Following its autumn-long appearance on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a 10-foot eponymous  was installed on ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ own busy thoroughfare, Alumni Walk, on Dec. 5.

On loan to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for a year, the approximately 4-ton metal sculpture, formally named Legacy Mantle (Mao Jacket), is by contemporary Chinese Artist .

Mark Bessire, director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art, says that he first spied the sculpture in Beijing as he was organizing the museum’s exhibition. He wanted Sui’s piece in that exhibition, but shipping the sculpture from China to Lewiston would’ve busted his budget.

Professor of History Dennis Grafflin touches the rough, rusty metal surface.

Professor of Mathematics Chip Ross, exiting Pettengill Hall, looks askance at Mao Jacket.

Director of the Museum of Art Mark Bessire says that he first saw the sculpture in Beijing, outside artist Sui Jianguo's studio.

Standing together in front of the sculpture, history professor Dennis Grafflin and Anthony Shostak, the museum's education coordinator, provide a sense of the jacket's size.

The sculpture apparently has the power to stop Alumni Walk traffic, as biker Rusty Milholland '10 of Freeport pauses to take a good look.

Instead, the jacket initially came to the U.S. as part of , an exhibition by the Asia Society and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

From Sept. 7 through mid-November, the suit sat on the Park Avenue median at 70th Street.

According to Melissa Chiu, museum director at the Asia Society, “the iconic Mao jacket symbolizes Mao’s legacy and may be viewed as both nostalgic and critical, mirroring the views of the artist and many Chinese of his generation.”

Given the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art’s reputation for championing contemporary Chinese art (other recent major exhibitions include and From Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium by Wenda Gu), Bessire says he “immediately” approached the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Committee on Public Art about bringing Mao Jacket to campus.

From that point, the sculpture’s path to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was guided by the College’s Public Art Policy (see page 7 for “temporary installations”).

Bessire hopes the work will “continue the conversation about Chinese history and the expanding influence of China and Chinese culture,” noting that Mao Jacket is an “extraordinary opportunity for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to have one of the iconic symbols of Chinese contemporary art by one of the most influential artists in the world today.”

The huge icon of Communist rule looked like some strange bell as it dangled in the air between Lane and Pettengill halls. “Surreal,” said Bessire.

The scuplture arrived early Wednesday morning on a flatbed trailer hauled by a Peterbilt tractor. In two stages, a 120-ton Grove all-terrain crane hoisted the piece from the parking lot behind Lane Hall up to Alumni Walk.

At one point, the huge icon of Communist rule looked like some strange bell as it dangled in the air between Lane and Pettengill halls against the vivid blue sky. “Surreal,” said Bessire.

The sculpture sits outside Pettengill Hall, across from Dana Chemistry.

Afterwards, Bessire relaxed on a bench next to the jacket and talked with people about the sculpture. “I got many responses,” he says. “Some loved it, some were confused and some did not like it. But everybody was certainly thinking about what is public art and what role it has on the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ campus.”

In the coming weeks, Bessire will offer a lecture about the sculpture and about public art at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Mark Bessire, director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art, is shown with an image by Xing Danwen during the installation of the exhibition Stairway to Heaven.Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

"On the Wall, Haikou 6" is a 2003 C-print by photographer Weng Feng.

A 2004 silver gelatin print from the "Shanghai Series" by Gu Zheng.

Paul D. Miller, the musician, essayist and media artist also known as DJ Spooky, presents a live performance of his internationally renowned multimedia project Rebirth of a Nation at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 2, at Lewiston Middle School, 75 Central Ave.

Co-sponsored by departments and programs at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College including the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art and the Multicultural Center, the performance will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the artist with Mark Bessire, director of the art museum; Dale Chapman, assistant professor of music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½; and Charles Nero, associate professor of rhetoric.

Admission to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ event is $10 for general seating. For tickets, please . For more information contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The performance takes place just days before the 93rd anniversary of the release of Birth of a Nation, the silent film by D.W. Griffith whose racist interpretations of American history during and after the Civil War have been a source of outrage for nearly a century. Miller, of New York, adapted Griffith’s film for Rebirth of A Nation.

