The Colby College Museum of Art started out in 1959 as one room in the Waterville, Maine, college’s Bixler Art and Music Center. As it approaches 50, the Colby museum ranks, at least in terms of facilities and perhaps in terms of collections as well, as one of the premier small college art museums in […]
“For the last 19 years,” says June LaCombe, Maine’s one-woman outdoor sculpture campaign, “I have been trying to get sculpture out of the white box of the gallery and back into people’s lives where it belongs.” June LaCombe is not just an art dealer; she is an art believer. She curates exhibitions of outdoor sculpture […]
Back in 2001, while preparing a cover profile of her for the Boston Globe Magazine, I had the distinct privilege of spending time with Kara Walker, arguably America’s most important African-American artist. Walker’s provocative cut paper silhouettes plumb the depths of the highly charged historic experience of African-American women. Other than my conversations with Walker […]
Susan Shatter ranks among the best contemporary American watercolor painters. Other than Andrew Wyeth, I can’t think of another living artist who has done a more substantial body of work in watercolor. Shatter’s new exhibition, “Over Seas” at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine, features more than two dozen paintings that bring the fresh, translucent quality […]
As city after city and state after state begin promoting cultural tourism in hopes of cashing in on the much-ballyhooed creative economy, art trails or museum trails have become an increasingly popular marketing tool. Maine, for example, already has a Maine Art Museums Trail and a Maine Fiberarts Tour. Now it has a Maine Folk […]
Come summer, meeting a Maine artist is no problem. Meeting a good one can be. If you want to meet a real artist in a real Maine fishing village, you definitely want to stop by to see Jill Hoy in her Stonington gallery. Jill’s paintings are joyous celebrations of everything we love about Maine: the […]
Contemporary Collaborations: Artist and Master Printer at the Portland Museum of Art features fine art prints by 30 artists who worked with master printers to create lithographs, serigraphs, etchings, aquatints, silkscreens, monotypes and mixed media multiples of all kinds. Most if not all of the artists have Maine connections, but this is by no means […]
New Britain Museum of American Art is an easily overlooked jewel in the crown of New England culture. I confess I had never been to New Britain, Connecticut, let alone to the New Britain Museum of American Art before stopping by last week on my way to a soccer tournament. New Britain on a Sunday […]
As often seems to happen with the inspiration for museum exhibitions, the idea for Georgia O’Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity occurred to Portland Museum of Art curator Susan Danly as she was looking at photographs in the museum’s own collection. The Portland Museum of Art happens to own three portraits of the […]
Vincent Andrew Hartgen: His Art and Legacy (Wildflower Lane Publishing, Twin Falls, Idaho, 2008. $55 softcover) is an affectionate and appreciative attempt by the artist’s sons David and Stephen along with Maine art critic Carl Little to document the life’s work of one of the icons of Maine art. Vincent Hartgen (1914-2002) was a fine […]
Of all the types of art exhibitions — group shows, career retrospectives, recent work, juried competitions, survey shows, exhibitions organized around periods and styles, etc. — the shows I find most satisfy are theme shows, those in which art and artifacts are assembled around a central idea. Art, after all, is a form of knowledge, […]
An elite New England prep school might not be the place you’d expect to find one of the wild men of contemporary American art having a show, but then few if any prep schools have a museum to match Phillips Academy’s Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Fewer still have such illustrious artist […]
