We hope you will read, explore, and enjoy all the many essays. Share the issue with friends and family, consider submitting your work, subscribing (it’s free), and joining the Union of Maine Visual Artists. Please let us know if you have any comments or concerns about this issue or ideas for future publications. All feedback is valuable to us.
This August, the Maine Arts Journal was one of nine non-profit visual art journals to be awarded an unexpected grant from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation of Portland, Maine, for general operating support. We are thrilled and grateful to be a recipient of this grant and proud to be in such great company with these other publications!
–From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Kathy Weinberg, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), and Colby intern Andrew MacDonald.
Please click on cover image to go to the Introduction of the current issue.
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Spring 2025: In Times Like These
The theme description that appeared in the winter issue of the Maine Arts Journal asked contributors to consider how their work and their role as artists reflect the times of upheaval we live in. We mentioned the global ruptures of climate change and wars, the erosion...
Ian Trask – Between Two Truths
I want to play a part in building a safer, more equitable, and empathic society—of that much I’m certain. What’s unclear to me is how exactly I should go about doing that. Where and how should I direct my energy? My inclination is to build a relatively small and...
Edgar Allen Beem – Tanja Hollander: Art As an Act of Empathy
Tanja Hollander is a photographer best known for her Are You Really My Friend? project in which she photographed all 430 of her Facebook “friends.” Neither pure portraits nor straight documentary photographs, Hollander’s Facebook pictures are conceptual images that...
Hale Linnet – Brazen Bandits
The Brazen Bandits are a newly formed artist collective of trans-non-binary artists in Southern Maine. Boots Shertzer (they/he), Sampson Spadafore (they/them), and Hale Linnet (they/them) met at a creative retreat organized by Maine TransNet in 2023, and have been...
Dan Mills – In Times Like These: Chronicle
For much of my career I have used the conceptual space of maps, extensive research, and a painter’s vocabulary, to abstractly visualize information about historic and contemporary topics and events. I combine media including painting, collage, drawing, and printmaking...
John Bell – Peter Schumann’s Bedsheet Paintings
This article first appeared as John Bell, “Pictures and Puppet Performance: Peter Schumann's Bedsheet Paintings.” Puppetry Research International 1.2 (2024): 1–24. This is an edited version of the original article. Late in his life, and influenced by the isolation of...
Carl Little – Nick Heller: This Is What I See
On the “about” page of his website Nick Heller shares two quotes. The first comes from poet-activist John Trudell (1946–2015): “When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and...
Anonymous – Maine Artists in Brooklyn, with a Reflection by Véronique Plesch
Maine artists are making paintings about immigration issues, Gaza genocide, the destruction of our democracy, nuclear Armageddon, native American language, DEI, boycotts, etc. that are now hanging in public spaces in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in those six-foot tall...
Alan Magee – A Testament to What is Best in Us
"Look for the helpers." —Fred Rogers Robert Shetterly's Americans Who Tell the Truth Robert Shetterly's Americans Who Tell the Truth is a singular masterpiece comprised of many parts—a synthesis of art, biography, American history, and civic engagement. It is a...
Brooke Holland and Anthony Lufkin – In Times Like These
Knowing that in the presidential election divisive opinions would be amplified this year, we wanted students to start within their classroom to build a community where we listen to each other and find where we can relate. Photography and film classes started off with...
Véronique Plesch – Bearing Witness
Visual art does not—and cannot—exist in a vacuum. Even the most escapist of paintings can be seen as a response to circumstances, an emphatic refusal to engage with unpleasant, challenging, or distressing realities. As I reflect upon this issue’s theme and the times...
Claire Millikin – If Art Could Save Us: Film Review
This January, I joined those viewing Mary Louise Schumacher’s extraordinary film, Out of the Picture, at the Portland Museum of Art. Out of the Picture answers mourning with energy for renewal. Elegiac, investigative, and defiant, Schumacher’s film holds up a mirror...
Stuart Kestenbaum – At the Wall
The day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I was in Berlin, standing at what’s left of the Berlin Wall. I was at the East Side Gallery, which is a series of murals painted on the east-facing side of a 4,300 foot remnant of the wall. It was created in 1990 by 118...
Reed McLean – An Unstill Time: Long Live the River: Aretha Aoki, Ryan MacDonald, and Meghan Brady
It has been a cold winter, the first normal winter in years. The Androscoggin River is clogged with ice on its way to the ocean. As we drive along it I think of the rivers I have known. First is this river’s tributary, the Little Androscoggin, which begins at Bryant...
Rosa Lane – Poetry
In times like these, how important it is to listen and recognize our shared humanity beyond dictates of facile binaries. Rosa Lane’s book of poems, Called Back, is a tribute to Emily Dickinson, her linguistic originality, her fierce passions and complexity. Each poem...
