Maine Arts Journal Summer 2026 cover (Anneli Skaar, Signum, 24 x 36 in., 2015).
The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Original Art, Essays, and Poems from Maine
Summer 2026: Light
Our summer issue celebrates light. Our contributors answered the invitation to think about the fundamental challenge of representing this physical, yet immaterial, reality, indispensable to life and to vision. We invited them to explore the meanings this enduring theme takes on, beyond a passive “light in the dark” toward an active quest for enlightenment, revelation, discovery, and creation.
From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Rose Marasco (photography editor), and Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with Colby College intern Winnie Ulland.
For the issue’s contents, scroll down.
A journal devoted to the work of contemporary Maine visual artists and writers.
The Union of Maine Visual Artists publishes the Maine Arts Journal through the generous support of the Rabkin Foundation, Kent Gordon, and our donors. The MAJ is our primary vehicle for advocacy, championing the visual arts and the community that makes them possible.
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Featured work from The Summer 2026 Issue of the Maine Arts Journal
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Summer 2026: Light
Our summer issue celebrates light. Our contributors answered the invitation to think about the fundamental challenge of representing this physical, yet immaterial, reality, indispensable to life and to vision. We invited them to explore the meanings this enduring...
Lucy Preston and Winnie Ulland – L.C. Bates Museum Summer 2026 Exhibition
What follows is the script and slides from the PechaKucha Night presentation delivered on 10 April 2026 at the Strand Theatre in Rockland, Maine. The L.C. Bates Museum is an important local natural history museum in Hinckley, Maine. Its encyclopedic collection...
Anneli Skaar – Chasing the Blue Hour
Even at a young age, I was keenly aware of light, especially how it shifted during my family’s annual summer trips to Norway to visit my grandparents. This was back when travel felt long and tedious, without the ease of today’s transatlantic journeys: just a knapsack...
Michael Branca – Some Light Thoughts
In one particularly poignant and memorable chapter of Walden, Henry David Thoreau devotes several pages to the color and clarity of the water in the pond. His descriptions are uncanny, not just in their lyrical prose but also in what they reveal about the observer:...
Edgar Allen Beem – Luminous and Numinous: Emily Nelligan in Shades of Gray
In Emily Nelligan’s (1924–2018) charcoal drawings—almost all of which depict landscapes and seascapes around Great Cranberry Island off the south shore of Mt. Desert Island—the world is manifested in shades of gray as though twilight were eternal and fog a constant....
Elise Klysa – Shining a Light on Those in the Shadows
While drafting this essay, I saw an obituary in the Washington Post about the passing of Brian Lindstrom, a filmmaker who created documentaries that shone a light on society's underdogs and inspired change. He was described as wanting to tackle challenging topics with...
Claire Millikin – Lights, Camera, Music: Ming Smith’s Jazz Requiem
This spring the Portland Museum of Art housed American photographer Ming Smith’s exhibit Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue (6 February–7 June 2026). I found myself pulled to the show repeatedly while it was on offer in Portland, each time discovering solace and grace in...
Carl Little – Leon Benn’s Violet Hour
Light plays a central role in Leon Benn’s new suite of paintings shown recently at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. The illumination is at turns eerie, wavering, blurred, artificial, ominous, and uncanny. The title of the CMCA exhibition, The Violet Hour, infers...
Carl Little – Gail Page: Light and Energy
Last September, I drove to Sedgwick to meet Brooksville-based artist Gail Page at the Reversing Falls Sanctuary. Page was showing abstract paintings, aesthetically miles away from her wonderfully whimsical and celebrated images of dogs, cats, and other creatures. The...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Both/And
The day I began to think about writing this, scientists at NASA, using the radio waves from multiple telescopes on our small planet, captured the first images of a black hole fifty-five million light years away. Because black holes are so dense that no light can...
