Sculptor Rona Pondick and painter Robert Feintuch have been an item since 1975, and have been notable presences in the art world since the ’80s.

Painter Robert Feintuch and sculptor Rona Pondick pose with some of their work at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

But only since February 2017 has it been possible to see a substantial selection of both their work combined in one exhibition. And only now has that exhibition come to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, where Feintuch is in his 42nd and final year on the art and visual culture faculty.

Opening with a 6 p.m. gallery talk and reception on Oct. 27 at the Museum of Art, the exhibition Rona Pondick and Robert Feintuch: Heads, Hands, Feet; Sleeping, Holding, Dreaming, Dying was organized by museum director Dan Mills and made its debut nine months ago at the .

“ and each use themselves as a model, yet neither makes self-portraits per se,â€� Mills says. “While their work is materially very different, this approach to making work and the psychological interest in the body and gesture that they have in common fascinated me.

“I started thinking about exhibiting their work for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, where Robert has taught for many years but rarely shown and where Rona has never shown. And as I was developing this idea, I realized that no one had ever organized an exhibition investigating” that common interest.

“It became clear that this is the exhibition we should present at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.â€�

“White Beaver� (2009–11) by Rona Pondick, painted bronze, edition 2/3. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

Until Mills proposed the idea a few years ago, Feintuch and Pondick hadn’t considered a joint exhibition — even though each is intimately familiar with the other’s work (they even had adjacent studios for many years).

“A few people who followed our work very closely talked about seeing relationships between the work,� says Feintuch. But, he continues, “on a superficial level, we kept seeing the differences.�

Mills was one of the ones who saw the relationships. “They believe the body speaks,â€� he says. “They seek to represent subjective experience and psychological states through a physical vocabulary comprising aspects such as gesture, posture, naturalism, and expressive distortion.”

Pondick’s sculptures combine forms from the human body — usually her own — with those from non-human animals. ARTnews critic Lilly Wei ascribed “disquieting psychological reverberations” to her sculptures, reverberations that “paradoxically attract and repel.”

Feintuch, meanwhile, situates unheroic older men in dreamlike settings that express vanity and vulnerability, and his work is consistently regarded as comic and rooted in psychological machinations.

“Feet Up� (2013) by Robert Feintuch, polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

Now residents of New York City, they met at the Yale University School of Art. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ exhibition comprises nine sculptures and a series of prints created by Pondick between 1998 and 2013, and 11 paintings that Feintuch made between 2007 and 2016.

Juxtaposing their artworks was something of a revelation to the couple. “One of the things that we’ve both been really struck by, between installing the show in Utah and then again here, is that it feels like our work goes together in a very interesting way,� says Pondick.

“Even though the work is approached so differently and our sensibilities are so different, we share so many interests that we complement each other in ways that are surprising to us. And that is both shocking and kind of intriguing,� given how long they’ve been together.

“We’re both interested in having people interpret the work,� says Feintuch — that is, look beyond the physical presence of a given piece. “That physical presence makes a lot of the meaning, but we also want people to think about what the work is about and what it feels like psychologically.

“I’ve had a wide range of interpretations of my work across the years, and none of them seem wrong to me. A lot of visual art is ambiguous in its meanings, and it’s one of the things I love about it.�

Art-historical references lend another dimension of meaning to their work. Pondick’s animal/human hybrid sculptures have a long lineage across many cultures, and Feintuch’s paintings often play with historical mythological and religious imagery.

Similarly, each combines age-old and cutting-edge technologies. Pondick employs three-dimensional scanning, computer imaging, carving, hand modeling, and traditional metal casting. Feintuch’s preparation for a painting has often mated hand-drawing from life with drawing on the computer and manipulating photographic material.

“Marmot� (1998-99) by Rona Pondick, silicone rubber, exhibition copy, edition of 6. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/ Salzburg; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

“Feintuch’s a terrific painter, whatever the subject,” Cate McQuaid wrote in a 2012 Boston Globe review. His works “wrestle with the debilitations and humiliations mortality imposes on us, but also with the possibility of grace, which we find in beauty and in hope.”

Reviewing “Heads, Hands, Feetâ€� for Salt Lake City’s SLUG Magazine, Kathy Zhou wrote that Pondick recognizes the viewer’s “tendency to search for artworks’ distinctly human elements, and she embraces it, toying with the human form and the psychological themes it evokes in her audience.

“Her resulting sculptures are at times fantastical, at times unsettling and thoroughly difficult from which to avert your gaze.”

“Fat Hercules� (2011) by Robert Feintuch, polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the artist.

Feintuch is a senior lecturer in the art and visual culture department. It’s fitting that he’s taking part in a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ exhibition himself during his final year as an active faculty member: Since he began at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, in 1976, he has advised studio art majors as they spend their final year at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ making work for the annual Senior Thesis Exhibition. (For many of those years, Associate Professor Pamela Johnson has advised the seniors during the fall semester, and Feintuch during the winter.)

