Right Now! Processing the Moment: Fall 2026

“Right Now!: Processing the Moment” presents some of the creative responses to the time we are living through, including what is happening in Maine artists’ studios, on social media, or in the streets. It is increasingly difficult to focus on other issues when the threats to our daily lives feel both immediate and globally exponential.

“Right Now!” is intended as a primarily visual feature, interspersed with brief reflections from contributors. Artists interested in submitting up to 3 images for the MAJ Winter 2027 “Right Now” feature can read our guidelines here.

Lately I’ve been finding a lot of release and freedom in painting protest signs. I’ve never really drawn or painted grotesque illustrations, usually preferring to paint beautiful things, so these posters have been an interesting new direction for me!

—Shelby Arnold

 

This is a portrait of my friend Rob Levin’s hands as he was getting arrested outside of Susan Collins’s office (a devoted Quaker, Rob and a group of other local faith leaders were protesting ICE’s occupation of Portland). Rob’s bravery and unwavering commitment to standing up for the dignity and humanity of all members of our community struck me as the definition of a modern-day patriot. Ben Franklin famously summed up the nascent American government as “a republic, if you can keep it.” Unselfish acts like Rob’s are what the country needs to keep on keeping it.

—Michael Branca

As an art therapist since 2016, I help patients discover visual symptoms in their artworks so that they gain insight.

Since 6 January 2021, I expose the “Visual Symptoms” of our current administration through drawings, paintings, and flag figure sculptures. This triptych includes Me the People, Gates of Hell, and The New Abnormal. Each work is a mash-up of art history motifs, my imagery, and current media images.

—Peter Buotte

 

This piece shows the acts of kindness shown to immigrant communities that are in fear of leaving their homes due to the presence of ICE.

Languages: Somali, Sudanese, Spanish, French, and English.

—Norajean Ferris

These works come from TRAsh, an ongoing project examining how ordinary discarded materials carry the pressures of contemporary consumption. By shifting scale, typography, and photographic context, I use familiar waste as a way to think about environmental urgency, material value, and the systems we often stop seeing because they have become part of everyday life.

—Asif Shaikh

Thanks for the opportunity to share.

Kenny and I started our collaboration with my monoprint. He does whatever he wants to it and returns it to me. I continue to modify the image. If he approves, we then both title, sign, and date the work. Due to our respective schedules and our distant living/working conditions, in some cases we agree to share a work that has not been signed on the back.

—Michael Torlen and Kenny Cole

Painted on thick loose canvas, these two Lady Liberties are connected with over-the-shoulder straps and are worn like a sandwich board.

—Nora Tryon

Made in response to 9/11, Coniunctio consists of six chairs formed by the symbols of warring religious worldviews, around a table whose top merges those symbols into a mandala, in hope that leaders of those groups could share a meal while sitting in their enemy’s chair.

1185 recalls the late ‘70s when, partly because I believed the only way past racism was multiple races living as neighbors, I bought an abandoned house in the ghetto and spent five years making it livable, but after my computer startup failed, a public school teacher bought it, because she thought her mixed-race adopted children wouldn’t be accepted in the suburbs (and she lives in that house to this day).

Strata represents the increasing inequality of wealth and resource usage in developed societies as an inverted top-heavy pyramid, with an oligarch’s estate at the top, the bourgeois tract houses racked by the weight above them, the proletariat tenements collapsing beneath the higher classes, and bottoming out in a homeless encampment.

—Tim Van Hook

I’ve been making cartoons for as long as I can remember, from high school and college publications to a job at Marvel Comics in New York in the mid-1970s. I began making them again about four or five years ago, and with the 2024 election and its disastrous results, I began drawing them again in earnest. This was largely to express my frustration and outrage at the current administration and its supporters, and to offer this emotional outlet to others as well, but it has also included observational humor and jokes. This renewed interest in cartooning has also dovetailed nicely with parenthood; during those in-between times when I can’t get to the studio but feel the urge to draw, I can sketch a cartoon on a sheet of paper, ink it, photograph it, and move it into Photoshop to make adjustments and add values, using my laptop as a portable studio.

—Mark Wethli