The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly presents As Things Fall Apart: Dystopia or Utopia? Spring 2022 For this issue (planned well before the war in Ukraine), we asked our contributors to tell us how, as things fall apart, they see their role as artists. From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Mads McDonough, Audrey Loo and Caroline Scarola. The MAJ is supported by the UMVA and by the generous contributions from the Rabkin Foundation and other donors. You can support us by becoming a UMVA member here. Maine Arts Journal Spring 2022 cover (Stuart Kestenbaum, Repair the World, 3.5 x 4.5 in., blackout poem with stamped letter text, from Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions, 2021).
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Spring 2022 – As Things Fall Apart: Dystopia or Utopia?
In 1498, Albrecht Dürer, ever the savvy businessman, decided to capitalize on the millennial fears rekindled by the approaching year 1500 and produced a luxury book with woodcuts based on the Book of Revelation. The Four Horsemen, the set’s most famous image, is...
Jordan Seaberry
The most visible result of war is the flight pattern of the refugee. Most of the narratives around people like my grandfather say the Great Migration was set in motion by Black families emigrating North searching jobs. But my grandfather wasn’t running to anything; he...
Janice Kasper
"Art does not aspire to entertain. It aspires to converse." Barry Lopez, Horizon. I relate very strongly to Barry Lopez’s sentiments expressed in this quote. My art is my means of communication about the...
Cecilia Ackerman – Shifting Worlds
I made the pieces pictured here one year after my father died. Until recently, I hadn’t thought they had anything to do with my experience of his hospitalization and the months leading up to it. Flowers, forests, and youthful figures weren’t new subjects for me. But...
Donna Festa
Empathy: The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an...
Stephen Burt
Contrary to popular belief, dragons exist. They are all around us, but to see them we have to acknowledge our part in keeping them alive and healthy. We feed them with ignorance, lassitude, apathy. We nurture them in our refusal to believe that we, too, have a part of...
Carl Little – Jessica Gandolf’s Interrupted Systems
Jessica Gandolf’s life has been steeped in art, from wandering the halls of the Metropolitan Museum as a youngster through arts high school, then after-school and Saturday classes at Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and Greenwich Street Pottery, and studies at the...
Edgar Allen Beem–Art that shines a light in dark times
What does “Hopeful” mean? Art that shines a light in dark times Between COVID-19 and Trump’s Big Lie, America is in serious trouble. Red versus Blue, Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals, MAGA versus BLM. Americans are battling over everything...
Lynn Duryea – The Watershed Workshop: An Experiment
It is difficult to ignore or dismiss the current COVID-19 pandemic, although there are those who do. Much easier for many people was to avoid the reality of the AIDS plague that began in this country in the early 1980s. Since those who fell ill first were primarily...
Véronique Plesch – Utopia: Retreating, Engaging, and Effecting Change
“To every age its art, to every art its freedom.” (“Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit.”) Motto above the entrance of the Vienna Secession building. The Island of Utopia Even though nowadays we tend to use the word utopia in a negative way, referring to a...
Richard Brown Lethem – Guston and de Chirico: Fragments from a Personal Journal
2021 “We Have Met the Enemy and It is Us” From Pogo’s single reliable parable, we can draw truth regarding the history of the 20th century and shed light on the recent controversy over the late dystopian work of Philip Guston and the attempts to censor it. Wow! Think...
Lee Chisholm – Children, Art, and Climate Justice
Reflections of a Maine Middle School Teacher Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to have participated in a “Healing Walk,” led by Canada’s First Nation Cree, through the tar sands regions of northern Alberta. There, I witnessed a pipe ceremony. Remarkable in...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Things Seemed to Be Breaking
I began making blackout poems when I was co-teaching a workshop that combined visual arts and writing with visual artist Susan Webster at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in 2016. One of our exercises was to create a piece of writing by placing a...
Claire Millikin – Catalogue Raisonné for the Patriarch
Thinking about art as an institutional structure, especially its capitalist moorings, this essay verging on prose poetry meditates on capitalism, sexism, art, and photography, entwining with the idea of things falling apart. 1. Catalogue Raisonné of the Patriarch’s...
Linda Buckmaster – Poetry
The Future “. . . and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Genesis I.1 “This [fighting] angered the Creator, Kichi Manito, who decided to flood the earth into a rebirth.” Algonquin creation story What year is it? you...
All the Best from the West (of Ireland) – Pat and Tony Owens
The Aisling (who might have the answer) We all expect something better than what is in front of us. We all hope that the new year will bring something positive. We vote to initiate change, to make last year's politics obsolete. We look toward a vision of something...
Todd Watts – Solace
If I were a billionaire—funny, I didn’t know how to spell billionaire—I would commission an airship. I would specify that it go no faster than sixty miles an hour, fly no higher than two hundred feet, and have berths with feather beds. In the lounge, a Bosendorfer...
Matt Blackwell, Val Porter, and Joanne Tarlin – Members’ Showcase
Matt Blackwell Half A Utopia Will Do Before the world went medieval, I was looking a lot at the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch. I love the cautionary parables and moral lessons of their work. Lo, and behold, in 2016, a reality TV star became President. You...
Peter Buotte and Laura Waller – Members’ Showcase
Peter Buotte Two Sisters Going Down the Falls of Conspiracies (2022) is a 6-by-9 feet acrylic painting on unstretched drop-cloth canvas. During the Romantic period of the mid-1800s, the intent of Hudson Valley painters was to proclaim the grandeur of the American...
James Boorstein and James McCarthy – Members’ Showcase
James Boorstein 12 October 1991 25 TIPS sleep is the keynote to success have fun try to do what you want eat well get a lot of exercise be nice listen to as much music as possible spend some time outside each day walk a bit do not talk on the phone much read...
UMVA Portland Chapter Update Spring 2022
The Portland UMVA group continues to meet monthly via Zoom. The group formed a committee to suggest a policy for the number of times in a year that a member may exhibit their work in the UMVA Gallery. The committee reported back in February, and it was decided to...
ARRT! Update Spring 2022
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! Update Spring 2022
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...
Theme and Invitation Summer 2022: Beyond Plein Air: The Landscape—Real/Recreated/Reassembled/Imagined
The summer 2022 issue of the Maine Arts Journal hopes to explore the process with which a real landscape is transformed—observable external reality being only a starting point but not the end product. We invite you to reflect on the tension between real and imagined...