CCNE's 2007 Visiting Artists Lecture Series & Shaindel Beers

Visiting Artists Series opens at CCNE

The Visiting Artists Symposium Lecture Series will welcome writer Jennifer Haigh and artists Alan Metnick and Leah Gauthier to campus in September. The lecture series is an integral part of a course in the college's upper level curriculum. The lectures are free and open to the public as well as the entire college community. After the public session, the artists will be available to the junior and senior students formally registered in the College's Visiting Artist Symposium (Course #HUM.301). All Visiting Artist Symposium Lecture take place in Wadleigh Lecture Hall at 2:30 pm.

11 September - Jennifer Haigh, writer

Public Lecture at 2:30 in Wadleigh Conference Room
Public Reading at 5:30 in Powers 29

Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the 2004 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her second, Baker Towers, was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Both books have been published in nine languages. Ms. Haigh is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and she has taught in the graduate program in creative writing at Boston University. She has also been a visiting writer at Ohio Wesleyan, Georgia State and Susquehanna University. HarperCollins will publish her third novel, The Condition, in 2008. Haigh’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Ploughshares, Five Points, Good Housekeeping and many other periodicals.

Compass Rose interviewed Haigh in May 2007. Click here to read the interview.

18 September - Alan Metnick,
Serigraphs, Drawing, Prints, Photographs

The artist Alan Metnick is someone who might be categorized as a master printer although he does not like being pigeonholed or labeled. His photographs and silk screen prints explore a rich range of techniques and subject matter. He is drawn to silk-screening as a medium because the process allows for the saturated use of lush oil inks. Many of his pieces display colors that are deep and rich and that permeate the subsurface of the support for the work. While he does not consider himself a documentary photographer many of his works relate to world events, to history, to the Holocaust and to Israeli and/or Jewish concerns dealing with heritage, tradition, and values. He calls the photographs he takes “…in reality, documents.”

For more extensive information on this artist, please visit alanmetnick.com.

25 September - Leah Gauthier, Installation artist

Leah Gauthier was born 1963 in Chicago, Illinois. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and is an MFA Candidate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts. She is a conceptual artist using natural materials, live plants, and food as ephemeral sculptural material and performance to explore ideas of sustainability, microfarming, self-sufficiency, and community building through shared pleasures of good food and conversation. Leah teaches new media at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and has been a visiting lecturer at Tufts University, and Chester College of New England. Her work has been exhibited at Tufts University Art Center, The Revolving Museum, 808 Gallery Boston University, The Portland Museum of Art, The Burren College of Art (Ireland), School of the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Bowdoin College, Centro Pablo de la Torriente Brau (Cuba), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Longing On Highway 1 by Shaindel Beers
The Shell station is a horrible ship going nowhere. She feels lucky that it is not a Mobil station or the irony would be too much. The cars drift along on their way to Hwy 10—the only road out of this—the only town—she’s known. She stands behind the counter shifting her weight from one foot to the other, leaning forward on the counter in front of her, backward against the wall behind her.