Pondick has co-taught with her husband at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, in Salzburg, Austria. “I’ve witnessed how easily Robert can connect in a very quick way with a student,â€� she says, “understanding what they should be looking at and asking them questions, so that they can start asking the questions that you need to ask when you’re in the studio alone.

“And it’s not easy to forget about your own prejudices and the way that you think, and say, ‘This is not the way I think, but how would I approach this?’ So that you can then help your students develop.�

“Which is one of the pleasures of teaching,� Feintuch responds. “It’s fun doing that.�

To economists, “creative destruction” is something practiced on a grand scale by capitalist societies as one mode of production is swept away by the next.

But artist Kate Gilmore ’97 might interpret the term very differently. Gilmore has drawn by undertaking creative destruction on a very personal, often individual scale. Through videos and performance pieces depicting a woman’s literal struggle with physical challenges, Gilmore delivers sharp societal judgments cloaked in humor and captivating design.

Her work is messy, cathartic, sometimes cringeworthy, often funny, and always thought-provoking, battering at the structures of power, gender roles, and societal norms.

This summer, visitors to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ get to experience Gilmore’s work up close and personal — really close and personal, thanks to a new museum commission, a viewer-participation piece involving sledgehammers — as the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art opens the exhibition Kate Gilmore: In Your Way on June 9.

Gilmore, who on June 10 will discuss her work and preside over the inaugural hammer attack on her viewer-participation piece, spoke to us from her home in New York City.

You have often been the protagonist in your work, and some of your recent performance pieces have featured groups of women, but not you. And now at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ you’re inviting viewers to take a hand in your work. What will they do?

The work is steel cubes, fabricated in Portland. They’re pink and red, and on gray carpets. There will be sledgehammers available, and every day from one to two o’clock [through Oct. 7], the piece will be open for the public to attempt to destroy these objects.

In the destruction — which is almost impossible because the cubes are steel — they start actually to look pretty spectacular. If people do it for long periods of time it becomes hammered steel, in contrast to these really exuberant colors.

Similar to pieces you had at the New York City gallery On Stellar Rays during the winter.

“” was a big performance piece with female characters on top of metal cubes, pounding to a beat with work boots and brass knuckles. And I did that that you’ve seen on the website.

We changed plans for the show right after the November election, because what I was doing before just didn’t make sense any more — to me at least. I’ve always been somebody who responds to my circumstances and how I view the world, and how it affects our daily existence. That’s really what I’m thinking about in my work.

A frame from the 2011 video “Sudden as a Massacre” by Kate Gilmore.

You’re not going to see a picture of Donald Trump on the cubes that we’re destroying or anything like that, but my work has definitely been influenced by our new situation. Steel seems to be the best material for how I’m feeling right now — just in terms of where we are in our society right now, that kind of anger and rage.

It’s not unusual for things to get broken and messes made in your work. As an aesthetic device, how does damage work for you?

The idea of people rising up or tearing down structures that are holding them back is still really relevant. And whether you’re talking about gender, or sex, or race, or class — OK, it’s really about who has the power and who doesn’t. So I would just say that damage and destruction and rage continue to be a very important language for me.

How do you stay safe while doing your pieces? Have you injured yourself?

Just cuts and scrapes and stuff. You know, I don’t do anything that’s beyond my physical capabilities. Getting hurt is not part of the piece! For some people, that becomes part of their language, but it’s really not for me.

You started out in sculpture, then moved to videos that you’ve performed in. Then in 2010, you made a piece where seven women in yellow dresses moved around on top of a big yellow cube — for 10 hours a day. That was “Walk the Walk,” presented in Bryant Park for New York City’s Public Art Fund. That was your first live public project and your first project that you didn’t appear in.

That commission was for a big outdoor sculpture and live performance. I was petrified, I didn’t know what to do. I was like, “How am I going to do this? I’m so used to doing that.�

For “Roll in the Way,” a work responding to the machismo of artists like Richard Serra, Kate Gilmore dipped more than 500 pieces of wood in paint and placed them on this platform.

And then, I did it — and it changed my life and offered me a whole different perspective and way of making work. It’s allowed sculpture to come back for me in a major way, and it’s allowed me to be an observer of the work, as opposed to always being the participant.

So that’s been really exciting, and this way of working has become really important to me. I haven’t made a video in a couple of years because I’ve been focused on these performances and the sculptures. But I’m going to make a couple new videos.

You also developed pieces where spilling or splashing paint, or paint that looks like trickling blood, is an important element.

There’s always been a robust conversation about paint in my work because my videos are very painterly — the way I layer color and action within a canvas-like frame. So I just started to think about paint directly. And then the actual material of paint offers this great physical action — if you put paint in something and you break the thing, it explodes, right? Then you have this proof of an action because of the remnants of the color.

And then, thinking about painting in terms of the art world and art history, and the weight that it’s given, and [mythologized macho] male painters like Jackson Pollock — thinking about them, and then forcing the female body into making work. All of those things came together and that’s why I started doing it.

Why is humor important in your work?

