I must admit that I am a sucker for nature illustrations, whether Audubon’s birds or the fabulous flower of Maine’s own Kate Furbish. I think what I like about drawings and paintings of the flora and fauna of the world is that the artists put their talents at the disposal of Creation rather than trying to add anything to it. Then, too, you can often see a great deal more in a careful rendering or hi resolution photo than you can in reality.

Currently, there are a couple of exhibitions I would call to your attention in this regard – From the Mountains to the Sea: Plants, Trees and Shrubs of New England (through September 8) at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA, and Pollination: Evolving Miracles (through June 7) at the Atrium Art Gallery at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College in Lewiston, ME.

Spiranthes cernua

The Art Complex Museum show features works on paper by some 18 members of the New England Society of Botanical Artists, images of seaweed, fungi, flowers, trees and shrubs native to New England. A side show features botanical illustrations by South Shore artists.

Splendid examples of the exacting attention to botanical detail include a clump of Spiranthes cernua (Nodding ladies’ tresses) by Kelly Leahy-Radding of Columbia CT and a vine of Vitis riparia (Riverbank grape) by Kay Kopper of Pembroke MA. The exhibition is slated to travel all over New England for the next 18 months with stops at Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, VT; the Bartlett Arboretum, in Stamford, CT;  the Audubon Education Center in Bristol, RI and the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

Vitis riparia

The Atrium Art Gallery show, curated by Robyn Holman, herself a beekeeper, is not an exhibition of natural history illustrations but rather artistic responses to and interpretations of flowering plants and their pollinators. The process of art is thus undertaken in concert with the process by which bees make honey.

Pollinators: Evolving Miracles features prints, drawings, paintings, photographs, video, sculpture and poetry by more than two dozen artists, some of them farmers, beekeepers and scientists. A sequence drawing by celebrated scientist and nature writer Bernd Heinrich, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Vermont, depicts how carrion beetles change their color to mimic bumble bees when they fly, an evolved protection against predation by birds.

Nicrophorus Tomentosus

“Drawing is a way for me to get reacquainted with my feelings for the subject,” Heinrich has said of the right brain appeal of rendering nature as well as analyzing it.

A hand-colored photography by British photographer Rob Kesseler of a single piece of pollen from a greater stitchwort plant reminds us of that life even at the micro level is a fantastic show of strange and wonderful beauty and ineffeable order.

Stellaria holostea

If you have never done so, even if you have no pretense to being an artist, it is endlessly fascinating to just sit down to draw a bug, a flower, a weed, a pinecone, or a seed from life. It’s fine and fun to turn a few dabs of color into the evocation of a blossom, but when you become mindful of the minute detail that has been lavished on even the most seemly insignificant stuff of life, the simple act of looking becomes life affirming.

The Art Complex Museum, 189 Alden St., Duxbury MA,  781-934-6634, artcomplex.org. Atrium Art Gallery, University of Southern Maine,  Lewiston-Auburn College, Westminster St., Lewiston ME, 207-753-6554.  usm.maine.edu/atriumgallery.

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“In the solid, reassuring facades, high bay windows, and ornate stone entries along Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, he finds the essence of patrician gentility. In the trendy shops, boutiques, cafes, and galleries of Newbury Street, the fashions of the moment inhabit the buildings of the past.”

Two years later, my favorite writer John Updike, on the occasion of a 1993  George Nick retrospective at Massachusetts College of Art, where Nick taught from 1969 to 1994, wrote that, “One thinks naturally of George Nick’s paintings in terms of good conscience and simple truthfulness, of saying instead of judging.”

Along with Joel Babb, George Nick is one of the finest interpreters of the Boston urban landscape. He used to paint (and perhaps still does) by pulling an old green van over to the curb and using it as a studio on wheels. The finesse of his brush work applied to the complexity of 19^th century facades in 20^th and 21^st century settings seem, as Updike suggested, straightforward and honest. He paints like a bricklayer, a carpenter, a stonemason.

As a person, as a painter, and as a professor, George Nick is well-loved and respected. His website is the work of his former student Larry Groff who is also one of the 38 artists featured in Galvanized Truth: A Tribute to George Nick (May 20 to September 9) at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Curated by another of his former students Kimberlee Alemian, Galvanize Truth surrounds Nick’s own realist paintings with those of his students and several of his peers. The student/mentees are Eric Aho, Alemian, Dimitri Cavander, Christopher Chippendale, Steve Cope, Jeffrey Ellse, Emily Eveleth, Jeff Fichera, Shirl Fink, Shalom Flash, Chawky Frenn, Elizabeth Gauthier, Groff, Paul Inglis, Peter Inglis, Matt James, Catherine Kehoe, Ilya Lerner, Dik Liu, Kimberly MacNeille, Saeed Mahboub, Hunter McKee, Nancy Mitton, Katya Nick, Alvin Ouellet, Linda Pocheski, John Recco, Judy Solomon, Ed Stitt, and Ken Tighe. Nicks’ peers and colleagues in the exhibition are past an present MassArt and Boston University faculty Sidney Hurwitz, Jon Imber, Janet Monafo, Richard Raiselis, Paul Rahilly, John Moore, and Graham Nickson, Dean of the New York Studio School.

Kimberlee Alemian explains the exhibition title in an essay in the exhibition catalogue entitled “Galvanized by George Nick:”

“In Nick’s class painting was a very serious business. He didn’t teach a specific method or formula of painting. He taught an attitude, a way of thinking about painting – a way of seeing. Once class was over and Nick left for the day to paint his own paintings, his student continued to work on projects outside of class time. We were galvanized by George Nick.”