Claire Millikin – Poetry
In Claire Millikin’s poem “Of Angels,” beyond the personal, there is a broader narrative of relationships, of destruction, of the difficulty in our time of distinguishing truth and fiction, angels and devils, kindness and abuse, and what is happening to our climate....
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Peter Buotte, Kenny Cole, Titi de Baccarat, André Benoit
Peter Buotte To address the theme, In Times Like These, I offer Will He Escape? Yes . . . (2023–24) and Orange Mist (2024–). Like two previous paintings Sinking Raft (2021) and Falls of Conspiracy (2022), Will He Escape? Yes . . . fuses the culture of spectacle and...
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Stephen Burt, Philip Brou, Krisanne Baker, Marcie Jan Bronstein
Stephen Burt Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others? —Martin Luther King, Jr. This...
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Tom Paiement, Michael Torlen, David Estey, Camille Kouyoumdjian
Tom Paiement Craziness surrounds us. We are complex creatures. This imagery reflects my reaction to the political climate we are immersed in at the moment. It disheartens and discourages me. The coarseness we are exposed to in much of the dialog we encounter from our...
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Elizabeth Starr, Yvonne Maiden, Donna Festa, Taylor Newbeck
Elizabeth Starr I have always loved to see the presence of words in visual arts, words worked into the design, to become part of the form, as well as a message. These particular words (lies) were birthed from acute frustration, and even shock, at what I was hearing...
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Lesia Sochor, Nora Tryon, Natasha Mayers, Pat Wheeler
Lesia Sochor Love of my ancestral homeland and horror at the merciless, brutal unprovoked invasion of Ukraine compelled me to paint images of Babushkas. This iconic symbol of a culture stirs memories of my mother, who in her later years wore one most every day. In...
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Richard Wilson, Laura Waller, M. Annenberg, Marjorie Arnett
Richard Wilson The first time I realized I was living in a polarized environment was in 1968. The assassinations, riots, and war made it impossible not to have a point of view. It seems that some things weren’t done for the good of the country. Information became a...
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Joanne Tarlin, June Kellogg, Sandy Willcox, Emily Sabino
Joanne Tarlin I have not painted the ocean before moving to Maine. Beginning in 2024, I have felt compelled to paint the sea's turbulence in the wake of violent storms, literal and metaphorical. June Kellogg – In These Times As an artist, what do I do in this...
UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Sally Stanton, Karen Adrienne, David Wade, James McCarthy
Sally Stanton Fraught. Stomach-angst. Enraged. Powerless. Betrayed. Unsettled. Incredulous. Ashamed. Helpless, hopeless, and heartbroken. My recent work mirrors how I feel as I weather the continuous, worsening, deliberately outrageous, unconstitutional, often illegal...
ARRT! Update – Spring 2025
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 – Spring 2025
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...
Tony Owen – An Anthem for These Times?
Talking the other day after dinner we wondered why there were no new musical anthems. Songs that would inspire us and make us feel there was a universal purpose to the collective oppression many of us feel right now. We wondered where the likes of Woody Guthrie’s...
UMVA Portland Update: UMVA Artists Deal with Change at Portland Public Library
The Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA) presents a unique exhibition of work dealing with change from both environmental and personal perspectives as constant change impacts the world as we know it, or used to know it, at the Portland Public Library, 5 Monument...
UMVA Midcoast Update: UMVA Dark Skies Exhibit: Yearlong Effort Yields Impressive Results
The recent UMVA Dark Skies exhibition, in partnership with Belfast’s Waterfall Arts (WFA) and Dark Sky Maine, was by all measures a tremendous success. Not only did the exhibit gather a sizable crowd of roughly 240 people at the opening and 800 visitors overall during...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Summer 2025: Encounters
Life, art, and people are shaped by encounters—with other people, places, events, artworks, books, subjects, media, techniques, forms of expression, themes, ways of doing, ways of thinking, ideas, emotions, problems, crises, losses, surprises, and discoveries. Some...
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Winter 2025: Stuck!
In our theme description and call for submissions, we reproduced a photograph in which we see Joan Mitchell in her Parisian studio. The artist sits on the floor, surrounded by unstretched canvases bearing the webs of her distinctive colorful gestural skeins. She looks...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Stuck!
I know that this is a meta moment: getting stuck writing an essay on the theme of being stuck when writing. The truth is, stuck is the start of all my writing. Poised at the shore before diving in. And it’s the rocky shore of the coast in Maine, where even on the...
Marjorie Moore: A New Order
Stuck is a weird word, is there a word unstuck? We are asked to tell the reader what we do as artists when the practice seems to be in stasis or limbo. What are the steps we take to undo the condition? This past year I found myself in a mixture of grief and loss. I...
Lin Lisberger – STUCK!
For forty-five years I have been making sculpture (in series) and keeping an occasional journal. Reading over my current journal of the past several years I was surprised to see how often I have been stuck! As any artist will tell you, this is not an uncommon...