Around 1990, I was at the Hartford Atheneum where there was an iconic Eva Hesse sculpture, a grid consisting of small rubber washers resting on a platform about one foot high and three by three feet. For a moment, I am alone with the work. Then a young person enters...

Wandering through Homebodies, Nancy Andrews's recent solo show at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, a visitor couldn’t help but remark on the range of materials activated by the artist who makes her home on Mount Desert Island. A short list would include fabrics,...

Rosamond Purcell is known for her photographs taken in natural history museums and, to quote from the title of an article in the Atlantic magazine, for her “eye for anomaly.” She captures the fragmentary, the misshapen, and the unusual, while reflecting upon science...

Art Is Everything, Everywhere, All the Time Back in 2011 when I visited artist Wally Warren at this home, a roadside art attraction in rural Ripley just west of Dexter, the white snow made the brilliant works of art in his yard and festooning his home even brighter....

The jolt experienced when encountering a beautiful and vital object informs my work as an artist. Some things are conduits. Some are agents or surrogates, symbols or codes. I create sculptures from these things, with additions from my libraries of paint, glue,...

In July of 2023, the textile artist Diedrick Brackens was an Artist in Residence at Indigo Arts Alliance (IAA), an arts incubator space based in Portland, Maine. IAA’s mission is to build global connections by bringing together Black and Brown artists from diverse...

My first step of engagement with most of my material is starting a plant from seed, tending it as it grows and then harvesting the edible parts. The real magic happens with what is left in the field or garden. This medium greatly impacts my work because it is never...

Jocelyn Lee’s images are borne of nature. To walk into a room lit with her work is to look out at the universe itself—planets and moons, bright galaxies, nebulae, dark matter—all of it expanding, so much to examine that we are no mere onlookers but nineteenth-century...

Internationally renowned artist Andy Goldsworthy’s first permanent project in Maine entitled Road Line was commissioned by the College of the Atlantic. Goldsworthy was in residence during August to supervise and direct the placement of 1500 linear feet of granite...

I. Memory Preserved I was born in the island nation of Japan and spent my early childhood years in the Bay Area in California. Being born to the water and spending the formative years of adolescence by the ocean imprints a certain physiological ember of presence. On...

Opposite materiality in art is its negation, its “dematerialization.” The term first appeared in an essay Lucy Lippard wrote with John Chandler in 1967, which was published the following year in Art International (1). This foundational essay had enormous impact on art...

When I was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, it was thrilling to see makers at work in the studios. Their love of the materials of craft—clay, metal, fiber, glass, wood, paper—was palpable. Each studio building had its own spirit of research and...

The door is about to open and we are ready, in our element, poised for the reveal. A brief pause and an inhale—I imagine the skeptical faces of my neighbors. This is what I have for you; will you have it? Then life arrives. The overflowing throng of every generation...