About

The Project

The Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project brings a guest artist to Bowdoin College for one week every semester to produce an edition of  prints with the aid of current printmaking students. This gives students the opportunity to participate in an intensive workshop with a nationally renowned artist. In the process, students learn new techniques of printmaking and encounter different approaches to image-making. At the end of the project, each student keeps a print created with the visiting artist.

The project opens with a lecture which is open to the community, bringing attention to the art of printmaking. Also included is a visit to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art to view its collection of etchings by Marvin Bileck (which were on view along with Emily Nelligan’s drawings during the 2000 exhibition Littoral Abstractions).

Marvin Bileck and Emily Nelligan

Artist Emily Nelligan started the project in honor of her late husband, Marvin Bileck, a lifelong artist and teacher. He served as Professor Emeritus of Queens College, New York, and his work has been described by critics and art historians as comparable to such artists as Holbein and Rembrandt. The couple lived on Cranberry Island, Maine during the summer months for many decades, a landscape reflected in Emily Nelligan’s atmospheric charcoal drawings and Marvin Bileck’s detailed etchings. The couple’s work is often exhibited together.