“With the news dominated by broken treaties, ethnic oppression, raw power grabs and security threats, the time seems just right for revisiting” the film, Miller writes in his program notes. “There are so many resonances with contemporary culture’s indefatigable sense of shock and surprise.”

His piece, Miller writes, “posits no answers, only more questions.”

Starting with a newly restored print of Griffith’s film, Miller edited, manipulated and remixed it. Combining this footage with his original score, as recorded by the Kronos Quartet, Miller now performs a live mix, creating a unique version of Rebirth of a Nation at each show.

The piece was commissioned by and performed at the Lincoln Center Festival, New York; the Festival d’Automne à Paris; the Vienna Festival; and the Spoleto Festival USA. It has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Romaeuropa Festival in Italy; Harvard University; the Herod Atticus amphitheater in Athens; and many other venues.

Miller is best-known by his “constructed persona,” “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.” He has recorded a huge volume of music, solo and in collaboration with artists as diverse as Iannis Xenakis, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Pierre Boulez, Killa Priest from Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

He scored the 1998 film Slam, which starred critically acclaimed poet Saul Williams and received awards from the Cannes and Sundance festivals. In 2006, Miller received access to the vaults of the classic reggae label Trojan Records, resulting in his landmark Sanctuary Records compilation In Fine Style, DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records!!!

Among his other recordings are Optometry (Thirsty Ear, 2002), a jazz project featuring Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Joe McPhee, Carl Hancock Rux, Daniel Bernard Roumain and High Priest from Anti-Pop Consortium; Dubtometry (Thirsty Ear, 2003), a dub remix of the same, featuring Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor; and Riddim Clash (Play, 2004), a collaboration with Twilight Dub Sound System.

Miller took part in the 2007 Venice Bienniale with the video installation New York is Now, which originally appeared at the Luanda Triennial in Angola in 2006.

Miller has written for The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine and other periodicals. With noted African American poet Steve Cannon, he is co-publisher of A Gathering of Tribes, a magazine dedicated to new works by writers from a multicultural context. Miller was the first editor-at-large of the cutting-edge digital media magazine, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture.

His first collection of essays, Rhythm Science (MIT Press, 2004), was included in several “best books of 2004” lists, including those of the Guardian (UK) and Publishers Weekly. Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and multi-media edited by Miller, will be published in paperback by MIT Press in May.

Along with the Museum of Art and Multicultural Center, sponsoring Miller’s ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ engagement are the college’s departments of theater and rhetoric, and of music; the program in environmental studies; the offices of the dean of the faculty, student activities and admissions; the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dance Festival and the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

From Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium opens at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on June 12 and at ICA, site of the opening reception for both institutions, on June 18. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ hosts the closing reception and a performance by Gu on Oct. 9.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum is located in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St., and admission is open to the public at no cost. It is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and is closed Sundays and major holidays. For additional information about the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art call 207-786-6158. For more about ICA call 207-879-5742.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the Gu exhibition takes place in the museum’s Upper Gallery. In the Lower Gallery, also opening on June 12 are the shows New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography, which closes May 30, 2005, and Marsden Hartley: Photography and Identity, which closes Dec. 18 of this year.

Gu was active in the Chinese avant-garde before emigrating to the United States in 1987. He mines tradition and pursues innovation in works that explore globalism, diasporic art and transculturalism to present an idealized unification of humanity.

“Wenda Gu’s work is timely in its ambitious attempt to address in artistic terms the issue of globalism that dominates discussions of contemporary economics, society and culture. The enormous scope of his vision — conceiving of his artwork as existing over time and space and not constrained by convention, language or national boundaries — is remarkable,” writes Mark H.C. Bessire in the exhibition publication, the first major scholarly publication on Gu (MIT Press).

