The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Materiality
Fall 2023
From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Sofia Escobar Amaya and Audrey Loo.
The Union of Maine Visual Artists is proud to produce the Maine Arts Journal, with generous contributions from the Rabkin Foundation and other donors. The MAJ helps us promote and advocate for the visual arts, artists, and all arts supporters. Learn more and become a UMVA member here. The MAJ is dependent on UMVA membership dues.
David Estey – How to Prepare Your Work for Exhibit
This is the second installment of a four-part series on how to exhibit, prepare and promote your work, plus how to think about curators judging it. I have drawn on lectures, workshops, research, and nearly thirty years of twenty-four solo exhibits and over one-hundred...
UMVA Is on the Move — David Estey
The UMVA Board of Directors held a second management retreat on 28 October at the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland for an aggressive, day-long discussion of a detailed strategic plan for 2024. With forward momentum, the board approved: Belfast painter David Estey as...
David Estey – How to Show Your Work
This is the first installment of a four-part series on how to exhibit, prepare and promote your work, plus how to think about curators judging it. I have drawn on lectures, workshops, research, gallery owners and nearly thirty years of twenty-four solo exhibits and...
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Fall 2023: Materiality
For this issue we invited our contributors to reflect upon the many ways in which their work engages with the notion of materiality, considering the different stages of the creative process, starting with their choice of medium and how tools and materials interact,...
Duncan Hewitt – The Materials
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...
Carl Little – Nancy Andrews: “Materials Are a Driver for Me”
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,...
Véronique Plesch – The Appearance of Things: A Conversation with Rosamond Purcell
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...
Edgar Allen Beem – Playing with Wally Warren
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....
Jim Condron
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,...
Claire Millikin – Sacred Threads: Diedrick Brackens’s Textile Art
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...
Jacinda J. Martinez
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 – My Husband’s Garden
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...
Christopher Crosman – Andy Goldsworthy’s Road Line at the College of the Atlantic
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...
Takahiro Suzuki – The Salt Carried through the Fog of Time
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...
Lucy Lippard: Dematerialization Fifty-Five Years Later, compiled and introduced by Véronique Plesch
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...
Véronique Plesch – Art Matter
When referring to arts and crafts, the Greeks spoke of τέχνη, the word that has given us “technology,” while for the creative act itself, they used the verb ποιέω, “to make” (the root for “poetry”). Taken together, these two words remind us that although art might...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Naming It
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...
David Schwartzkopf – Poetry
David Schwartzkopf’s vivid, beautifully seen poem reminds us that it is through the material that we can approach the spiritual and can acknowledge our shared mortality with every other creature. In this poem, we see the sacred through the material body of the bird,...
Maryam Emami – Materiality’s Magic
Illuminating Student Work and Enriching Learning Experiences Materiality plays a key role in amplifying the impact of student work and creating a more engaging and rewarding learning experience. A passive approach to memorizing facts and reciting them out of...
UMVA Showcase Fall 2023: Nancy Wagner, Elaine McMichael, and Jackie Walsh
Nancy Wagner I took a sewing class when I was eleven. I studied weaving when I was twenty. I began painting when I was thirty. Now, close to forty years on, I continue to paint, all the while paying homage to my deep roots and love of textiles. My unabashed...
UMVA Showcase Fall 2023: Val Porter, Lesia Sochor, and Ann Tracy
Val Porter The following is true for most of my art. I will write about the sculpture I call Tilly, named after my great Aunt Tilly. Tilly began when I acquired a writing desk box and a silverware box. These make up Tilly’s body. The interior space created by...
UMVA Showcase Fall 2023: David Morgan, Emily Sabino, and Adèle Saint-Pierre
David Morgan I'm a woodcut printmaker. Even though my art is an image on paper, I'm strongly influenced by working with wood in the process. I'm not the only woodcut artist who also had (or has) a woodworking practice (twenty years of cabinetmaking in my case)....
UMVA Showcase Fall 2023: Kimberly Crichton and Bessie Moulton
Kimberly Crichton With my first body of artwork, I explored corporeality through collaged depictions of my own organs. It turned out to be the perfect material for reimagining myself and my life, cutting up and then sewing things back together in new ways:...
UMVA: Artists Helping Artists – David Estey
The Union of Maine Visual Artists continues its forward thrust with a new emphasis on "Artists Helping Artists,” a focus on what Maine artists have said they want and need. A small group of UMVA Board Directors volunteered to meet in September to work through my...
UMVA Portland Chapter Report – Fall 2023
Alight on the Rocky Shores opens in October at UMVA Gallery, Portland Three artists, Judith Greene-Janse, Joanne Tarlin, and Ann Tracy, who relocated to coastal towns in Maine, exhibit paintings and mixed-media artwork in Alight on the Rocky Shores: This Is Not an...
UMVA Midcoast Chapter Report – Fall 2023
UMVA Midcoast Holds Invitational Exhibit in November 4 by 6, four pieces of artwork by six artists, is the name of the show that UMVA member Janelle Delicata is organizing featuring invited artists Deb Vendetti, Kelly Desrosiers, Elisabeth Goodridge, Jane Gilbert,...
ARRT! Update Fall 2023
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...
LumenARRT! Update Fall 2023
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...
Maine Masters Update: Saint Carlo – Jeffrey Carson
I've been living in the Greek island of Paros for half a century. Many of my friends are artists from Europe and America who spend three to five months here every year. Like me, they are mostly older now and mostly retired, and so do not need to reside and be always...