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 2024: The Unconscious, the Unknown, the Unsaid
Springing from our celebration of Surrealism, officially born a century ago, we called for contributors to reflect upon a concept central to the movement: the unconscious. We combined the notion with a few related ones: the unknown and the unsaid. This theme, we noted...
Lesia Sochor
Two years ago I began a deep dive into the notion of repair. This came from a personal internal wound and morphed to include domestic and global issues. Using the image of intentionally ripped jeans (which to me seems irreverent and almost brutal to the fabric), I...
Paul Heroux – Forlorned Figures
The present crisis is impossible to ignore. This plague has an image. Illustrations and photographs of the virus are everywhere, unlike other pandemics. Many artists are incorporating it in their work. The word forlorn describes the condition we are now in, lonely and...
Maggie Libby
"Acknowledge native land." This statement is written on unceded Wabanaki territory (nativeland-ca), on land taken from the Abenaki of western Maine and New Hampshire, and the Wabanaki tribes of Maine and the Maritimes, the people of Dawnland, that is, the Mi’kmaq,...
Hank Brusselback
I’ve been making little books full of drawings, thoughts, and paintings since the '80s. The first one was a handmade book of xeroxes about a trip across the country, with some watercolor splashed around. Now, I have different tools to gather up various kinds of art...
James Boorstein – Box3Productions: COVID Entry 26
It should go without saying that we are here now. In Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic Nora Gallagher inked a simple and important question: "What is real now?" What is real now? is a wonderfully simple and rich question. Not so easy to answer. We tend to...
Lucy Lippard – Feminist Art in the Trump Era
The idea for Feminist Art in the Trump Era emerged during an Axle Contemporary/Axle Art Board meeting. The founders of the mobile artspace, artists Matthew Chase-Daniel and Jerry Wellman, are joined on the Board by three women: Diné curator Andrea Hanley, art...
Kathy Weinberg – Year of the Comet
Although I have many daily habits that serve as anchors or guides, I am currently experiencing a fragmentation of time, as if life has become a verb, a present tense. The future, currently opaque, is a horizon within a fog. I say, too many times a day, “We’ll see,”...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Inhale
Back in April, when there were YouTube videos of doctors in scrubs showing us how to disinfect everything we brought home from the grocery store and the sense of the impending pandemic felt to me like waiting for a hurricane to strike, I was invited to be interviewed...
Kenny Cole – Currents and Threads: A Chronological Self Reflection
July 18, 2020 The virus surges: my mind shuts down. In 2008, shortly before Barack Obama was elected, I began a series of text drawings. I anticipated that he would win, and my thoughts were already onto the idea that language would play a huge role in the upcoming...
Alan Crichton – America: Nowhere/HereNow
Artists! Aroused witnesses! Awaken our stunned senses! Daily, even hourly, our outrage has not dimmed, nor has our courage. Our work rises from our darkness and aloneness, out of nowhere yet now here, unfiltered, unrequested, insistent, necessary, true as wind, sea,...
Bridget Matros – 2020: Creativity’s Big Moment
Am I the only one who is sick of the word “pivot”? Ask any business owner, administrator, non-profit director, or service provider how they’re doing since the arrival of COVID-19. You’ll hear it, along with adapt, re-think, strategize, tweak, retrofit, reinvent,...
Brita Holmquist – How’re you doing?
Up until 2020, I thought of myself as the Angel Gabriel with my flaming sword of justice, ready to defeat evil in the world, but now I now identify with N.C. Wyeth's illustration Blind Pew in Treasure Island. Each day brings a new horror that I have no way of...
Estha Weiner – Poetry
Estha Weiner grew up in Portland and attended Portland schools before heading to New York for college and her adult life. In this first poem, “As I look Down on you, I love you,” set in her New York City apartment, we can feel another form of the weight of social...
Linda Aldrich – Poetry
In Linda Aldrich’s prose poem we recognize the life we all entered into this spring, a life that involved the isolation and many questions and unnerving uncertainties brought on by the pandemic. We are presented with the specific uncertainties and anxiety of one...
Jane Bianco – Implicit Bias
As I repeat often enough about polymath Jonathan Fisher, religious belief directed his life as the congregational minister in Blue Hill, Maine, but his encyclopedic interests nourished his mind and soul. Raised and educated in Massachusetts, he lived from 1768 until...
