Museum of Art

October 24, 2024 – March 15, 2025

Do you know that Bates Museum of Art is actively collecting many types of artwork to preserve, display, and engage with here at the college–adding to our 8,000+ objects? Join us to view a rotating exhibition focusing on select new acquisitions to the collection that expand and diversify our holdings, and serve the wide-range of interests and expertises at Bates College and beyond.  

Curatorial and Exhibition Interns: Lola Buczkowski; Keira January

Schedule:

ARRAY Part I: Jeffrey Gibson and Sarah Rowe, October 24 – December 21

ARRAY Part II: January 8 – February 15, 2025: Morris David Dorenfeld, January 8 – February 15

ARRAY Part III: Mary A. Armstrong and Carol Chase Bjerke, February 24 – March 15

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February 24 – March 15, 2025

Paintings by Mary A. Armstrong and mixed-media works by Carol Chase Bjerke

For the final focus into our recent acquisitions in the ARRAY exhibition, we are featuring two women with strong ties to New England. Active around the same periods, both Armstrong and Bjerke felt a deep connection with the natural world, which melded with their personal and artistic lives and experiences. Both artists had long, active careers, but did not break into the mainstream art world.

Mary A. Armstrong (1948 – 2020) was a Boston and Maine-based painter known for her ethereal landscapes, intertwining both the imaginary and real. Her oil paintings inspired by nature and memory are known to break out onto the frame. In 1972, Armstrong received her BFA from Boston University and, in 1977, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. From 1989 to 2019, she was an adjunct professor at Boston College’s Department of Art, Art History, and Film, leaving time for her to paint and exhibit around America. Armstrong’s characteristic seascapes are rendered through a dream-like sensibility, highlighting the beautiful and unpredictable nature of expanses of water.

Carol Chase Bjerke (1943 – 2022) was a visual artist and educator whose work was anchored in both personal experience and the natural world. Experimenting throughout a wide breadth of media–including photography, book arts, and collage–the artist blended traditional and experimental techniques. The many places Bjerke lived affected her work, especially Michigan where she completed her undergraduate degree in graphic design and graduate studies in design and photography at Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant. Throughout her travels, Bjerke tracked and mapped landscape as a means of rooting herself in unfamiliar places or remembering the ones she left behind.

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January 8 – February 15, 2025

Three works by Morris David Dorenfeld (1937-2023)

Known today for his abstract, brilliantly-colored tapestries, Dorenfeld began as an oil painter who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Arts Student League in New York until he discovered an abandoned loom in an empty farmhouse attic. Minimalist forms and a bold use of color became central elements to his tapestries, which were indicative of his practice of “painting in fiber,” according to the artist. 

Living in mid-coast Maine since 1978, Dorenfeld drew inspiration from his life events and the landscapes around him, ultimately making 146 abstract tapestries within 13 series over four decades. The three works on view span from the early 1990s to 2020, serving as a small sample of his various series that investigate color theory, horizontality, shape, contrast, and movement through the woven form.

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October 24 – December 21, 2024

Jeffrey Gibson, I Feel Real When You Hold Me, 2024

Sarah Rowe, Heyoka, 2019

The museum is pleased to exhibit a large textile by Jeffrey Gibson and a woodblock print by Sarah Rowe. 

Jeffrey Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is the first Indigenous artist selected to present a solo exhibition at the United States pavilion in the 2024 Venice Biennale. The museum’s display of I Feel Real When You Hold Me coincides with Gibson’s exhibition The Space in Which to Place Me on view at the Biennale through November 24. The origins of this blanket design grew out of a flag that the artist designed for a performance in 2021. The text, “I feel real when you hold me” is in the artist’s handwriting. 

Gibson (b. 1972) earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1995 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art in London. His work is collected by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; Denver Art Museum in Colorado; Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts; Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, among many others. 

Sarah Rowe is Lakota, Ponca, and lives in Omaha, Nebraska. She creates paintings, sculptures, and performances that combine traditional Indigenous iconography, personal forms, and popular culture. A common character she draws on is the Heyókȟa, the sacred clown or trickster of the Lakota. Rowe’s interpretation of Heyókȟa is a figure with a horse head who exudes cosmic knowledge, laughter, enchantment, and playfulness. 

Rowe (b.1981) received a BA in Studio Art from Webster University and continued her studies in Vienna, Austria. She has had solo exhibitions in museums around Nebraska. Her multimedia, immersive, and collaborative installation Post II was featured in Bates Museum of Art’s 2023 exhibition Exploding Native Inevitable. 

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Stay updated with us as we announce the details on upcoming artists and artworks featured in ARRAY: Recent Acquisitions Series into early 2025. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter!