ARRAY: Recent Acquisition Series

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:

Opening October 24: works by Jeffrey Gibson and Sarah Rowe

Opening January 8: works by Morris David Dorenfeld

Opening February 24: TBA

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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. 

A knit blanket with multicolored triangles and 'I feel real when you hold me' written in cursive.
Jeffery Gibson, I Feel Real When You Hold Me, 2024, machine knit mongolian cashmere blanket, oil on canvas, Bates College Museum of Art Purchase with the Synergy Diversify the Collection Fund and the Dorothy S Blankfort ’34 fund.

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. 

Heyoka, a print by artist Sarah Rowe
Sarah Rowe, Heyoka, 2019, woodblock print, Bates College Museum of Art Purchase with the Synergy Diversify the collection fund and the Gloria Swanson Fund

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!