MAJ Cover Fall 2020. Cover art: Lesia Sochor, The World, wax sticks, watercolor, and gouache, 10 x 10 in., 2020.
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 Fall 2026: Mapping
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Fall 2026: Mapping On 4 September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the draft resolution “Correct the Map,” aimed at rebalancing global cartographic standards and promoting equitable proportions for the world’s regions,...
Billy Gérard Frank – The Sea Is History . . .
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. —André Gide I was born on Petite Martinique, the smallest of Grenada’s sister isles, situated in the Grenadines archipelago between Saint Vincent and Grenada in the...
Edgar Allen Beem – Molly Holmberg Brown Paints with a Cartographer’s Sense of Place
Molly Holmberg Brown is an artist, scientist, athlete, and mother. She has made a name for herself as an artist who paints maps. Her business, MollyMaps, combines cartography and fine art in painterly maps that are not aids to wayfinding but rather orient viewers to...
Carl Little – Jane Crosen and Maine’s Pictorial Map Tradition
My brother David Little has a thing about maps. In all four books we have worked on together, David insisted we include some cartographic images to help orient the reader to the territory we were covering: Mount Katahdin, Acadia, Portland, and Penobscot Bay. David...
Natasha Mayers – Mapmaking Across Maine
I have been making maps on and off since 1981, when I was pregnant and needing to put the artist (me) at the center of her universe before she was knocked off-center. They were fanciful, colorful, subjective, semi-abstract maps, creating my own map vocabulary and...
Claire Millikin – Mapping the Edge of America: Holdfast!
A strangeness at the heart of the national project has motivated American art since the early years of our history as a colonized land. Before contact, this land we call America was not strange to the Indigenous people living here. It was home. But colonization...
Ronald Leax – To Delineate as a Map: An Analogical Mapping Practice
Base Cap Notions Map: To delineate as on a map, also to explore, survey, etc. To chart the course of; to plan in detail. I am an object and image maker. I operate within the dynamics of matter and idea. The studio is the environment where these dynamics interact. It...
Véronique Plesch and David L. Simon – Harriett Matthews: A Life Mapping Place
To consider the legacy of Harriett Matthews is to chart a life defined by an enduring fascination with place, physical movement through diverse topographies, deep spatial observation, and a career spent engaging with space, form, and environment. Whether navigating...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Finding the Way
Back when tail-finned Cadillacs and Buicks roamed America’s highways, gas stations gave out free road maps. Even before I was old enough to drive, I was attracted to these maps. I loved the way they folded and stacked in the glove compartment. I could run my fingers...
Todd Watts – From LA to Sedona
I was driving across the desert trying to find a discreet place to stop. The desert was flat, dry, and still. The only motion was the traffic and some distant wind turbines. I left the parade and pulled up next to some large boulders. Stepping behind, I startled a...
Harriet Matthews Tribute: Abbott Meader, Tom Higgins, Duncan Hewitt, James Ffrench, Luke Johnson
Harriett Matthews (21 June 1940–23 June 2026) Earlier this summer, on 23 June, Harriett Matthews passed away, leaving a house and barn filled with a lifetime of artwork. By a felicitous coincidence, our fall issue is dedicated to Mapping, a theme made all the more...
Poetry – Julia Bouwsma
In this edition of the Maine Arts Journal, we are celebrating our two most recent Poets Laureate. Julia Bouwsma is the outgoing laureate, and Dawn Potter is the incoming one. Both of these stunning poets have a strong attachment to the land and to Maine. Both have...
Poetry – Dawn Potter
And now, our new Poet Laureate, Dawn Potter. Both of these poems map literal spaces, one by a train ride across the Northeast, and the other by following a brook as it moves through all its channels and seasons. “The Lakeshore Limited” is a long, Whitmanesque poem,...
Rachel Sperry – Photography and Mapping
One would think that photography and mapping would not have that much in common, but I think they do. They both depict the three-dimensional world and shift it into a two-dimensional world. Photography accomplishes this feat simply because it records the...
Véronique Plesch – The Cartographic Impulse
For a child educated in French schools, a plastic map of France was the indispensable companion of geography lessons. Tracing the contours of the “Hexagon”—as the country is often called—served as the foundation for studying its topography, river systems, and...
David Whelan – David Dewey
David Dewey has painted subjects around his home in Rockland, Maine, for decades, often returning to the same scene at different times of day throughout the year to capture fleeting moments of light and shadow. I wondered if his watercolor paintings could also be...
UMVA Members Showcase – Fall 2026: Dan Mills, Janelle Delicata, Amy Bellezza.
Dan Mills – Visceral Cartography: Projects on Colonialism, Conflict, and Culture Last year the Maine Arts Journal published an essay that focused on the series Chronicle: Colonizing the World Since 1400, and included an overview of my working process. This present...
UMVA Members Showcase – Fall 2026: Alison Hildreth, Noah Apple, Jon Taner.
Alison Hildreth Since the beginning of recorded history (and likely before) mankind has been making maps. Going back in time to ancient Babylon, the discovery of a 7500-year-old map of the world confirms the belief that maps have been central to our understanding of...
UMVA Members Showcase – Fall 2026: Paula Gerstenblatt, Faylinda Kodis, Charlotte Agell.
Paula Gerstenblatt – Transversals: Reverberations Across Contested Lines My love for maps began in childhood, rooted in the tactile joy of unfolding a paper AAA map, spinning a globe, or flipping through a street atlas tucked into my parents' glove compartment. Maps...
UMVA Members Showcase – Fall 2026: Peggy Diggs, Natasha Mayers, Mary Becker Weiss, Jane Page-Conway
Peggy Diggs – Mapping Mapping has the ability to go way beyond locating or situating. Since a map is a representation, it can serve as a symbol: to identify, typify, name, or characterize. Think of cartoons, where a map might be personified and identified as a...
ARRT! – Fall 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 – Fall 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: Fall 2026
“Right Now!: Processing the Moment” presents some of the creative responses to the time we are living through, including what is happening in Maine artists’ studios, on social media, or in the streets. It is increasingly difficult to focus on other issues when the...
UMVA Update – Fall 2026
Dawn is a time for awakenings. To that end, the Dreaming at Dawn exhibition lived up to its theme by awakening patrons of the Bangor Public Library to the artistic talent all around them. The Union of Maine Visual Artists opened its biggest exhibition of the year on 1...
Tony Owen – Even with the Best Map We Find Uncertainty
We recently adopted a dog from a rescue center. Her owner had died in a house fire. His dogs (all three of them) were in a shed attached to the house. Fortunately, the shed escaped the flames, and the dogs, although traumatized, were saved. The dogs were taken in by a...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Winter 2027: Looking at the Past
We are continuously shaped by the past and encounter it throughout our personal, emotional, and creative lives. Whether through personal recollection, familial heritage, or the broader currents of history with a capital H, the past is never fully behind us—we are in...
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...