LEWISTON – The Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston will be the subject of a half-hour profile as part of “The Maine Art Museum Trail” series, an original production of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. The program will be broadcast at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 20, on the television stations of MPBN.

Featured prominently in the program will be the Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection along with a discussion with museum director Mark Bessire about the influence Hartley had on those who followed him to Maine, artists of such renown as pop art icon Robert Indiana, author of “The Hartley Elegies,” and Carl Sprinchorn, in whose work Hartley’s influence is clearly evident.

Also examined is the importance placed on performance art at Bates College, which is the academic home of William Pope.L, one of the country’s preeminent performance artists. The program features a segment in which his students engage their unwitting colleagues in a dialogue on race and the effects of globalization as part of a piece called “The Black Factory.”

The televised profile of the Bates College Museum of Art represents the sixth installment of “The Maine Art Museum Trail,” a series that made its debut on MPBN in 2003.

The seventh and last show in the series, profiling the Colby College Museum of Art, will be broadcast a week later at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 27, followed by a back-to-back rebroadcast of each of the other six programs in the series. Other museums that have been spotlighted include the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, the Portland Museum of Art and the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor.

For further information or for high-resolution video stills from the program, people may contact MPBN Marketing and Communications Manager Lou Morin at 1-800-884-1717.

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