News Archive 2009-2018

‘Why Draw?’ Bowdoin Art Museum’s Recently Concluded Exhibition Draws Glowing Praise Archives

“Bathsheba,” ca. 1724, pen and brown ink and brown wash, by Sebastiano Ricci, Italian, 1659–1734.

Writing in the international journal New York Arts, critic Michael Miller had high praise for Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s recently concluded exhibition “Why Draw? 500 Years of Drawings and Watercolors at Bowdoin College.”

The show, which can still be viewed online, highlighted the Museum’s extensive collection of drawings, established more than two hundred years ago and regarded as the first in the country. While presenting a show structured around this impressive collection, this exhibition “enriches the experience by asking a fluid complex of questions inspired by the drawings themselves—determined ultimately by the aims and activity of the artist,” wrote Miller.

“If this exhibition and its catalogue achieve nothing else (and they do achieve a great many things),” he went on to write, “they bring home the vastness and multiplicity of the art of drawing—its lack of limitations.” Read Michael Miller’s review of “Why Draw?

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