Bowdoin College Museum Of Art Expands

Brunswick, Maine

:Long recognized as one of the nation's finest college art museums, located in a landmark building, the renovated and expanded Bowdoin College Museum of Art reopened last October to much acclaim. Impressed visitors have called the revamped facility "elegant and beautiful" and a model for restoring a historic museum building.

The ambitious, $20.8 million project begun in 2003 includes the addition of a dramatic, new glass entry pavilion that respects the integrity of the original structure and renovation of the entire interior of the building. It adds significant space in which to showcase the museum's eclectic permanent collection. The project is part of a $250 million Bowdoin campaign aimed at upgrading the entire campus.

Chartered in 1794 and opened in 1802, Maine's oldest college is named for James Bowdoin II, a Massachusetts governor whose son generously endowed the fine liberal arts institution. Among the college's most famous alumni are writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, President Franklin Pierce, Senator and Secretary of the Treasury William Pitt Fessenden, Arctic explorers Robert E. Peary and Donald B. Macmillan, Senator and Major League Baseball investigator George Mitchell, and Senator and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen.

The museum began in 1811 with James Bowdoin III's gift of 70 paintings and a portfolio of Old Master drawings, making it one of the nation's oldest college art collections. With holdings ranging from the ancient world to the Twenty-First Century, and housed in a building designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead and White, the augmented museum will be an even more valuable resource for the college, community and art world in general. The renovation and underground expansion increases the museum's total space 63 percent — from 19,980 to 32,500 square feet — and expands the number of galleries from nine to 14.

The highlight of the above-ground architectural elements is the new entry pavilion — an expansive glass and bronze structure housing a glass elevator and "floating" steel staircase. Behind a large glass curtain wall are displayed the museum's famed Assyrian bas-reliefs.

The new complex, says Katy Kline, the museum's director, "celebrates our role as a leader in college art museums and our mission to broaden knowledge and inspire all our visitors." In her tenth year at Bowdoin after serving as director of the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kline sees the museum "as a laboratory for thinking about just about anything."