(Camden, ME) Camden photographer Jim Nickelson is currently pursuing a major project, his Nightfall series. The work explores iconic landscapes and the night sky between dusk and dawn. The first image from the Nightfall series, Otter Cliffs, was taken a few months ago in Acadia National Park and has been selected to be included in the upcoming Starstruck international fine art astrophotography exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art opening next summer. For more information on the show, please click here. A second image of Nickelson's, Thunder Moon II, was also selected to be in the show and is part of his Adventures in Celestial Mechanics Project.

Jim has a number of trips planned for this winter in Maine as part of the Nightfall project and says that he is “looking forward to capturing snow-covered night landscapes in particular and is excited to see how this project develops.”

To see more of Jim's work, please visit www.jimnickelson.com.

The Bates College Museum of Art is a laboratory for the visual arts. Providing an environment for broad audiences to explore and discover synergies created by visual art across academic disciplines of a liberal arts education, we represent the new academic museum for the 21^st century. The museum works collaboratively with artists, students, faculty and other museums to create exhibitions, which offer new scholarly explorations and educational programming linked closely to our communities.  Through original exhibitions, programming and a growing collection the museum transcends its commitment to expanding traditional notions of art history and identifying specific artists and artistic trends that address local and global issues in context.

Academic museums have become a powerful force in American culture. Devoted, like their college and university affiliates, to the missions of education and scholarship, these museums make daring and provocative forays into new artistic territory, presenting the work of artists from a striking variety of backgrounds and perspectives. The Museum of Art is taking a leadership role in redefining the Academic art museum for the 21st century. Dedicated to challenging explorations into visual culture and contemporary art through exhibitions and educational programs the museum represents a new cultural space where diversity is championed and the local is as significant as the global.

Today many college and university museums like Colby, Bowdoin, and the University of Maine on the Maine Art Museum Trail are cultural leaders in a museum world defending itself against an environment increasingly dominated by commercialism. Unlike traditional academic museums that became insular by looking to the past for answers about the past, the museum views itself as a new academic museum and cultural leader resisting commercialization. Our museum is dedicated to introducing new ideas and questions about how art transcends and reflects history in our current times, and presents the possibilities of what is to come. It is a laboratory for creative thought, a site of synergy where artists, curators, scholars, students and visitors engage art together.

In support of our new mission and its challenge to traditional museum methodology we recently received a generous gift to the museum: a “synergy” fund dedicated to “the development of education, with focus on the synchronistic parallels in time and space across the subject matter of the liberal arts.” The Synergy Fund supports the museum’s efforts to look more creatively at how it organizes exhibitions and how it experiences and communicates that process. It is a space of adventure, exploration and mystery where more questions are asked than answered, where process is as important as the results.