Following welcome remarks by LC Bates Director Deborah Staber, Professor Véronique Plesch, curators María Minuesa-Sicilia and Caroline Scarola, five of the show’s artists, Gary Green, Kris Engman, Stephen Burt, Alison Hildreth, and Julia Arredondo will speak.
Caged Lion (1976–77), Bernard Langlais’s monumental wooden sculpture on the lawn next to the LC Bates Museum, perfectly encapsulates the notion of captivity. Taking its cue from the fall 2021 state-wide initiative and 2021–22 Annual Humanities Theme at Colby College on Freedom and Captivity, the 2022 LC Bates summer exhibition invites artists to reflect upon the meanings that these two concepts hold for the natural world and the ways in which we conceive, represent, and imagine freedom and captivity in nature. Possible avenues of reflection are, for instance, wilderness, cultivation, and domestication.
