Tuesday, August 21, 2012; 9 a.m.

Location: College of the Atlantic - Deering Common Campus Center, 105 Eden Street, Bar Harbor, Maine

Contact: Donna Gold; 207-801-5623

Website: coa.edu

BAR HARBOR, ME—Art, artists, and their stories will be the subject of College of the Atlantic’s Tuesday, Aug. 21 Coffee & Conversation, a 9 a.m. talk in the college’s Deering Common Campus Center. The talk features Emily Wei Rales, curator and co-founder of Glenstone, a private museum and foundation of postwar and contemporary art in Potomac, MD. She will be talking with Catherine Clinger, COA’s Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts.

Glenstone, which opened in 2006 with an exhibit featuring many of the best artists of the twentieth century, has been engaged in an ambitious oral history program of some of the world’s most prominent artists. Currently, the museum has more than 30 taped interviews. The project began informally when Richard Serra’s Torqued Spiral sculpture, Sylvester (2001) was installed on the museum grounds. The oral history program is meant to be documentation rather than a documentary; the films are archival, representative of key aspects of the artist’s thinking, their story and for some, their techniques.

During the Tuesday conversation, Rales will be showing an excerpt from the interview with Serra, which includes footage of the actual installation, along with a recent interview with the German artist Katharine Fritsch.

Rales worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City on the landmark exhibition of Chinese art, “China: 5000 Years” before graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College in 1998. She later worked at the Chinese antiquities gallery J.J. Lally and Company and at contemporary art galleries in New York. In 2003 she established a nonprofit organization called Hudson Clearing that mounted exhibitions of emerging artists in underused commercial spaces in New York. Rales is a member of the Collectors Committee at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Committee on Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Clinger is a printmaker and painter, as well as a scholar of European and American Art from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. She is also a master printer of intaglio. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of London, an MPhil in the history of art from University College London, and MA in the history of art from the University of New Mexico and a BFA from the University of Kansas. She is currently working on a book related to German Romanticism and Mining Practices.

Additional August Coffee & Conversation series in COA’s Deering Common Campus Center:

Aug. 28: Daniel Dennett, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and co-director of the Tufts Center for Cognitive Studies, speaks with COA’s Gray Cox, faculty member in political economics, history and peace studies.

Deering Common Campus Center is reached via COA’s south entrance. For more on this summer series, which is free and open to the public, contact Laura Johnson, 207-801-5621, ljohnson@coa.edu, or Kim Childs, 207-288-5015, kchilds@coa.edu.

College of the Atlantic was founded in 1969 on the premise that education should go beyond understanding the world as it is, to enabling students to actively shape its future. Intentionally small, COA is a leader in environmental stewardship and experiential education. It has pioneered a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to learning—human ecology—that develops the kinds of creative thinkers and doers who can lead all sectors of society to promote sustainable ecosystems while meeting compelling and growing human needs. www.coa.edu.