COA Summer Institute Begins with Visionary Voices
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BAR HARBOR—The College of the Atlantic’s annual Summer Institute began Monday with an evening session that focused on how art can change culture. It will be followed by morning and evening sessions, Tuesday through Friday.
“This year’s Summer Institute is designed to help us understand how good ideas and good works break through. We will look to historical examples, grapple with current issues, and look forward to challenges we see on the horizon” says COA Dean of Institutional Advancement Shawn Keeley. “We believe that bringing folks together in conversation is so important today, and keeping the event free and open to the public is a way we can invite everyone in and give back to the MDI community.”
The opening session, “Changing Culture through Art” featured Thelma Golden and
Glenn Lowry.
Golden is the director of the Ford Foundation and Studio Museum’s chief curator. Located in Harlem, New York, Studio Museum is “the world’s leading institution devoted to visual arts by artists of African descent” according to the college. It was founded in 1968.
Since 1995 Lowry has been the director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA).
Introducing the series, COA Board of Trustees Chair Beth Gardiner said the series began nine years ago.
“This institute is all about ideas and people,” Gardner said. “It’s a way for us to showcase what we do here and how we think at the college.”
This institute, she said, is focused on leaders who become pathmakers, who think outside the box.
Emily Wei Rales, a Canadian-American art curator and historian who is the director of Glenston introduced the first session.
“I can’t think of two more authoritative voices” about art and culture and change, she said of Golden and Lowry.
The discussion focused on Golden’s career and the reconstruction of the museum, which Lowry called “one of the most incredible museums” in generations.
Golden said that she wanted the building to operate like life lived and to evoke the experience of the stage, which paid homage to the performing arts of Harlem and African-American culture. She also wanted the museum to reflect the spaces of spirituality and community. It has been a monumental $300 million campaign to rebuild.
“You have done something astounding,” Lowry said.
“I actually didn’t think about it that way. I couldn’t. It would feel daunting,” Golden said.
There were many people who said that level of fundraising couldn’t happen. She didn’t focus on that. Instead she focused on what it would mean to make the campaign happen.
“What made it possible was that I was always just thinking about mission. Right? I always was thinking that this is what it takes to make this happen,” she said.
The museum’s founders created the museum in 1968 as they were imagining themselves and creating an institution as resistance as well as culture making, she said.
“We were born in a moment like this, right?” she said.
What they think about most, Golden said, is where their voice is needed and how the institution and program makes a space to be a place of conversation about art and about culture. People aren’t just finding solace in art, she said, but the inspiration to move through.
“I came of age thinking of museums as static. Right? Places that were showing a particular history” that was the same, she said. But change happens and even how a person directs a museum can change or differ from a colleague’s way.
Early in her career, Golden curated an exhibit at the Whitney, “Black Male.” It caused some outrage and vitriolic attacks.
“Black Male” was a necessity to open up intellectual space for the museum and the artists. Risk is the necessity to create change, Golden said.
How work happens in the world is part of leadership, she said. Service is an important part of her leadership ethos. That’s true in the art world as well as other communities.
The 1993 biennial show was reprised because it was so impactful, Lowry said. “Leadership is about calibrating risk.”
Golden expanded on that, too, saying that leadership is where passion and purpose meet. Leadership is an evolving way to imagine yourself in your full purpose.
Earlier this year, Golden told the New York Times, “These museum experiences would exist like libraries, parks, and should be open to all.”
The museum will open with a Tom Lloyd exhibition this fall. Lloyd is an artist as well as an activist. When the Studio Museum first opened as a loft in 1968, Lloyd’s art was there.
Speakers for the Summer Institute include The Honorable George Mitchell, elephant conservationist Dr. Winnie Kiiru, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin, and former director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins. Former Literary Director of the Library of Congress Marie Arana, Democratic National Committee Vice Chair David Hogg, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden, co-founder of the Carlyle Group David Rubenstein, and others join the 20+ pathbreakers taking the stage at the institute.
Sessions will explore scientific leadership in times of crisis, principles of equality in a democracy, the promises and threats of artificial intelligence. Most are available in person or via Zoom.
SESSIONS
Tuesday, July 29
5:00 PM – 6:15 PM
The Highest Calling with Marie Arana and David Rubenstein
David Rubenstein has made a study of successful leadership. In his books and podcasts, he explores the world’s highest performing leaders and shares keen insights about what qualities shaped their rise. His popular podcast, The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations, highlights leadership through the personal and professional choices of the most influential people in business. In his book, The Highest Calling, Rubenstein chronicles the journeys of the presidents who have defined America as it exists now, what they envision for its future, and their legacy on the world stage. Join us as he speaks with Marie Arana—author most recently of LatinoLand (2024), as well as Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story and Bolivar, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress—on what great leaders have in common.
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
9:30 AM – 10:45 AM
Civil Rights and the Fight for Multi-Racial Democracy with Dorothy Wickenden and
Zaakir Tameez
Charles Sumner was a household name in his era. Friends with Charles Dickens, de Tocqueville, and Emerson, the abolitionist and civil rights crusader was called “a colossus holding his burning heart in his hand” by Henry Longfellow. Sumner coined the phrase, “equality before the law” in an argument before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1849. He was an advisor to Lincoln and an ally of Frederick Douglass. In his new biography, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, Zaakir Tameez brings back, in living color, the nearly forgotten statesman’s achievements, such as his role in helping ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Dorothy Wickenden, author of The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights, will talk with Tameez about the ideas that remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, equality, democracy, and constitutional law.
