Introduction to Fall 2018: Dialogue
Dialogue This issue shares the response to our call for dialogue. The contributors give examples of artists engaged in a conversation with a place, with their own thoughts, through time, or in response to the work and stories of another. It was an opportunity to...
Introduction to Fall 2018: Dialogue
Dialogue This issue shares the response to our call for dialogue. The contributors give examples of artists engaged in a conversation with a place, with their own thoughts, through time, or in response to the work and stories of another. It was an opportunity to...
Susan Smith — Dialogue: The Necessity of Agency
The bed was a vintage wrought iron frame. The trailer was for sale on Craigslist. Hundreds of second-hand shoes. These have become the materials of my art practice. In an age where people more and more talk past one another, living in the echo chamber of their own...
MOTHER TONGUE — Mary Bernstein
MOTHER TONGUE ‘Real dialogue is where two or more people become willing to suspend their certainty in each other's presence.’ David Bohm Mother Tongue is a community visual Dialogue which I started with a partner Terry Rumble in the early nineties. This visual...
Touch Me, by Katy Kelleher
Katy Kelleher was invited to write an essay for the Maine Arts Journal, having experienced, on the front line, a Dialogue break-down on a social media forum. As a writer she has much to offer the visual arts by thinking in an original way. She has written a piece for...
Greta Bank: Our Digital Dialogue
I’ve recently been reading the book ‘A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things’ by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (University of California Press, 2017). This is a fantastic summary of the way capitalism created the ecology that we are currently lost in. I hope you...
Kyle Patnaude: Utter Silence
When we speak today of initiating dialogue, what we achieve more than not is diatribe. Entrenched speakers compete against another without genuine exchange of thought. Yet it's diversity of thought that makes us human, not solipsism. Sincere communication is obtained...
Abby Shahn and Mark Melnicove — Dialogue
Grudge-holding ghosts have traveled Grudge-holding ghosts have traveled great distances to your funeral, but you were cremated years ago. Why are they still obsessed with marking your death, rubbing it in as if you were sand underfoot? Have they no other...
Birds of a Feather — Waldman-Plesch+Plesch-Waldman
Waldman-Plesch+Plesch-Waldman discuss the beginnings of their collaboration and their dialogue with the history of museums One of us was born in Buenos Aires, the other in Detroit, but the art collective now known by the name of Waldman-Plesch+Plesch-Waldman, which...
Lori Tremblay: Painting the Story
When I hear the word dialogue the first thought in my mind is that of a relationship. In a philosophic context, all meaningful relationships are sustained through dialogue: it is how we get to know someone or something by spending time and conversing. As a...
In Conversation with the World: Alan Gussow’s Watercolors — Carl Little
The artist-activist Alan Gussow (1931-1997) carried on a conversation with his surroundings all his life, whether he was visiting Monhegan Island or running alongside the Hudson River. He managed to combine his environmentalism with his art. And he often turned to...
The Appearance of Things: Jocelyn Lee Dreams a World of Women — Edgar Allen Beem
One of the clichés of art appreciation is that a work of art must speak for itself, but that is only true to a point. The knowledge that we bring to a viewing greatly determines what the work of art says to us. The way an artist thinks about her work does not have to...
Dialogue: Photographer Scott Anton and art model Paula Kany by Daniel Kany
The following is a conversation between Solon-based wet-plate photographer Scott Anton and my wife, Paula Kany, who has worked with Scott for years as an art model. Paula isn't comfortable with the term “model,” and that is probably the inspiration for this entire...
Chancing into Charlie: Dialogue with artist Charlie Hewitt by Daniel Kany
On a hot July morning, I stepped into Ace Hardware in Falmouth for some silicone rubber sealant. While I was standing in line to pay, I noticed a bunch of small works by Erin McGee Ferrell. I picked one up to take a closer look. They were small, thick panels with...
Estha Weiner Poetry — Introduction by Betsy Sholl
Here are two poems by Estha Weiner, who grew up in Portland and Falmouth and now lives in New York City. Her sense of irony and of how to create characters and a sense of dialogue through the briefest suggestion come in part from her training in the theater. Estha...
Margaret Yocom Poetry — Introduction by Betsy Sholl
In these poems, Margaret Yocom offers a new vision of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s controversial “Allerleirauh” (“All Kinds Of Fur”), a lesser-known version of “Cinderella” that opens with incest. Erasing the Grimms’ words to reveal a young woman’s story of her journey...
5 Tips for Creating, Sustaining, and Growing School Partnerships — Andrea L. Curtis, Farnsworth Art Museum
This fall, the Farnsworth Art Museum will begin its eighth year of the Stories of the Land and Its People program, a yearlong in-depth project-based learning experience that connects art and student curiosity to curricular learning in the classroom. Since the...
One and All | Collaboration as Dialogue — Bethany Engstrom
Ideas are not real estate. In collaboration one can accept the fact that someone else can be so sympathetic and in tune with what you’re doing, that through this they move into depths that might not be obvious if that person had been working alone in a studio with the...
Interpretation of an Artist Mother — Lisa Jahn-Clough
Life is a composite of many things—people, friends and family, pets and homes, music and food, sea and sky, ideas and art. Elena Jahn, my mother, had an overflowing abundance of all of these. She made herself a good life; a life that was full of art to the core. She...
UMVA Member Showcase — Diane Dahlke, Gregg Harper, CE Morse, Ragna Bruno-Torkanowsky, Anne Strout
Diane Dahlke A dialogue with time My dialogue is with art history, thinking about how my own sensibility intersects and is influenced by paintings of the past. One of my interests is Vanitas, the idea that the brevity of life should lead us away from materiality to...
VOTE! 2018
Maine artists are participating to help get out the vote in Maine's 2018 election and the Maine Arts Journal is featuring their efforts here! Click on images below to see them larger. [gallery link="file" columns="2" size="medium"...
Creatives and the ACA: A letter by Genevieve Morgan
This letter —a part our national dialogue— dated June 11, 2018, was signed by numerous members of the creative community and sent to our Senators and Representatives. Dear Senators King and Collins and Representatives Pingree and Poliquin, By now I’m no stranger to...
ARRT! Artists’ Rapid Response Team! Update
The images created by ARRTists become vibrant components of communities throughout the state and over time find many uses, often framing important messages and bringing groups together. As a project of the UMVA, ARRT! creates images for progressive non-profits...
UMVA-LA Chapter Report
UMVA-LA has had a wonderful summer season starting with our annual exhibit “Pride: What brings pride to your life?” at Kimball Street Studio. This exhibit included works from artists who take pride in what they do. We also enjoyed sharing works with our community,...
UMVA Portland Chapter Report
Portland UMVA has had a great summer of gallery shows including its 2018 summer members' show in July, painter/mixed media artist Matt Demers' fabulous exhibition of new abstract paintings titled “Everybody's Talkin' at Me” in August, and the always engaging Addison...
Invitation to Contribute: Winter Issue 2019: Sketchbook
Sketchbook There is a sense of privacy between the closed covers of a sketchbook. It can be a place of fresh discovery where something new is hatched or it can serve as an archive. There is a sense of time in a sketchbook. It is a stand in for a calendar with the...