WATERVILLE -- Anthropology students at Colby College got a lesson in Somali culture by visiting Lewiston.

Colby senior Erin Beasley was among the students from professor Catherine Besteman's class who visited Lewiston, a city that is home to a Somali population of several thousand.

This fall Beasley and her classmates turned what they learned in those trips into an exhibit that opened Thursday at the Colby Museum of Art.

An opening reception for the exhibit that will include a dance performance by members of the Somali community is slated for 2 p.m. Sunday at the museum.

"I think this exhibit gives people a better perspective of the new group that has come into town," Beasley said.

Beasley said the project actually focused on a minority group within the Somali population known as the Somali Bantu.

Besteman is intimately familiar with the group. She and her husband, Jorge Acero, traveled to Somalia about 20 years ago and lived with some Somali Bantu.

Early last year she discovered that some of the family members from the village where she and Acero lived had settled in Lewiston -- escaping the war that had erupted in their African country.

Besteman said the exhibit features photographs taken in Somalia and Lewiston. Colby students shot the photos of the Bantu in Lewiston.

The exhibit at the museum actually is the second phase of a project started last spring. Besteman said students in the spring semester turned their work into an online exhibit -- www.colby.edu/somalibantu -- of the Somali Bantu in Lewiston.

Beasley took a big role in that earlier project.

"My job was to be the (online) exhibit designer," she said, "so I created the Web page."

Besteman said the physical exhibit is not nearly as comprehensive in its exploration of the Somali Bantu.

But it does tell a compelling story.

"The installation is more about the way in which they have successfully adapted to their new life in the United States," she said, "as well as how family is the most important building block for the Bantu community in Somalia and in the United States."

Colin Hickey -- 861-9205

chickey@centralmaine.com