LEWISTON — Featuring artists Joel Babb of Sumner and Barry Nemett of Maryland, two exhibitions dedicated to drawings will open Saturday, Oct. 10, at the Bates College Museum of Art.

A reception will be held at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30, in the museum at Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Nemett, chair of the painting department at the Maryland Institute College of Art, will talk about his work and sign copies of his 2009 book, “Paintings, Poems, and Passages,” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, in Olin Arts Center’s Room 104.

Babb’s exhibit, “The Process Revealed,” will be up until March 26, while Nemett’s “Drawings from Italy” will remain up until Dec. 18. Open free of charge, the museum’s hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday.

Through Babb’s exhibit, curator Bill Low investigates the roles of both the act of drawing and the drawings themselves in the production of paintings. Commonly thought of as by-products of the act of creating paintings, drawings are works of art in their own right. Illustrating the creative process by pairing preparatory drawings with finished paintings, this exhibition reveals the stages of work that go into resolved art.

The exhibition will display works from three of Babb’s many areas of interest: cityscapes, wilderness landscapes and figural works.

Nemett presents landscape drawings made during travels to Italy. He has received numerous awards, including two from the Alfred and Trafford Klots Residency Program to paint in Brittany, France, and a Ford Foundation grant to support his work in Italy.

In 2003, Babb’s work was the subject of a major exhibition at the Bates museum titled “Intimate Wilderness.” Nemett has also exhibited widely, including the National Academy Museum in New York, the Rochefort-en-Terre Museum of Art in France and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya, Japan.

He is also the author of a novel, a textbook and a collection of both writings and art. He has been on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 1971. In 2006, he worked as an artist-in-residence at Bates.

To learn more about these exhibitions, visit www.bates.edu/museum.xml.