Maine Arts Journal Winter 2026 cover (Susan Groce, Reach (detail), graphite on paper, 11 x 14 in. [photo: Marydale Abernathy]).
The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Original Art and News from Maine’s Community of Visual Artists
Winter 2026: Words and Images
In this issue of the Maine Arts Journal, contributors share their work and thoughts on the theme of Words and Images, engaging with the question of why visual artists would put words in their works, their motivations, and their purpose for doing so. Why would one want to combine the visual and the verbal, two modes of expression that are fundamentally different? As our contributors ponder these questions, they explore the creative process, and evoke action and contemplation, intuitive spontaneity and thoughtful reflection, artist and work, message and medium.
From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, and Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Michelle Lewis and Colby College interns Sofía Escobar Amaya, Cynthia Li, and Winnie Ulland.
For the issue’s contents, scroll down.
A journal devoted to the work of contemporary Maine visual artists, digital artists, and photographers, writers and their work.
The Union of Maine Visual Artists is proud to produce the Maine Arts Journal, with generous contributions from the Rabkin Foundation, Kent Gordon, and other donors. The MAJ helps us promote and advocate for the visual arts, artists, and all arts supporters.
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Featured work from The Winter 2026 Issue of the Maine Arts Journal
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Winter 2026: Words and Images
As I read through this issue and consider the theme of words and images—or, better put, of words in images (since our contributors are visual artists)—I am reminded of an early medieval anecdote, recounted in the Libri Carolini (a book commissioned by Emperor...
Tollef Runquist
Inspiration for the text in my work comes from early exposure to the bombastic narratives of comic books and the constant stream of text on screens—video games, dialogue boxes, notifications. I’m drawn to the patina of time on street posters and the way meaning erodes...
Carl Little: Laylah Ali’s Activations
In a statement on the Joan Mitchell Foundation website, Laylah Ali offers this note on her art: “My work deals with the amalgam of race, power, gendering, ambition, human frailty, murky politics, and the other complex combinations that we so often treat as separate...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Waiting for the Words
Did you ever misunderstand an assignment in school and go to class with the wrong project? Susan Webster and I had that dream-like experience back in 2003 when Bruce Brown, then curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, invited us to be in an exhibition of...
Carl Little – Shanna Compton’s Closed-Captioned Collages
Poet Shanna Compton’s new book, Deep Whoosh (Black Square Editions), offers fifty cut-and-paste collages created over four months in 2020. As a way of taking her mind off the news, Compton writes in the book, she “spread out a pile of materials, grabbed my X-ACTO...
Susan Groce
Since the late nineties I’ve been keeping little black travel journal notebooks—quick onsite diaries filled with meditations on place—actual and fabricated, both text and image. They are based mostly on travel in Canada, Australia, and Europe, often in austere and...
Véronique Plesch – Moving Paint, Writing Memories: A Conversation with Stephen Hannock
Artist Stephen Hannock has many ties with the State of Maine, starting with his having attended Bowdoin College and continuing to this day with his on-going collaboration with Camden-based Two Ponds Press. The connection with the press’s proprietors, Liv Rockefeller...
Claire Millikin – The Land Speaks: Margaret Wickens Pearce’s Cartographic Medicine
Will we forever be erased? No, it is here our footsteps we must trace back to the source. —Carol Dana (Penobscot Nation) The artifact known as Powhatan’s Mantle is described by the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, UK), where it is held, as a ceremonial cloak, probably given...
Carl Little – Abbie Read: A Library, a Lucky Quilt, and Layers
Since settling in Maine in 1998, Abbie Read has been creating extraordinary art—mixed-media wall pieces, collages, artist books, prints, watercolors, and more—from her ARTgarden studio on Appleton Ridge. Among her most celebrated works are assemblages that incorporate...
Ryan Adams
My artistic practice began with the use of letters and letterforms through writing graffiti in my youth. The art of graffiti writing is centered around creatively bending and abstracting letterforms as far as they can while still maintaining their function and...
Véronique Plesch – Words in Graffiti: A (Mostly) Visual Essay
This might have been the very first time that I photographed graffiti. As a budding art historian, the quote featured in this mural struck me: “Art is anything you / can get away with / Warhol.” Little did I know that, forty-two years later, I would end up using this...
Graffiti in Battery Steele, Peaks Island
Battery Steele (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Battery Construction #102) is a United States military fortification on Peaks Island, Portland, Maine, in Casco Bay. Completed in 1942 as part of World War II, it is located on 14 acres (5.7 ha) on the ocean side area of...
