The woman who was the driving force behind the creation of Mother’s Day came to rue that day. Anna Jarvis, who organized the first observances in Grafton, W.Va., and Philadelphia in 1908, reportedly came to despise so much the commercialization that was already taking over her creation, she campaigned to abolish it.
Jarvis, who never had any children, is said to have lamented that the day of sentiment she had envisioned had instead “become a bonanza for greeting cards, which she saw as ‘a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.’” Happy Mother’s Day anyway.
Small children gripping trays loaded with french fries and ice cream, and occasionally something green, were at times visible through the crowd of relatively rangy Bowdoin students at Thorne Hall Friday.
On Bridge to Kids Day, Bowdoin students involved in one of the College’s many mentoring programs invite their mentees to campus to tour the campus, play outside, make crafts, and eat lunch in the dining hall. Caitlin Callahan, assistant director for student community service at the Center for the Common Good, says the day is a nice change in routine. Instead of Bowdoin students traveling to their mentees’ schools, the children get a chance to see where their mentor spends most of his or her time. Continue reading Bowdoin Extends ‘Bridge’ to Young Local Students
This new mini-documentary takes a look at the making of the historic double CD set of legendary folk musician Pete Seeger’s full concert at Bowdoin in 1960. Recorded more than 50 years ago on WBOR’s state of the art equipment, the tapes used to make this album are among the very best in existence of Seeger live. Joel Sherman ’61 and many on campus assisted Smithsonian Folkways in researching the history of Seeger’s Bowdoin performance for this album project.
Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin Concert 1960 is available through the Bowdoin College Bookstore, and through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
This is the prime period of Pete Seeger’s music; to catch him live at that point, playing, this well recorded, is kind of an amazing historical item. —Producer/Archivist Jeff Place
Theater professor Davis Robinson directing Beau Jest's original staging of Ten Blocks on the Camino Real.
Fresh from the success of The Glass Menagerie, and while still working on A Streetcar Named Desire in New Orleans, Tennessee Williams wrote a pivotal play in 1946 that few have ever seen: Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. A revised version opened on Broadway in 1953. It flopped…and the original, Ten Blocks version of Camino Real subsequently became an obscurity in the theatrical performance landscape.
Now, almost 60 years later, the award-winning Beau Jest Moving Theatre of Boston is bringing its faithful adaptation of the rarely seen Williams fantasy back to the stage, including a three-day run in Maine. The play is directed by Beau Jest founder and artistic director Davis Robinson, professor of theater at Bowdoin.
Baseball — Bowdoin plated the tying run in the top of the ninth and go-ahead run in the top of the 11th, then retired the side in order in the bottom of the 11th for a 3-2 victory over Amherst College in Game 2 of the 2012 NESCAC Baseball Championship.
Scores listed are those available at time of publication.
The Maine International Trade Center has announced that Hancock Lumber, North America’s largest manufacturer of Eastern White Pine boards and a sixth-generation family-owned business run by Kevin Hancock ’88, son of David Hancock ’64, has been named Exporter of the Year.
Established in 1848, Hancock Lumber employs 200 people in three sawmills across Maine, and began exporting in 2007, now shipping products all over the globe.
Hancock Lumber is one of four companies to be recognized at the Maine International Trade Day May 24 in Rockport.
Bowdoin’s annual Scholarship Appreciation Luncheon — an event President Barry Mills has called “the most important gathering of the year at Bowdoin” — was held Thursday, May 10, 2012, in Thorne Hall.
The College maintains 832 scholarship funds, and many of the donors behind these funds — alumni, parents and friends of the College — shared a meal yesterday with the students who benefit from their gifts. View a gallery of images from the luncheon.
Following a performance by Bowdoin’s Afro-Latin American Music Ensemble, President Mills spoke of the increasing importance of ensuring that a Bowdoin education continues to be accessible to students from all backgrounds and means.
Mills then introduced the next speaker, Bowdoin Trustee Deborah Jensen Barker ’80, who, besides having a successful career in investment banking, has been long committed to community service, particularly in the realm of education. Barker spoke about her journey of becoming “an advocate for students and a passionate supporter of funding for education.” Read the text of Barker’s remarks.
The final speaker at the event was La’Shaye Ervin ’12, from Brooklyn, N.Y., who attended the event with her mother and grandmother. Ervin, who dedicated her remarks to her family, to President Mills and to Professor of Biology Barry Logan, is the 2012 recipient of the President’s Award, which honors a student “whose actions demonstrate particular imagination and generosity of spirit and provide tangible benefit to the atmosphere, program, or general effectiveness of the College.” A biology and Africana studies major with a minor in English, Ervin is a leader in Bowdoin’s Outing Club, in “I am Bowdoin,” and other student organizations. She delivered a moving and personal talk based on the metaphor of the sankofa, a Ghanaian symbol her mother taught her that refers to never forgetting where one comes from.” Read the text of Ervin’s remarks.
The handmade artist books on display for the next three weeks in the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library include an elegant monster bestiary, a how-to manual for making cupcakes and community, and a narrative about a community-service trip to an impoverished community in New Jersey.
The books were made by students in Assistant Professor of Art Carrie Scanga’s Printmaking I class. This year, instead of having her students design a series of prints that might hang together on a wall, Scanga asked her class to create narratives for books.
“With a book, you turn pages,” Scanga said. “Books have pacing. It can’t help but become performative and time based.” She added that this project forced her students to more carefully imagine their viewers, as they had to think through how someone else would read or observe their book’s pages. “You have to think about the person you’re in relationship with,” Scanga said. Continue reading Slideshow: Students Imprint their Imaginations onto Books
Lesley Vance, Untitled (32), 2010, oil on linen, 19 x 14 inches. Collection of Barbara and Michael Gamson. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
A review of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art exhibition of the works of Los Angeles-based painter Lesley Vance stresses the Museum’s coup in gaining the distinction of being the first to offer a solo show for an artist “who forces you to reconsider everything.”
With insights from the exhibition’s curator Diana Tuite, the Museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, and artist Mark Wethli, Bowdoin’s A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art and program director for visual arts, the article details Vance’s enigmatic “exercises in abstraction that look like realism.”
