LEWISTON — Fifteen studio art majors at Bates College, one of them from Maine, show work from their yearlong thesis projects in the annual Senior Exhibition, which opens with a public reception at 6 p.m. Friday, April 8, in the Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St.

 The exhibition runs through May 28. Admission is free. Regular museum hours run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, please call 786-6158 or visit www.bates.edu/museum.xml.

 Senior Exhibition artists are: Clyde Bango, Harare, Zimbabwe; Bridget Brewer, Portland, Ore.; Kirsten Gill, Jackson, N.H.; Sara Ellen Godek, Laconia, N.H.; Uriel Gonzalez, Von Ormy, Texas; Meredith Greenberg, Ridgefield, Conn.; Jenna Ligor, Denmark, Maine;

 Also, Kimberly Neubert, North Haven, Conn.; Lauren Okano, Rock Springs, Wyo.; Mareika Phillips, West Hartford, Conn.; Hannah Porst, Madison, Wis.; Phoebe Reed, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Diane Saunders, Durham, N.C.; Anna Skarstad, Pleasantville, N.Y.; and Marta Solomianko, Plainview, N.Y.

 Since its dedication, in 1986, the museum has maintained a special relationship with the college’s department of art and visual culture, expressed in part by its support of studio art majors through the Senior Exhibition. As required by the studio art major, exhibiting students create a cohesive body of work through sustained studio practice and critical inquiry.

The yearlong process is overseen by members of the AVC faculty: during the fall semester by associate professor Pamela Johnson, and during the winter semester by senior lecturer Robert Feintuch, who also curates the exhibit and oversees its installation.

 “This year’s exhibition includes wire and ceramic sculpture, figurative and abstract painting, digital photography — both ‘straight’ and Photoshopped — collage and embroidery, a site-specific drawing and a relief sculpture made from corrugated cardboard,” says Feintuch. “Artists’ subjects range from childhood memories of a village in Zimbabwe to spinal processes as sculptural forms.

 “All of the seniors have worked hard, and many of them have progressed in leaps and bounds in these last few weeks. I think my seniors learn an enormous amount about what is possible when you limit possibilities and bring all of your attention and focus to one thing.”

 Bango makes wire models inspired by the traditional huts in his native Zimbabwe’s rural areas where he sometimes stayed. “My artwork is merely a glimpse of my home. No models could do justice to the rich culture of our rural communities,” says Bango. “I hope to make art that celebrates creativity from under-resourced communities and to inspire kids who may have never realized what they make is art.”

 Brewer designs cardboard houses filled with characters, rendered in intricate line drawings, that tell stories. “It’s through obsessive redrawing of my figures that I discover their personalities and quirks,” she says. Sharply contrasting the humorous and the grotesque, the pieces explore the question: how do you laugh at a cruel world?

 Sewing is essential to Gill’s work, both responding to its stereotype as women’s work and gratifying her own love for the craft. Gill sews to add texture to her paintings, layering cloth over the surface, but this practice also represents “an exploration of femininity and feminine beauty,” she says. “It’s a way for me to explore on a personal and intimate level the complexities of a subject that I myself can’t easily resolve.”

 “My work is a manifestation of my irrational thoughts,” says Godek, who is inspired by recurring nightmares about dead bodies. Working with her hands to fashion skeletal forms out of clay helps her come to terms with these fears. “When clay is wet it is really flexible,” she says, “and that gives me the liberty to invent skeletal forms for creatures not yet discovered or imagined.”

 Gonzalez combines his love of two media by drawing on a transparency that he superimposes on a photo he has taken. While his work taps indigenous art from Mexico, Central and South America, he has also been influenced by the Mexican tattoo artist Dr. Lakra. “I aim to explore the identity of Latinos without offending or misrepresenting them,” he says. “These images show pride — an element I see missing in popular portrayals of Latinos.”

 Greenberg’s harshly lit self-portraits reflect the Expressionist tradition, a genre of painting that fascinates her “both for its unremorseful aesthetics and its ability to unmask the emotions often held in check by our superegos,” she explains. She overpaints her images with a variety of media. “Both physically and metaphorically, creating these paintings allows what lies hidden and dormant in me to surface.”

 “I work with what is real because I think it is both interesting and challenging,” says Ligor, who photographs street views in black and white. “I roam the city on a mission of discovery, searching for the extraordinary in the ordinary. My goal is to always be present in the world as a receptive observer.”

Inspired by artists like Andy Warhol, Neubert explores the relationship between “high” and “low” art by incorporating into her oil paintings diverse other materials, such as glitter paper and paper towels that she cleans her brushes with. “My goal is to make something that is visually cohesive and has a strong physical presence,” she says. “Ideally, my viewers will attach their own meanings to each painting.”

 A self-professed, “biology nerd and art lover,” Okano is fascinated by the way things are made up of smaller parts. “I photograph the same two steel bridges at various times” and under different conditions, she says. She takes apart their structures and surroundings with the camera and digitally composes those parts into a new image. “I am not attempting to elicit one specific response from my viewers,” she says.

 Inspired by photographer Sally Mann, Expressionist illustrator Alfred Kubin and Symbolist artist Odilon Redon, Phillips aspires to Mann’s notion of seeing “the beauty [as well as] the dark side of things.” Inspired by an e.e. cummings poem referencing the arrival of winter, Phillips represents that season — “muddy, bleak, barren and muted” — in layered multimedia works that strive for beauty, timelessness and psychological power.

 Porst’s photography is inspired by her junior-year stay with the Q’eros people of the Peruvian Andes, a group designated a “national living cultural patrimony” for the continuity of its ancient traditions. In her images, Porst seeks to convey “the love, joy, perseverance and intrinsic integrity that suffuse [the Q’eros’] individual personalities and cultural character.”

 Porst has received a 2011 Davis Project for Peace award to help build the first primary school in the Q’eros village of Ch’allmachimpana this summer.

 Reed describes herself as “fascinated by the intricacy and amount of detail that exist in nature — the underside of a mushroom, an elaborate root system or in tree bark patterns.” She creates drawings using pencil, fine-tipped pen and embroidery floss on a variety of papers, repeating and layering her marks to create depth, dynamic shapes and rhythm.

 Saunders’ art arises from an examination of political and topographic maps and ways they represent the human desire to organize information. Straddling abstraction and representation, she uses various media to draw maps that portray objects, worlds and locations, real and imaginary. “This body of work is my attempt to integrate cartographic stories,” she says. “It is both micro- and macroscopic, and blends fact and fantasy.”

 Skarstad’s approach to painting has progressed from making representational landscapes into abstraction. Abstraction allows the work to be “about the paint on the surface, and not the specific landscape being depicted,” she says. “It’s about how colors and forms interact.” Her work, she says, is “simply an experiment in complexity of mark making, diversity of stroke, building and rebuilding, and delicious color.”

 Family history inspired Solomianko’s paintings: In 1990, her parents emigrated from Poland to the United States. Starting “with images of May Day parades, Solidarity protests and American suburbs because of the political content they suggested,” she explains, “I eventually became more interested in their pattern-like qualities.” Her paintings compose a series, each evolving from the previous one, and she seeks to overwhelm her viewers with intricate detail and repetition.

 After graduation, Solomianko will work in the Project 2048 artists residency program in San Francisco, a residency she was granted on the basis of her current artwork.