Véronique Plesch – Conversation with Abby Shahn
This is the transcript (with small edits) of a conversation SPEEDWELL Projects organized in the context of the exhibition Abby Shahn—50 Years. The show had opened on 21 March and COVID caused it to close just a few days later, before an opening could be held. On 19...
Carl Little – Leon Benn: Relinquishing Collective Grief
Painter Leon Benn has described himself as a “transcriber of drawings and visions pertaining to the landscape.” In Gardening Techniques, his first solo show at Grant Wahlquist (3 June–23 August 2020), Benn followed through on that self-designation with bravado,...
Dan Kany – I Can’t Get There from Here
This year was going to be an adventure. On January first, I found myself in Saudi Arabia, away from my family and starting a new job. While days before I had toasted 2020 with a formidable phalanx of friends in the snowy crisp cold of Maine, I stepped into a whole new...
Members’ Showcase: Ann Tracy, Harold Garde, John Stormer
Ann Tracy Waters seethe with the blood of my black brothers and sisters Staining those hypocrite Christians who don't believe we are all children of god Waters seethe with unanswered questions about the struggle for justice Keep your head above the waters and...
Members’ Showcase: Sean Hasey, Lin Lisberger, Mark Nelsen
Sean Hasey I am sure Learning to Paint a Swastika is an oversimplification of a particular ideology. I honestly don’t even know if the sentiment is true. Then again, in the words of R. Giuliani, “truth is not truth.” Maybe this painting is little more than a meme,...
Members’ Showcase: C E Morse, Ruth Sylmor, Amy Bellezza
C E Morse Days of turbulent emotions: despair, apprehension, hope, and confusion. Ruth Sylmor Throughout the world, people struggle with Coronavirus and the pervasive, continual stress associated...
Members’ Showcase: Laura Waller, Linda Gerson, Eva Rose Goetz
Laura Waller I feel out of it. Everything is touched by this Pandemic but most of all, I feel out of it without people. And so, I paint what I miss. First, I painted friends and relatives as large faces that...
RABKIN FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES GRANTS TO JOURNALS
The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation of Portland, Maine announced grants to nine non-profit visual art journals. Artists, galleries and museums are struggling to survive. Writers and editors of America’s visual art journals are also in need of our support. The...
ARRT! – Update Fall 2020
ARRT! The Artists' Rapid Response Team (ARRT!) is a project of the Union of Maine Visual Artists. The ARRTists are members of the UMVA who collaborate with progressive organizations throughout Maine to create “visual soundbites,” frequently in the form...
LumenARRT! – Update Fall 2020
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...
Richard Kane – On the Road with Robert Shetterly and his Portraits of Americans Who Tell the Truth
My times with Robert “Rob” Shetterly began 21 years ago when he arrived at my editing studio with an armful of videos of Robert Hamilton, a painter of great imagination and invention who was living in Port Clyde. Rob’s visit that day resulted in our making the...
Richard Kane – Maine Masters Monthly Film Series Screens Free on Vimeo
For the benefit of all members of the Union of Maine Visual Artists, we will screen one Maine Masters film every third Thursday and Friday of every month beginning October 2020. Free Promo Codes will be provided via email to every paid member. Schedule: October...
An Un-Still Life – Upcoming Film about Natasha Mayers
Coming soon! NATASHA MAYERS: AN UN-STILL LIFE Several years in the making, Natasha Mayers: An Un-still Life, will be available at the...
Pat and Tony Owen – From the Archives
A Birthday Wish in the Form of Propaganda When we think about the meaning of history, it brings up a dark, empty place that is best forgotten. It's easy to ignore it, because we are confronted daily by the immediate. History, as taught in school, gave us wars...
UMVA Portland Chapter Update Fall 2020
UMVA Portland Chapter meetings are held at the Portland Media Center, 516 Congress Street, every third Monday of the month from 6–7:30pm, and are open to all interested members. The Portland Chapter runs the UMVA Gallery at the Portland Media Center in the heart of...
UMVA Members Invited to Add Pages on Website
ATTENTION all UMVA Members! We are currently moving toward a new website where members will be able to create and manage their own pages. While we don't have a timeline, we hope this will happen sometime mid-2024. At this time, due to a web-page limit that we...
Theme and Invitation for Winter 2021 – Maximalism: Courting Chaos or Creating Order?
Maximalism: Courting Chaos or Creating Order? Welcome to 2021! The year 2020 certainly felt like too much, so please join us in finding our way forward. In the arts, maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an esthetic of excess and redundancy. The...