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.
Spring brings changes to our daily lives, and to the Maine Arts Journal. With this issue Kathy Weinberg is stepping down from her long time position on the MAJ editorial board, needing more time for other projects, but will maintain a returning presence as a contributing writer and advisor. Our Colby intern Andrew MacDonald has graduated and will be moving on, we are grateful for all of his help and wish him well in his next chapter. We welcome Caroline Scarola, our newest Colby intern, and we look forward to working with her.
–From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Kathy Weinberg, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Andrew MacDonald, Mads McDonough, and Caroline Scarola.
Please click on cover image to go to the Introduction to the current issue.
Phoebe Adams – Memory and Exploration
I often spend winters walking and painting in New Mexico. But during this time, I have remained in my old house in MidCoast Maine. No one is coming over anytime soon, so I leave things stacked on the kitchen counters, books and papers on the dining table, and dust...
Dozier Bell
It’s rather difficult to write about the COVID period. For one thing, it hasn’t been a very verbal time. With everyone staying home or wearing masks that make conversation difficult, it has hardly seemed worthwhile to even think in terms of words. There has also been...
Richard Brown Lethem and Sean Hasey – Dialogue 2021
R.B.L. What year was it, that we met up, Sean? Probably at the instigation of George Burk . . . 1998 or ’99 . . . anyway, it has been 20 years easily. S.H. It was the winter of 1996 to ’97 that I drove down to your studio in Berwick in a snowstorm to meet you the...
Rose Marasco – Parallax 2020
Often in the spring (before the leaves appear), as I walk around my neighborhood in Portland, Maine, I am moved by the powerful tree shadow/shapes. A few years back, I shot one or two rolls of medium-format color negative film, but was not satisfied with the results....
Carl Little – Gail Spaien: Anchoring and Suspension and Gravity and Light
“I am always influenced by the landscape that surrounds me,” painter Gail Spaien once stated. “In a sense,” Spaien continued, “the work has really always been about my own backyard.” More recently, she has confirmed this perspective: at the “ground level,” her art is...
Edgar Allen Beem – Art Seen: The Maturation of Emily Leonard Trenholm
Emily Leonard Trenholm is a telemark and alpine skier, mountain biker, and stand-up paddleboard surfer, so it makes sense that she would come into her own as an artist working in the outdoors. During the month of January 2021, Trenholm’s bold, new abstracted...
Véronique Plesch – The Comforts of Domesticity
Nesting In an article for the November 2020 issue of The Atlantic, Amanda Mull considered “Why Americans Have Turned to Nesting.” She noted that when the pandemic forced her to spend more time in her apartment, she noticed its flaws: “The dusty ledges and shelves,...
Adrian Blevins and Cate Marvin – The Obstacle to Poetry Is Shame: A Conversation
A.B. Our dear friend Sarah Braunstein (author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children and other amazing books and, not unrelatedly, exemplary colleague) tells the story of asking Grace Paley how to build a life around making art when one must also, you know, live....
Adrian Blevins – Poetry
Though she now teaches at Colby College, Adrian Blevins grew up in Southwest Virginia and has strong ties to Appalachian culture. While that may seem distant from us, in many ways we can think of Maine as Appalachia-north. Certainly the mountains make that so, and in...
Cate Marvin – Poetry
In these two poems by Cate Marvin from her book Oracle (Norton, 2015), we see some of the tensions the two poets discuss in their conversation. In “Plastic Cookie” the tension is more about different loyalties when lovers are also each single parents and fiercely...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Necessary Things
There is no shortage of predictions. Every day we can hear what may happen with tomorrow's weather, next year's "in" colors, or the future of democracy. At moments of crisis, we're more prone to try to make sense of consequences. Our opinions and prognostications...
Alan Crichton – A New Normal
In late 1999, in search of a New Millennial Normal, I visited Belfast poet laureate, assemblage artist, and futurist Bern Porter: publisher of Henry Miller, lover of Anaïs Nin, Manhattan Project physicist, and, locally, Rapscallion Founder of Belfast’s Institute for...
Robert Shetterly – Time & Art
Suppose you are tempted to regard artists as particularly positioned and obligated to bear witness, to tell the truth, to lead as the sharp point of inquiry into who we are and where we are going. In that case, you may be feeling, as I am, that that role is harder and...