Placards from No Kings Day Rallies
Here is a selection of some placards photographed in June 2025 at No Kings Day rallies in Bath, Wiscasset, and Dresden/Richmond by David Griffin, Natasha Mayers, Liz Starr, and others. We think they effectively combine words and images. ...
Edgar Allen Beem – Maret Hensick: Flowers Past and Present
From just after her mother died in 2019 until shortly before her own death in 2025, artist Maret Hensick worked on a series she called Flowers Past and Present. The mixed-media paintings presented flowers from her own garden in Woolwich almost as botanical...
Carl Little – Diverse Words and Images, Messages and Mediums in Blue Hill
This year’s Word, Blue Hill Literary Arts Festival, the ninth annual iteration, featured a special words and images exhibition at the Cynthia Winings Gallery. Eleven artists showed work that incorporates words of one sort or another. The four-day show is the...
Véronique Plesch – Images and Words
I must confess that as I sit down to write this issue’s “Art Historical Musings,” I am quite daunted, to say the least. This is different from the trepidation I usually experience when I write (in my introduction to the 2025 Winter issue on Stuck! I shared the turmoil...
UMVA Showcase – Winter 2026: Adam Daley Wilson, Mark Melnicove, Liz Starr, Laura Dunn
Adam Daley Wilson My text-based pieces propose—first—that such a thing as Post-Theory Art may be seen in relation to traditional conceptual art and—second—that such a post-theory art and practice can be defined as substantive theory-making by an artist, in any medium,...
UMVA Showcase – Winter 2026: Lesia Sochor, Jan Owen, Susan Webster, Marjorie Arnett
Lesia Sochor Words have played a role in my work on and off for years. When I do choose to use them, it is with a specific message I wish to communicate. The incorporation of text with an image can enhance, add layers of meaning, provoke thought, proclaim and exclaim....
UMVA Showcase – Winter 2026: Stephen Burt, Jon Luoma, Liz Moberg, Amy Tingle, Heather Newton Brown
Stephen Burt I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2016; as a result, I began to question my approach to making art, which has, for some time now, centered on calling attention to both the beauty of nature and the ravages of climate change. With the ticking of...
UMVA Showcase – Winter 2026: Kenny Cole, Mark Barnette, John Ripton, Kelly Desrosiers
Kenny Cole For me, using text in my art can be a way of establishing a non-aesthetic entry into aesthetics, a pedestrian doorway or foothold into an otherwise unfamiliar realm for an innocent viewer. Text can be viewed opaquely or transparently, the latter meaning...
Carl Little – Baron Wormser: The True Fire
Near the end of September, I sent an email to Baron Wormser to let him know I had quoted him in a review of a show of Ralph Steadman’s work at the Bates College Museum of Art. The Art New England review began: In a recent Substack posting on the subject of "Law and...
Baron Wormser Tribute – Marcia F. Brown, Glenn Morazzini, Dawn Potter, Ian Ramsey, and David Stankiewicz
This poetry section of the journal is dedicated to the work of Baron Wormser. Baron was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000–06, a beloved teacher, mentor, and friend to many writers. He published twenty-one books in all genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. A new book...
ARRT! Update – Winter 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 – Winter 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...
UMVA Portland Chapter Report
The Portland Chapter of the Union of Maine Visual Artists held a meet up on 22 November 2025 at the home of our VP, Kimberley Harding. Members discussed the prospectus that Ann Tracy is developing for the May 2026 exhibit at the Oak Street Lofts Gallery, the only show...
UMVA Midcoast Chapter Update – Call for Art: Bodies in Motion
We invite UMVA artists to submit their original artwork for our juried exhibition, Bodies in Motion. Bodies in Motion can be human or animal bodies; celestial, astrological, or cellular bodies; bodies of water, etc. Work can be representational, but it doesn’t have to...
Joanne Tarlin – A letter from the UMVA President
Hello Artists and Friends of the Arts, I’m writing to you as the President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (the UMVA) to inform you that artists throughout Maine have been uniting, not dividing. Our members are creating, not destroying. They are bringing people...
Tony Owen – Just Look, Will Ya
We recently attended a local community artist event. It was organized by a visual artist friend who worked with a curator to produce a series of events that would capture the essence of the people who lived there, the history of the place, the mythology and folklore,...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Spring 2026: The Shape of Time
Time is fleeting and yet is ever present: it is a reality we must all contend with, try to tame, ignore, or even hope to control with “time management” techniques. Our relationship to time is profoundly meaningful, its perception is linked to our psychological state,...