4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
The Troubles: Uncovering the Story
Daniel Zalewski
Patrick Radden-Keefe
In December of 1972, Jean McConville, a widow and mother of 10 living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was kidnapped and disappeared. In 2013, Dolours Price, the first woman to join the Irish Republican Army in the early ’70s as a front line soldier, died in a suburb of Dublin. Their stories are intertwined and revealed by the acclaimed investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in his book, Say Nothing: The True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, winner of National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Keefe will speak with his longtime editor at The New Yorker, writer Daniel Zalewski, about the moral complexity of living in the times of The Troubles, and how he may have solved the mystery of who killed Jean McConville.
5:30 PM – 6:15 PM
The End of the Troubles: The Good Friday Agreement
The Honorable George J. Mitchell
The Northern Ireland Conflict was a 30-year period of political and sectarian violence primarily between Catholic nationalists demanding Northern Ireland be part of the Irish Republic and Protestant unionists insisting it remain governed as part of the UK. Over 3,500 were killed during “The Troubles”, which lasted from 1968 to 1998. Former Senator George Mitchell was asked to chair the negotiations between the warring factions and did so “mostly by listening,” he has said. These talks successfully ended with an agreement of the parties signed on Good Friday, 1998. Senator Mitchell will talk about his time as US Envoy to Northern Ireland, and the skills politicians need today to compromise, find common ground, and restore democracy.
Thursday, July 31, 2025
9:30 AM – 10:45 AM
David Remnick (via Zoom)
Craig Kennedy (in-person)
With humor and courage, the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny began writing his memoir shortly after being poisoned in Siberia by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Navalny was Vladimir Putin’s main adversary and most outspoken critic. He survived the attempt on his life, but refused to stay in the West where he was recuperating. The 47 year-old opposition leader flew back to Russia to fight on and was immediately arrested. “‘Do not be afraid, do not give up’, was his constant refrain, and he refused to betray his own counsel and principles,” writes David Remnick in The New Yorker. Navalny finished his autobiography from a jail cell in the Polar Wolf penal colony, once part of the Soviet Gulag system. He died there July 26, 2024. Remnick and Craig Kennedy, historian and Russia expert, will discuss the life and legacy of Alexei Navalny, and the supreme sacrifice he made in the name of a free Russia.
5:00 PM – 6:15 PM
David Hogg turned 25 in April and, by then, the politician and activist has already founded not one, but two nonprofit organizations: March for Our Lives and The Leaders We Deserve. In February, he was voted in as vice chair of the DNC, the youngest in history and the first member of GenZ. Hogg is a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and his activism started there. He helped organize and amplify the 2018 gun violence protests and marches calling for sensible gun controls. Together with his sister Laura Hogg, he wrote the book Never Again: A New Generation Draws the Line. Hogg will speak with Hannah Pingree, the youngest woman ever elected both majority leader of the Maine House of Representatives and Speaker of the House, about getting young progressive people in office.
Friday, August 1, 2025
9:30 AM – 10:45 AM
Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being hailed as revolutionary, with world-changing applications in every sector from human health to e-commerce, finance, and transportation. But as the technology grows more sophisticated, the alarm bells about potential dangers—deep fakes, market volatility, weapons automatization, and uncontrollable self-aware AI—grow louder. To counter these threats are leaders in the field of human-centered AI—an approach that centers human needs and values, and help enterprises responsibly build, adopt, procure, and use AI at scale. That is the mission of CredoAI, a San Francisco-based company founded by Navrina Singh. She will speak with the CEO of The Atlantic, Nick Thompson, about creating a future in which humans can thrive.
5:00 PM – 6:15 PM
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Ted Widmer
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin has written brilliantly about US presidents who led our nation through times of great turmoil in the 19th and 20th centuries: Abraham Lincoln, and both Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt. However, in the latter part of the 20th century, she and her husband, writer and political advisor, Richard “Dick” Goodwin, knew, covered, and counseled many others in real time—men like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, and especially Lyndon Johnson. Historian Ted Widmer will discuss with Kearns Goodwin her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, about some of the most dramatic crises in our nation’s history and the people who led the country through them.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE:
ARTICLE: The Art World Before and After Thelma Golden, by Calvin Tomkins
BOOK: Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, by Connie H. Choi and Thelma Golden and Kellie Jones, Foreword by Pauline Willis
BOOK: Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, by by Darby English (Author, Editor), Charlotte Barat (Author, Editor), Mabel Wilson (Contributor)
BOOK: MoMA Now, introduction by Glenn D. Lowry. Essay by Quentin Bajac, Christophe Cherix, Stuart Comer, Rajendra Roy, Martino Stierli, and Ann Temkin
BOOK: Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, Foreword by Anna Deavere Smith, with contributions from Campbell et al.
THE SCHEDULE: COA has information about its sessions, interlocutors, and speakers on its website.
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