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 brainchild of Lee Lehto, poet and educator, who has been curating it since 2018. She proposed the idea after seeing work by Susan Webster and Stuart Kestenbaum that incorporated words and images, and Katie Helman’s exhibition Sink or Swim at the Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, which featured brightly colored paintings that included words.

“The concept is to show visual art that enhances the festival,” writes Lehto, who is a member of the planning committee. The criteria are broad, “but the work must either include actual words or letters, involve a ‘book’ form, or be created by an artist who is also a poet or writer of some kind,” she explains. In the past, the show has featured paintings and poems by Heidi Daub, and watercolors by Katherine Koch, who read from her memoir of growing up with her poet father, Kenneth Koch.

This year’s iteration offered a wonderfully diverse range of mediums and messages. Marechal Brown’s Forbidden Words highlights more than 350 words and phrases banned in various contexts by the Trump regime. Brown printed them on silk pages and clipped them to lines strung across the gallery like Tibetan prayer flags.

Cynthia McGuirl’s Orek Orok, a shaped accordion fold book, gets its title from the book artist’s grandmother and her aunt, refugees of the Armenian genocide who lived in Aleppo, Syria, in the 1920s. After her grandmother, Rebica, moved to America, the two women corresponded. Her aunt addressed her letters “My Dear Orek” and “Orok.” In this video, McGuirl explains the significance of the names as well as how she assembled the piece.

You have to look closely to make out the letters in the word “always” that appear in Susan Webster’s mixed media construction of the same name. Suspended off the wall, casting a dynamic shadow, the piece resembles an abstract puppet.

As he explained in the Maine Arts Journal a few years ago, Stuart Kestenbaum began creating his “blackout poems” while co-teaching a workshop with Webster that combined visual arts and writing at the Penland School of Craft in 2016. Using books found at the Take It or Leave It Building at the Deer Isle Transfer Station, he activated a “call and response” between title and highlighted text. In Cabinet Meeting, the highlighted sentence “You seem unprepared for this” undercuts the title. (The current cabinet members appear to be over-prepared—to kiss the ring, that is.)

Jan Owen created The Mind’s Eye during the pandemic. Working from her “mistake file,” she selected papers to cut circles and then combined them to balance text, colors, and patterns. She filled the faces with words, thoughts, and ideas, as she imagined “walking on a busy sidewalk wondering what each person was thinking, what words had filled their eyes.”

Other featured artists included Kristie Billings, Helman, Annaliese Jakimides, Lehto, Anne Oldach, Abbie Read, Elaine Sexton, and Sandy Weisman. Poets Arisa White and Jakimides read at the opening.

 

 

The 2025 Word. Festival featured a wide range of talks, workshops, and readings, including presentations by Roxana Robinson, Colin Woodard and Alicia Anstead, Kate Moses, Andrew Revkin, Paul Doiron and Elizabeth Hand, Phuc Tran and Noel Paul Stookey, and George Emlen. Scenes from the 2025 festival in this article from The Ellsworth American.

 

Image at top: Lee Lehto, ABC Cup, porcelain and alphabet macaroni (photo: Carl Little).