Bessire, director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum and former director of ICA, edited the publication and, with counterparts at museums in Kansas and Texas, co-curated the exhibition. It consists of two site-specific installations, two other installations and a performance.

“Words, languages, human hair, glue, calligraphy and stone carving are just some of the components of his installations that catalyze discussion and broaden awareness among viewers,” Bessire writes.

At the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum, Gu will create an installation titled “united nations — 7561 kilometers,” the 20th piece in his “united nations” series. An ongoing worldwide project begun in 1992, the series consists of “monuments” made of human hair, collected from barbershops across the globe, that the artist presses or weaves into bricks, carpets and curtains. The blend of hair from different nations is a metaphor for the mixture of races that Gu predicts will eventually unite humanity into “a brave new racial identity.”

For “united nations — 7561 kilometers,” Gu will construct a “temple” using thin and colored human hair braids. The structure will large enough for viewers to pass through and under the piece. Members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and local communities will be invited to participate in “united nations — we are united,” the artist’s performance in October.

Among his works at the ICA, Gu will present a second original installation, a new chapter in a series using stone steles marked with retranslated, rewritten Tang Dynasty poetry, as well as rubbings taken from the steles. Inventing and misusing words and language symbols in a variety of languages, Gu embraces mistakes and misunderstandings. He finds absurdity and unexpected beauty in the acceptance of illogical retranslations.

How does the art in the two locations function as a whole? In a sense, they express two opposed outcomes of the great international convergence of nation, race and culture. Gu’s idealistic intimation of an ultimate, corporeal and spiritual unification of humanity will be expressed in the spacious, ascendant monument at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ — a “temple” of hair — where the steles at ICA convey poetic gibberish to frustrate viewers’ attempts to secure their fundamental meaning and coherence.

A consortium of art college museums has organized the exhibition as a model to encourage collaboration among art colleges nationally. The catalog includes an introduction to Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, documentation of the complete “united nations” series to date and useful background for the exhibition.

The project was supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the museum’s Lower Gallery, New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography presents American, African and Chinese artists whose work transcends its local origins to achieve global relevance. The American photographers include Melonie Bennett, Tanja Hollander, Jocelyn Lee, Scott Peterman and Sa Schloff, all associated with the Bakery Photo Cooperative in Portland.

The Chinese photographers include the seven who showed work during the winter in the museum’s acclaimed Documenting China exhibition, as well as exhibit curator Gu Zheng. The breadth of contemporary African photography is represented by Samuel Fosso, Malick Sidibe, Jurgen Schadeberg, Bernie Searle (performance artist ) and Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall.

Also in the Lower Gallery, Marsden Hartley: Image and Identity taps the museum’s collection of materials pertaining to Hartley. In fact, the museum was established as a repository for the collection of drawings, photographs and documents by or about this key 20th-century modernist, a Lewiston native. Evidence of Hartley’s efforts to establish his name and locate himself within the collective memory of the public, his friends and family turns up throughout the collection.

Hartley’s personal archive not only provides ample information about the artist’s life, relationships and interests, but demonstrates an attempt to construct both a personal history and a public identity. The collection includes a large number of photographs, both personal snapshots and formal portraits by George Platt Lynes and Alfredo Valente.

It’s evident that photography allowed Hartley to remake himself in any image he desired: New York modernist, European aesthete, native Mainer. Hartley’s ongoing struggle to find his place — geographically, psychologically, artistically and as a gay man — is documented in his writing, reflected in his work and revealed through a study of his archive.

A discrepancy in the published times for the Jan. 16 opening lecture and reception for a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art exhibition has resulted in a schedule adjustment that may affect the plans of your art reviewers and readers.

The reception for the exhibition, Documenting China: Contemporary Photography and Social Change, will begin at 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 16, in the museum, Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

A lecture by exhibit curator Gu Zheng will take place at 7 p.m. in Room 104, Olin Arts Center.

In addition, the museum has scheduled two events connected with the exhibition to take place on Feb. 6 in Room 104, Olin Arts Center. At 5 p.m., Wu Hung, professor in the College of the Humanities at the University of Chicago and author of Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (University of Chicago Press, 2001) offers a lecture.

