BRUNSWICK

The story of the Androscoggin River, once devastated by contamination and labeled one of the 10 most polluted rivers in the country, is the focus of a new project set to go on display this summer at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

The exhibit derives from a cross-disciplinary, collaborative project by Bowdoin professors Matthew Klingle, an environmental historian, and Michael Kolster, a photographer, that will accompany the museum’s exhibit, “William Wegman: Hello Nature.”

The accompanying project includes photographs of the present-day river and its environs produced through a variety of techniques, including 19th-century wet-plate processes that emerged during the era of the Androscoggin’s industrialization.

Oral histories from Maine residents with personal stories about the river also are being collected for the project. Visitors to the gallery also be invited to contribute their own memories to the project.

This year also marks an important anniversary in the river’s history, according to a press release from the college.

“First, 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, authored by Sen. Edmund Muskie, who grew up along the banks of the river in Rumford and attended Bates College in Lewiston at the height of river’s pollution. Second, the Androscoggin isn’t a Maine story alone. Other iconic American rivers — from the James River in Virginia, birthplace of the American nation and home to the Confederacy’s capital, to the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania, the defining river of Philadelphia — are also waterways once ignored but recovering, if incompletely,” Klingle said in the release. “Our project reconsiders how we define and value nature in a world were we cannot escape the legacies of our history.”

Find out more about the exhibit online at http://goo.gl/ic2vB.