The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Play
Winter 2024
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, Judith Glickman Lauder, 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.
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Winter 2024: Play
As we put the finishing touches to the Winter issue of the Maine Arts Journal, Maine is recovering from a devastating storm and just two months ago, mass shootings took place in Lewiston. Although traumatic, what we experienced since our Fall issue came out pales in...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Pretend for Real
I was once the star second baseman for the New York Yankees. It didn’t matter that I was nine years old and only had a pink rubber ball that I would throw repeatedly against the brick wall of our house and that the infield was our driveway—I could field every grounder...
Kenny Shapiro – On the Search for Joy
Growing up I was always pitched a vision of artists as free and uninhibited eccentrics. I hate to say it but I’ve found myself plodding through a much more pedestrian life. I work very slowly, easily falling prey to self-doubt and indecisiveness. The discomfort that...
Charlie Hewitt
I am an artist of many minds and I have two studios to prove it. One is a painting/printmaking studio, fully equipped with the tools to produce prints and paintings. The other, an old greenhouse, is a studio of limitless possibilities. My painting studio is haunted....
Véronique Plesch – Serious Fun: A Conversation with Angela Lorenz
On 17 November 2023, I talked with Angela Lorenz via Zoom about her work and the theme of play. Lorenz divides her time between Bologna, Italy and Searsmont, Maine. Her watercolors, prints, multiples, and artist’s books are in over 150 public collections in the US and...
Edgar Allen Beem – Alison Hildreth: Darkness Visible
The Fall of Alison Hildreth Alison Hildreth’s exhibition The Feathered Hand at the University of New England Art Gallery in Portland back in 2011 is the best one-artist show I have seen in the 21st century, well conceived and perfectly articulated. Hildreth’s UNE show...
David Isakson
Play is serious business. Watch a basketball player giving 100 percent. There is no hesitation or self-consciousness. If there is, it is a broken play, and all can be lost. This is not to say that there is no place for reflection in play, there is, but it goes...
Judy LaBrasca – Drawing Games
The first time I taught the class called Drawing Games, I was at Haystack as a visiting artist. I’d been asked to do a demonstration, but being inexperienced in doing demonstrations, I decided to do something interactive instead. The reason I could offer Drawing Games...
Susan Webster – The Art of the Unexpected
You probably know that there are simple methods to create Exquisite Corpse writing and drawing pieces. Make your marks or write your words, fold the paper and pass it on. No one knows what’s gone before or what comes after. My husband Stuart Kestenbaum and I have been...
Islesboro Long Ledge Retreat – Exquisite Corpses
A community of women artists meet annually for a regenerative week of art making and support on the magical island of Islesboro. Organized and hosted by Brita Holmquist, the Long Ledge retreat is a joyful suspension of daily life allowing for serious work and serious...
David Stankiewicz – Poetry
Maybe play is a kind of respite from fear, from living in a world with intractable problems and rigidities. Dreams are one kind of play in which our psyches loosen the bounds of rational waking life. David Stankiewicz brings to us another kind of play in his Night...
Carl Little – Poetry
One way we play is to talk about the little consternations of life and befriend them, allow ourselves a little amusement at our own minor predicaments. Carl Little brings us the pocket comb, that—can we call it an instrument?—we misplace, take for granted, never find...
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc – Poetry
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc gives us several kinds of play in his Hockey Poem. There is the playing of the game itself with its delicious vocabulary. Then there is the playfulness of the banter in the locker room. There is the play of music in lines like “twitch and switch and...
Claire Millikin – New Snow Game
When I heard about the shooting, I was in the rented room where I stay when I teach, two hours from home. Couldn’t hold it together in that rental with all that would come down the pike, remembering my cousin shot and killed by my uncle when I was four years old....
Véronique Plesch – Playing With the Marvelous
Around 1925, members of the Surrealist group decided to play a game. Known in French as “petits papiers” (“little papers”), it consists in writing a word, hiding it by folding the paper, and passing the sheet to the next participant. In French, you would write the...
Dean Allbritton – “Play” Theme at the Colby College Center for the Arts and Humanities
Each year, the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities supports a faculty-led theme that contributes to the intellectual life of the college through courses, events, public exhibitions, film screenings, and more. In the decade since the inception of the CAH, we have...
Cory Bucknam – A Sense of Play in the Classroom
I’m fascinated with the continuous opportunities I’m offered to interact with educators, and to learn how art intersects with their teaching and the development of their students’ learning processes. Even after a long career teaching in middle schools, visiting...
Reed McLean – The Movement of Our Irregular Spirits
Before our eyes open there are dreams in which we first see the world not as it truly is, but as we imagine it to be. By these passing lights and shadows we conceive the many games of our lives. As a child I woke and ran out into the morning yard to gather the lights...
Carl Little – MaJo Keleshian: Buddhist, Activist, Artist of Impermanence
In a video shot by Hans Krichels in May 2016 for a presentation at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft (below) where she was teaching, MaJo Keleshian offered a tour of her home and studio on Winkumpaugh Road north of Ellsworth. She displayed her work, including...
UMVA Showcase Winter 2024 – Betsey Feeley, James McCarthy, Linda Leach
Betsey Feeley My works celebrate the surprising, sometimes humorous, and often surreal juxtapositions made possible in collages. I cut, layer, and paste imagery from many sources: vintage and contemporary fashion magazines, and books on art, nature, history, and...
UMVA Showcase Winter 2024 – Val Porter, Joseph A. Miller, Sharyn Paul Brusie
Val Porter I built a three-dimensional Exquisite Corpse. It seemed like a fun challenge: exploring all the different possibilities with different perspectives in a three-dimensional Exquisite Corpse. I made a giraffe on one side and a rhinoceros on the other. I...
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...
Join the UMVA
The Union of Maine Visual Artists is in the midst of an exciting renewal to bring together artists, art lovers, and organizations for camaraderie, exhibitions, and mutual support. Whether you are an artist or simply love art, we’d like you to join us. Member benefits...
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...
UMVA Midcoast Chapter Report – Winter 2024
The Midcoast Chapter has a combined zoom and in-person meeting set for 11:30 a.m. at the Belfast Public Library, 106 High St., on Saturday 13 January. On the agenda will be reports from members on exhibit venues for 2024. Those attending are asked to bring their own...
ARRT! Update: Winter 2024
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 borders....
LumenARRT! Update Winter 2024
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 – TRUTH TELLERS Begins Broadcasting throughout the USA
Our film Truth Tellers, began as a way to expand the audience for a project I felt was so important to our country. It is now accomplishing that with its national distribution on PBS and became a story about art, politics, and American courage. Shortly after 9/11 and...
Pat and Tony Owen – I Walk the Line
Here in County Kerry (Ireland) on the Dingle Peninsula, there once lived a dolphin. Every day, rain or shine, tour boats would head out into the harbor to get a glimpse of him. In fact, the people who ran these tours made you a promise of your money back if the...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions Spring 2024 – The Unconscious, the Unknown, the Unsaid
Springing from our celebration of Surrealism, officially born a century ago, we invite our contributors to reflect upon a concept central to the movement: the unconscious, and along with it, the unknown and the unsaid. As is well known, we owe the notion of the...