Linda Buckmaster – Outbreak
March 2020, and the drive-through COVID testing tent pops up on the other side of my fence. Our small rural hospital is my neighbor, and (without the leaves on the trees this time of year) I can see what’s going on. An opaque white canopy on aluminum posts open at...
Veronica Cross – Of Life Interrupted
Die-Ins, Visual Poetics, and Community Engagement: Bringing Visibility to the Culture of Addiction Do you feel safe? Do you feel represented? Is your safety valued? Isolation from a year of varying levels of quarantine has affected many Americans in the realms of...
Véronique Plesch – Leading with the Arts: A Conversation with Teresa McKinney and Jacqueline Terrassa
I recently met via Zoom with my new colleagues at Colby, Teresa D. McKinney, Diamond Family Director of the Arts, and Jacqueline Terrassa, Carolyn Muzzy Director of the Colby College Museum of Art. I decided to have a three-way conversation—and in particular, see the...
Gianne P. Conard – Salon!
The New Normal Galleries closing, artwork behind shuttered doors, drawing classes, and critiques online. No visitors to your studio. A solitary life: not by choice but by necessity (though perhaps not that different from before). A year ago, the Mid-Coast Salon would...
Kerstin Engman – Teaching During a Pandemic
After 30 years of teaching, 18 at the University of Maine, I had significant apprehensions last March, when my UMaine students were summarily ushered off-campus and "billeted" at home after the spring break, there to remain for the rest of the semester. I crossed my...
Peter Herley, Nikki Millonzi, and Judy Schneider – We Three
A Pass Around Art Show Sometimes it is just good to do something totally different! This idea went through the minds of Peter Herley, Nikki Millonzi, and Judy Schneider as they thought about how they would like to approach a three-person art show at the Café Nomad in...
Members’ Showcase: Anita Loomis, Marcie Bronstein, Eric Taubert
Anita Loomis COVID was my excuse to become the artist and gallerist I always thought I should be. Considering my own mortality last May, I asked myself, "What do I feel the need to accomplish before I die?" I sold my home in Massachusetts, moved closer to my...
Members’ Showcase: Christine A. Morgan-Phillips and M.J. Benson
Christine A. Morgan-Phillips A different world but keeping it creative: CAM the Artist, Christine A. Morgan-Phillips As an empath and a fine artist working through COVID-19, 2020 was an emotional roller coaster. With so much loss and frustration in the world,...
Members’ Showcase: Norajean Ferris, Nikki Millonzi, Christine Sullivan
Norajean Ferris It has been one year since the present pandemic of COVID-19 has placed a stranglehold on America. In this past year alone, the political and social problems that had already gripped the country’s backbone have since risen to catastrophic levels....
ARRT! – Spring 2021 Update
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 of banners, to...
LumenARRT! – Spring 2021 Update
LumenARRT! is a project of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA) and was founded to artistically amplify the work of progressive non-profits in the state of Maine. Our large-scale video projections create a visual experience and like electronic graffiti, bring...
UMVA Portland Chapter – Spring 2021
UMVA Portland has had a very busy and productive quarter. Members have researched and are presently developing a way to respond to institutional racism and be socially responsible as an arts organization and gallery. Our deliberations have explored the space between...
Pat and Tony Owen – From the UMVA Archives
What if . . . it didn't go away? Like a good conspiracy theory, or an old fairy tale about a one-eyed monster living in a cave, it all begins with a bit of fact. But long-forgotten truth gets buried under the weight of fantasy. The forgotten one-eyed monster maybe was...
Letters to the Editors
Open Letter to PMA Director Mark Bessire, signed by "Untitled, 2020" artists and others (reprinted from a flyer passed out by PMA staff outside of the Portland Museum of Art on March 26th) We stand in solidarity with the Maine PMA Union. We are troubled by the...
Invitation and Theme – Summer 2021: Marks and Tracks
Animals and humans leave tracks on the ground. The landscape, habitations, and objects display marks that are witnesses of their use and history. Our bodies too are marked by life, with scars and wrinkles, or with the voluntary mark of a tattoo. Records of activity,...