Ubart at USM
To honor and celebrate the forty-year creative career of artist, educator, and collector Juris Ubans, who is retiring from the University of Southern Maine faculty in August, the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery has mounted a sumptuous exhibition that fills the little gallery on the Gorham campus (through February 15) not just with art […]
By Edgar Allen Beem|Jan 31 2009|
Dale Chihuly, "Rose Pink Venetian", 1990 13 x 16 x 16
Photo Credit:To honor and celebrate the forty-year creative career of artist, educator, and collector Juris Ubans, who is retiring from the University of Southern Maine faculty in August, the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery has mounted a sumptuous exhibition that fills the little gallery on the Gorham campus (through February 15) not just with art by Juris Ubans but with what curator Dennis Gilbert calls “a life-in-art,” a congenial coming together of art by Ubans, his former students, his colleagues, his friends.
“What makes this exhibit so exceptional as a retrospective,” writes Gilbert, a close friend and fishing buddy, in the marvelous catalogue essay for Ubart: A Juris Ubans Retrospective, “what elevates it to the level of meta-work in the artist’s oeuvre – is its success in capturing the compelling creative force of the entire career, the true spirit of conviviality: this is art as feast and art as fellowship.”
Juris Ubans came to USM in 1968, when it was still Gorham State Teachers College, and has been a creative life force there ever since. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, Ubans was born to art, the youngest of three sons of Konrads Ubans, one of Latvia’s best-known painters. Displaced by World War II, the Ubans family, minus his father, made their way to the United States in 1950. He studied at Syracuse University, Yale, and Penn State before coming to Maine.
Ubans’s own expressionist paintings form the nucleus of what is essentially a salon show with Ubans as the common denominator. The exhibition features 150 works by 60 artists. Among the name artists Ubans has collected are photographers Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, and glass master Dale Chihuly. His influence, however, has been more important than the art he has created or collected.
Juris Ubans is a cultured man, visually literate not only as a painter but also as a photographer and filmmaker. Something about his personal investment in the life of art communicates a sense of confidence that art is vital. Further, he possesses a knack for instilling that confidence in his best students, inspiring them to dedicate themselves to their talents and to look beyond Maine for an audience and a dialogue.
Three of Ubans’s prot
Every week I look for Ed Beem’s insights, and I am never disappointed. Few writers in New England share his knowledge and passion for art, and more importantly, for the artists. I moved to Gorham in the winter of 1970 and enrolled at what was then Gorham State College. I became friends with Eric Hopkins, and got to know Juris Ubans through my friendship with the artist Patt Franklin. He was full of energy and life and love of art, and he made what at the time was a not so well known college in Maine into a first rate destination for aspiring artists. Thanks, Edgar, for letting our readers know.