LEWISTON — In the summer exhibition “Dahlov Ipcar: Blue Moons & Menageries,” the Bates College Museum of Art presents a wide array of artworks — many of them being exhibited publicly for the first time —  by one of Maine’s best-known artists.

Organized by the Bates museum, “Blue Moons & Menageries” opens with a public reception from 7 to 9 p.m. on Friday, June 8, and a gallery talk at 3 p.m. on Saturday, June 9, by Rachel Walls, an authority on Ipcar and the proprietor of Rachel Walls Fine Art in Cape Elizabeth. 

Located in the Olin Arts Center at Bates College, 75 Russell St., the museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Saturday. Exhibitions and programming are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6158 or museum@bates.edu.

The daughter of prominent modernist artists, Marguerite and William Zorach, Dahlov Ipcar (1917-2017) reached a wide audience through the many children’’s books she wrote and illustrated. She also maintained a steady studio practice, producing paintings, sculptures, and prints that are widely represented in public and private collections.

Ipcar was the first woman — and, at age 21, the youngest artist at that time — to be featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

A 1999 graduate of Bates, Walls is a curator and gallery owner who specializes in Ipcar’s work. Her talk, titled “Into the Menagerie,” will afford Walls an opportunity to share her detailed knowledge gained from representing Ipcar’s art and from their long friendship.

An illustrated catalog, with an essay by Sara Torres, education researcher at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, will support the exhibition and be released after the exhibition opens.

Drawn mainly from private collections and spanning the artist’’s long career, the works featured in “Blue Moons & Menageries” include fanciful and colorful paintings, playful soft sculptures of animals, and original illustrations from many of Ipcar’s beloved children’’s books.

Comprising the upper and lower galleries of the museum, “Blue Moons & Menageries” will feature a reading area for visitors to read Ipcar’s stories aloud with their children. Animal-spotting and other family-oriented activities will be available to visitors, and additional public programs will be offered in the early fall of 2018.

Those will include an art-pedagogy panel discussion on Friday, Sept. 7, featuring catalog essayist Sara Torres; Wendy Woon, the Edward John Noble Foundation deputy director for education at the Museum of Modern Art; and Kate Cargile, art teacher at Lewiston Middle School and the 2018 recipient of the Maine Art Education Association’s Outstanding Service to the Community award.

For more information, visit bates.edu/museum andfacebook.com/batesmuseumofart, or contact museum@bates.edu or 207-786-6158.

“Blue Moon Square” is a 2007 oil painting on linen by Dahlov Ipcar.

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