Beauty and humor can be used in a very similar way. You can make people feel comfortable, and they spend time and relax, and then you can give them the undercut — you know, while they’re feeling comfortable, hopefully force information onto them. So that’s how I use humor and, I would say, aesthetics.

I’m very invested in the language of humor. That’s how I communicate in general. I can’t remember who said this first, but you can say whatever the hell you want if you’re funny!

You teach at Purchase College. How does your education at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ inform how you teach, or does it?

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was really important because it gave me this really strong liberal arts background — I was a double major with art and history. So I have ways of making work that combine all these different things, while maybe someone from more of an art school background will just be very invested in making work and then the other stuff comes later.

How I teach is definitely very conceptual. It’s very influenced by current events, history, and political systems. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has allowed me to offer more than just an art education to my students.

You’re going to be at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for your 20th reunion. What does it mean to you to show your work at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½?

I was very Olin Arts Center-centered. I was just in the studio all the time. I was very focused on what I was doing. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is really important to me, so I’m really happy to show there. It’s nice that what I do is being supported.

A frame from Kate Gilmore’s 2004 video “My Love Is An Anchor.”

Little, winner of the 2000 Acadia Arts Achievement Award, has authored several books on art, such as Edward Hopper’s New England (Pomegranate Communications, 1993) and The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent (University of California Press, 1999)

Little also writes for regional and national publications including Art New England and Art in America. He contributed an essay to the catalog for the exhibition Bernard Langlais: Independent Spirit at the Portland Museum of Art in 2002.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Little will focus on Langlais’ current exhibition in the context of his greater oeuvre. The exhibition Medium and Abstraction, curated by Erin Gilligan ’09, focuses on a selection of Langlais sculptures from the 1950s and ’60s that show a particular influence of the New York avant-garde. The inclusion of wooden assemblages by Louise Nevelson and portraits of Langlais imply a larger context of influence for his work, which Little will discuss.

Langlais, born in Old Town, Maine, in 1921, embarked on an art career at a young age. His early work is predominantly paintings and collages. In 1956, Langlais and his wife bought a summer cottage in Cushing, Maine. While completing renovations, Langlais began experimenting with wood, and developed his self-proclaimed “painting in wood” technique. He is most famous for whimsical animal sculptures and tableaus created with a fusion of painting and wood carving.

Also featured in the museum are the exhibitions Landscape Drawings from the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection and Our Positive Bodies: Mapping Our Treatment, Sharing Our Choices. The Hartley exhibition showcases ink and graphite drawings by this famed artist born in Lewiston, Maine, who wished to have a memorial collection in his hometown.

Marsden is known as a pioneer of American modernist painting in the early 20th century. Our Positive Bodies originated in Nairobi, Kenya, and focuses on “body mapping,” a palliative process through which life-sized silhouette self-portraits of women affected by AIDS are used to divulge feelings and memories.

The Langlais and Hartley exhibitions close on Oct. 3, while Our Positive Bodies remains up until Dec. 11. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and closed on major holidays. Admission is free.

For more information, please call 207-786-6158 or visit the museum Web site at www.bates.edu/museum.xml.

View of the sculpture looking down Alumni Walk

From Paul: Hey all. Taking a quick break from finals studying to let you know about some very cool art here at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.  The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art and its director Mark Bessire, spearheaded a project to bring an amazing sculpture here to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. The ‘Lagacy Mantle (Mao Jacket)’, created by world-renown Chinese artist Sui Jianguo was brought here early this month and is on loan to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for a year. The sculpture is truly incredible. It is made of metal, stands 10 feet high and weighs roughly 4 tons. Bessire, the man who helped bring the statue to campus, said that having the sculpture here 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 todayâ€�.

When I first saw the Mao Jacket I had no idea what to think. I snapped some pictures so you can decide for yourself. Also, check out this article from the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ website. It is much more in depth and has some AWESOME pictures of moving the huge sculpture (from a flatbed truck, through the air between Pettengill and Lane Hall, into its resting spot along Alumni Walk).

Displaying graphically compelling and texturally intricate wall sculptures, the exhibit will span the artist’s work from 1980 to the present.

“Hemenway’s work features a variety of colors, textures and themes inspired by Maine’s rugged topography, events and phenomena frozen in memory, as well as a lifelong engagement with art,” said Anthony Shostak, education coordinator of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art.

Born in Boothbay Harbor in 1920, Hemenway has lived abroad in Europe, Central and South America and Africa. She studied music at Wheaton College and Harvard University before turning her talents to the visual arts.

As a sculptor, Hemenway has earned several distinguished honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to South Africa and a doctor of fine arts degree from Wheaton.

She has exhibited her work at institutions such as the Seattle Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

The exhibition will remain on view at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ through Aug. 16. Regular hours at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m., Sunday, with additional hours often scheduled on the evening of concerts and other special events at the Olin Arts Center. The galleries are closed Mondays, major holidays and during the installation of exhibitions. Admission is free.

Schools and other groups are welcome, and tours are given by appointment. For more information, contact the museum at 207-786-6158.