Kelly Thorndike’s Search for Home Introduction and interview by Alan Magee   The hardest part, Kelly Thorndike told me, was to learn to look into a clear blue sky without terror. It wasn’t the long nights of darkness or the fear of violent men; it was the sky....

We cannot consider war without bringing up lies–they go with the embattled territory. Lies run through its history like an evil river as mainly older men send the young to their deaths on what are mostly false pretexts. Lies are repeated; they fuel the fury. A recent...

In 1976, Josefina Auslender was working on a series of graphite drawings titled La Ciudad (The City), inspired by her native Buenos Aires. In the statement she wrote for her show last summer at Sarah Bouchard Gallery, she recounts how, suddenly and in spite of...

The Maine Arts Journal’s theme of “Truths and Lies” aligns with my personal interest in social justice. For me, seeking the “Truth,” in the context of social activism, becomes a task of exposing suppressed narratives. A lie, for me, is a deliberate, knowing,...

Natasha Mayers’s Old Orchard Beach series of paintings launches its pictorial world on a note of wary tenderness, viewing from a nonjudgmental distance the dance of shoreside vacationers. Mayers’s series of eighteen by twenty-four acrylic and charcoal on canvas works...

My name is Sam Onche, I am a painter and illustrator from Benue state, Nigeria, and currently based in Chicago. I graduated from Colby College with a major in studio art and a focus in painting. Before coming to the United States, I lived most of my life in Nigeria...

As I describe in the essay that follows, I believe one way art represents truth is by an artist expressing their own truth while, at the same time, seeking out other truths.To that end, while writing this essay, I asked my colleague, Myronn Hardy, with whom I’ve...

Artists and others have been arguing among themselves over the merits and demerits of a mural proposed by Brunswick Public Art (BPA) for the side of the Cabot Mill on the banks of the Androscoggin. The mural, entitled Many Stitches Hold Up the Sky, is a vision of the...

I once attended a talk by the late novelist and editor Helen Yglesias. She was reading from her novel Family Feeling (Doubleday, 1976), and began by saying that the book was about her family, but that it was a work of fiction. She described the difference between...

In the late 1960s, when I was a college student, I went to a teach-in at the Brattle Theater just off Harvard Square. It was 1967, I think, in the winter, at night, standing-room only. The speakers were activist writer Noam Chomsky from MIT, historian Howard Zinn from...

Visual intelligence, at least for artists, is often a matter of proximity over time to works of art of all kinds and varying degrees of excellence. Many artists who are just beginning their careers gravitate to places where original art is on view, not only as...