Lily Brown – Poetry
“Take My Waking” is from Lily Brown’s book Blade Work, which just won the 2026 Maine Literary Award for poetry. It seems in this early morning light, the speaker has willed herself awake from a troubling dream that has left her “mid-cycle, midnight / amidst dream, and...
t love smith — Poetry
In “Outside Today,” t love smith creates a portrait of more than weather, a study of how the speaker weathers negotiating between self and world and the desire to be seen for who they truly are. An “interrobang” is a punctuation mark that combines a question mark with...
Fran Vita-Taylor – Photography
It is with great pleasure that I introduce this new feature on photography. With Light as this issue’s theme, it’s the perfect occasion to inaugurate a column dedicated to the medium. The root of the word photography is photo, meaning “light,” and graphy, meaning...
Véronique Plesch – Solar Musings
At the Maine Arts Journal, we work beautifully as an editorial team, sharing the responsibilities in the preparation of each issue. The process starts with choosing a theme and drafting the description that appears at the end of the current issue to announce the topic...
Victor Sabbatini – Alexander Reitman’s Divine Light
The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. —Arthur Rimbaud, “Letters to the Seer” I Entering Alexander Reitman’s studio-cubicle, located on the top floor of Colby’s art department, my eyes were immediately drawn to the pile of books framing the painter’s...
Caitlin Hutt and Samantha Maheu – The POWER of Light
I. Through the Darkness In his 1968 “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed this: “only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” Fifty-eight years later, our nation faces issues that parallel those of the great social...
UMVA Showcase – Summer 2026: Lee Chisholm, Tim Van Hook, Jo Trafford, James McCarthy.
Lee Chisholm Light. We live in it. We see by virtue of it. “See” in an outward sense—as when we behold colors reflecting off of opaque things, such as that new-mown lawn over there, or shining through translucent, transparent things, such as our atmosphere. There are...
UMVA Showcase – Summer 2026: Buzz Masters, Ed Nadeau, Marcie Jan Bronstein, Todd Watts, Ruth Sylmor
Buzz Masters During the past two years, I have been recognizing how my current work is influenced by artists I knew in my childhood. This has led to the landscape seeping into my work (the majority of those artists painted what they saw around them). I have found I am...
News About the MAJ Archive
The Maine Arts Journal is thrilled to announce that our earliest issues have now been added to the archive. Using ISSUU, we digitized in PDF format the eleven issues we published between the Summer of 2014 and the Winter of 2017. While physical copies were available...
ARRT! Update – Summer 2026
ARRT! (The Artists’ Rapid Response Team!) works with progressive groups and organizations throughout Maine, providing images that can help to distill and clarify their important messages about issues that matter to people in Maine and the world beyond our borders....
LumenARRT! Update – Summer 2026
LumenARRT! is a project of the Artists’ Rapid Response Team (ARRT!). We work through the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), a members’ organization that advocates for artists and furthers the work of progressive non-profits in the state of Maine. Our video...
Right Now! Processing the Moment
We believe there is power in witnessing how our community of artists respond to the moment. Many of us feel despair over the erosion of our rights and the integrity of our democratic process, as each day brings another onslaught. Our new feature in the Maine Arts...
UMVA Chapter Reports
UMVA Brunswick Group On 26 May—by far the most beautiful afternoon of the spring—seven intrepid UMVA members from the Brunswick area (including Harpswell and Dresden) gathered for the inaugural UMVA ShOWS UP workshop. (The acronym stands for Sharing Opportunities,...
Tony Owen – How the Light Gets In
June stretches itself out, and the long days that follow make me think anything is possible. Here in Ireland, at 10 p.m., the darkness keeps its distance. I can still see across this valley and pick out features in the landscape as clear as day, and those few birds...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Fall 2026: Mapping
Maps are a constant presence in our daily lives, yet we seldom reflect on the fact that they are based on conventions and specific sets of codes. They are abstractions—diagrammatic representations that help us make sense of our world and orient ourselves within it....