Wilson play where it’s very much grounded in reality,â€� Furr said. “You have to live in this world where there’s gods and there’s love, and there’s betrayal, and there’s curses, and it makes for a very challenging experience.â€�

Like most of the cast, she played multiple roles, most prominently the role of Alcyone, whose husband, King Ceyx, is lost at sea. “I’m lucky because I only had to go about knee deep in the pool,â€� Furr said. “But I know people who fully dived in and in each scene had to be completely wet.â€� 

Included among them was Jenny Liu ’29 of Suzhou, China, who plays Myrrha, daughter of King Cinyras, cursed by Aphrodite into falling in love with her own father. She’s tossed around the pool in a particularly intense scene. “I was so excited when I heard that we were actually going to be in the water,â€� Liu said. “And I actually enjoyed it. It was warm.â€� 

The everybody-in-the-pool experience brought the cast closer together, Furr said. “Because when 15 people are running around the stage with towels and having to dry off and change, and there’s a whole laundry system going on, it makes it chaotic but it also makes it really, really fun.�

+Click here to learn more about what was happening for Jenny Liu in this scene

For Smith, seeing this kind of student experience is a large part of what drew him to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ during the hiring process. “What I think that the department really does well is creating the space for students to learn the craft and do their thing.â€� That might be a common enough sounding goal in the liberal arts, but at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ it felt like a reality. “I really felt it. It was really obvious to me,â€� Smith said.

Though when Smith arrived at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ last fall, he did develop a wish list of things he wanted to improve. Reidy had been a master of keeping old resources and materials going but it was time for upgrades. “Some instrumentation was dated back as early as the ’70s,â€� Smith said.  It was held together by tape, or worse. “It had, oh gosh, it had asbestos wiring. I think most of it was probably from the ’80s, and that’s just not equipment that we use anymore.â€�

Rachel Wray, senior director of corporate and foundation relations at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, worked with the George I. Alden Trust, based in Worcester, Mass., which generously provided a $175,000 grant for the necessary theater tech upgrades. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ contributed more funds, and now all three theaters — Schaeffer, Gannett Theater, and the Martin Andrucki Black Box Theatre — have new and improved equipment, including four big moving lights that were vital to making Metamorphoses glow, and a central control board (an ETC Ion Xe lighting control console) that can function as a true teaching tool. Some describe it as the guts of the whole operation.

For Smith, it was essential that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ graduates who want to work as professionals in the world of stage, lighting, and theater, be trained on current equipment. “Students in my classes, including Introduction to Digital Media, and in lighting projection design related courses, are learning on the tools they’ll see in the real world,â€� Smith said. “That was a huge lift to the program to be able to do that, and it was all because of that award.â€�

Furr’s first ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ production left her with a deep appreciation for her new community. That includes the responsive audience. 

“It’s easy to kind of compartmentalize your work as an actor, and kind of separate it from yourself,� Furr said. “Part of that is healthy and it’s good, but it can sometimes make you unaware of the amount of work that you put in. So it is definitely very rewarding to hear people come up and say how much they liked the show. It makes me very proud of all the work that the entire ensemble put in and the directors and then each and every stage hand and the theater directors and the sound designers. Really, everybody put their maximum amount of effort in.