At 7 p.m., Chinese Art Explodes Onto the Scene, a roundtable discussion of contemporary Chinese art and photography, features Wu Hung; Brian Wallis, chief curator, International Center of Photography, New York; and Gu Zheng. Mark Bessire, director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art, moderates.

For your convenience, previously released details of the exhibition follow:

Documenting China: Contemporary Photography and Social Change runs through March 28. The museum is open to the public at no charge.

Documenting China showcases the work of seven photographers, including Zhou Hai, whose exhibition The Unbearable Heaviness of Industry was reviewed by The New York Times in August 2003. Depicting people at home, at work and in public, the Documenting China images are fresh, blunt and compelling.

In her preface to the exhibition catalog, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Elaine Tuttle Hansen writes, “The exhibition introduces a new and critical generation of Chinese photographers to American audiences while it raises vexing questions about the impact of urbanization on societies and individuals.”

In addition to Zhou Hai, participating photographers are:

Liu Xiaodi, a painter by training who shot his Village series while he was a student doing fieldwork;

Jiang Jian, director of the photography department at the Henan Institute of Art, Zhengzhou. He specializes in photographing peasants in their homes in central China;

Zhang Xinmin, who concentrates on peasant immigrants in China’s cities;

Luo Yongjin, who depicts the city of Luoyang, formerly a grand imperial capital and now a middling industrial city;

Lu Yuanmin, who documents the impacts of China’s Reform era on middle class domestic life in the booming city of Shanghai;

and Zhou Ming, who captures Shanghai street and nightlife scenes.

The seven will donate their images from the exhibition to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum’s permanent collection. Museum Director Mark Bessire, pointing to China’s considerable and still-expanding role in international politics and the global economy, says that “in 50 years these photos will be unique in recording China at the millennium.”

“They’re very important to our collection because we now have seven different artists’ work that records the cultural and economic changes that have been influencing China for the past 10 years,” he says. “Rather than just one point of view, we get seven.”

Documenting China appears next at the China Institute in New York City from June 24 through July 23, 2004.

China is a growing presence in ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ visual-art offerings, from a site-specific calligraphy installation by Xu Bing in 2000 to next summer’s major exhibition by the artist Wenda Gu. Two displays of photographs taken by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students in China and Tibet during the past semester open simultaneously with Documenting China at two locations, the Chase Hall Gallery and the student-run Ronj coffeehouse.

Gu organized Documenting China in collaboration with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art staff and two faculty members, Assistant Professor of Chinese John Yu Zou and Associate Professor of Economics Margaret Maurer-Fazio, chair of the college’s Asian studies program. Gu will work with Professor Zou this winter in his course “Chinese Culture and Agrarian Society,” as well as with students in photography and economics.

Gu is vice president of the Asian Society of Photographers and the author of several books, including The Practice of Modern Photography in the 20th Century (Industrial Publisher, 2002); Chinese Perspectives on Western Cityscape (Liaoning Fine Arts Press, 2002) and The Nude in Retrospect: 150 Years of Photography (Guangdong Traveler’s Press, 1999). He has won numerous national photography awards in China, including the prestigious Ministry of Culture Gold Medal.

He co-curated the first Asian Photo Biennale, Seoul, in 2002, and chaired the 2001 Yipin International Photography Festival, Shanghai. His doctorate is in cultural anthropology from Japan’s University of Osaka.

Funds from a four-year grant by the Freeman Foundation supported the production of the four-color catalog and Gu’s residency at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ this winter. With offices in New York City and Stowe, Vt., the Freeman Foundation was created by AIG Insurance Company co-founder Mansfield Freeman to promote better relationships and understanding between the United States and the countries of East Asia. In December 2001, the foundation gave ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ a four-year, $400,000 grant intended to enhance and energize the study of Asia and Asian culture across the curriculum.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and is closed for major holidays. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.