Yeti at Bates

Yeti at Home at Bates

This weekend’s Bates College Cryptozoology Symposium will bring together artists and cryptozoologists, for the first time, as far as I know, in a credible academic setting. It is the kickoff to the June-October 2006 exhibition, and will have a good schedule of talks on cryptozoology, art, science, creativity, and more. One change in the talks is a cancellation of Rachel Berwick for personal family matters, to be replaced by June O’Neill, discussing The Great New England Sea Serpent. The weekend should be informative and fun.

I am also happy to announce that the Museum has pulled together a mini-exhibit of items that will now be on display for this Friday-Saturday (October 28-29) free gathering. They will be of cryptozoological importance.

In a special vitrine at the Bates Art Museum, from my private and others’ collection, you will be able to see the alleged hair of Yeti from Edmund Hillary’s 1960 expedition, the alleged hair of Yeti from Tom Slick’s 1950′s expeditions, a cast representing the 1951 Yeti footprints found by Eric Shipton and Michael Ward, Ralph Izzard’s Abominable Snowman Adventure (1955) turned to Wladimir Tscernezky’s reconstruction of the Yeti, my first personal copy of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961), with the original dust jacket, the Laird Meadows 1964 Bigfoot cast, a 100-year-old okapi representation that was popular with children after this animal’s remarkable discovery, Maine College of Art’s Sean Foley’s Nessie painting, and the photographic imagery of a woman in a stream as “Patty.”

Also, there will be available for viewing, for the first time, a large eighteen-inch-tall bronze sculpture of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot, created and cast in 2005 by artist and retired professor Richard Klyver of Eastport, Maine, formerly of Pennsylvania and Africa. Klyver spent many years in Africa studying living antelopes, chimpanzees, and other wildlife, and brings to his sculptures a true sense of “aliveness” in the fluid motion he captures.

All of these items (and other art that may be added before the symposium) will hint at the exhibition to be opened there next summer entitled “Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale.”