So George Nick put a charge into his students just as his teacher Edwin Dickinson had done for him and Dickinson’s teacher William Merritt Chase had done for Dickinson. It is this pragmatic East Coast realist line of visual inquiry that Nick has passed on, one in which the senses are everything, knowledge is nothing. The ethic is to paint what you see, not what you think, but it is not as Christopher Chippendale points out in his essay “Judging by Appearances” a simple matter of imitating nature.

“Nick insisted that our painting be autonomous from the world they depicted, not copies of that world,” write Chippendale. “He would refer to them as separate, ‘parallel’ constructions. ‘Don’t render the motif,’’ he would bark. ‘Let cameras do that kind of work. Paint parallel to what you see.’ It was not copy work we were engaged in, it was translation – the motif’s materialization on the canvas through the facts both of physical paint and our own senses.”

That’s what I believe John Updike meant by the “simple truthfulness” of Nick’s art – it is faithful to the facts yet not a slave to illusion, and it gives evidence that the artist understand that a painting is a thing-unto-itself, not just a picture of some external reality.

Nick, Eric Aho, and Jon Imber are the only artists in the show whose work I know personally, but judging solely from the catalogue Nick’s students follow his lead with varying degrees of fidelity. And that is as it should be. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flatter, but great teachers like George Nick don’t want imitation, they want integrity.

A nice tribute to one of Boston’s best painters and teachers.

(The Art Complex Museum, 189 Alden St., Duxbury MA, 781-934-6634.)

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The I-95 Triennial 2013 is an exhibition of works by 34 artists who live along the Interstate-95 corridor in New England. The artists were selected from among 114 who applied by UMMA director George Kinghorn and Connecticut College art professor Timothy McDowell, himself an artist who showed at the Maine museum in 2009. This is the second triennial exhibition, meant to place some of Maine’s best artists in the context of the best art of the region. Though the number of submissions was low (the Portland Museum of Art biennial draws close to 1,000 entries), the quality is very high. And as with any good open juried exhibition, the discovery factor is even higher.

The 34 artists include 20 from Maine, six from Massachusetts, four from Connecticut, and two each from New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Though I have written about art in Maine since 1978, I was familiar with only seven of the Maine artists – Ilya Askinazi, Kenny Cole, Joshua Ferry, Nina Jerome, Paul Oberst, Claire Seidl and Barbara Sullivan – and none of the other 14 New England artists. I am pleased to have a whole new group of artists now on my radar.

14, 86 lbs

Again as with most juried shows I have seen in recent years, photography is heavily and well represented in the UMaine triennial, 11 of the 34 featured artists working in photography. The marquee work and the juror’s prize winner is a large-format color photograph of a young Thai boxer by Noah David Bau of Melrose, Massachusetts. Bau’s four portraits of Thai children are from a series This is My Body he has been working on for three years, photographing children enrolled in a boxing camp in one of Thailand’s most notorious slums.

Backbird

Other photo graphic highlights of the triennial are a pair of pictures of men diving by Kay Howell of Hull, MA; garish carnival scenes by Christopher Chadbourne of Marblehead, MA; a trio of “portraits” of antiquated communications devices (phone, TV, radio) by Robert Moran of Bar Harbor, ME; five timeless black and white architectural photographs by Ilya Askinazi of Brewer, ME; a quartet of really fine wet plate collodion prints of the female torso from the Venus Series by Lindsey Beal of Providence, RI; four obscured and blurred black and white portraits by Claire Seidl of Rangeley, ME; and a pair of conceptual photos by Cheryle St. Onge of Durham, NH, from her Natural Findings series. In this case what, St. Onge has found is a snake in box and a hand plunged into a jar containing what also looks to be a snake.

Matt and Betsey

The paintings in the exhibition that I found most entertaining were a pair of large oils by Alexis Kochka of Somersworth, NH, depicting herself and her friends in the woods. At once casual and ritual, her al fresco figures act out little dramas at the intersection of nature and culture.

Janes’ Parrot Shirt

And you can’t not like the big, good-natured oil on linen paintings of Hawaiian shirts by Ken Sahr of Lamoine, ME. These big proxy figure paintings speak the whole length of the UMMA gallery to Kochka’s young people in the woods.

In many cases, George Kinghorn has hung the I-95 Triennial to intentional highlight visual connections and conversations between and among works of art, whether grouping black and white photographs or encouraging more subtle correspondences between, say, the scratchy graphite ball drawings of Gerri Rachins of Jamaica Plains, MA, the trio of minimal cross paintings by Joshua Ferry of South Portland, ME, and the striped fountain and wire grid prayer rig by Paul Oberst of Freedom, ME.

Rack

There is also a posturing communication between four scalloped wood and metal sculptures by J.T. Gibson of Morrill, MA, and the ceramic “nets” created by Christine Owen of Westport, CT, simply by virtue of the fact that both works lean up against the gallery wall rather than hang from it.

The I-95 Triennial is complements by an exhibition of expressive and energetic abstract paintings and drawing done in 2007 by John Bailly in response to poems by Richard Blanco. Bailly, a French-American painter born in the UK, and Blanco, a Cuban-American poet, knew one another from Miami, where Bailly teaches at Florida International University.

Maine audiences first learned of Blanco’s presence in Maine when it was announced that he had been selected to write a poem for the second inauguration of President Barack Obama, but George Kinghorn, who came to Maine in 2008 from the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, was well aware of Place of Mind: Works by John Bailly in Collaboration with Poet Richard Blanco and brought it Maine. And that really is the primary function of an academic art museum – to bring the world of art to campus, or in the case of the University of Maine Museum of Art, to the broader town-gown community of Bangor-Orono.

University of Maine Museum of Art, 40 Harlow St., Bangor ME, 207-561-3350, www.umma.umaine.edu

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   The 2012 DeCordova Biennial, which opens January 22 and runs through April 22, is shaping up to be an oddly parochial exhibition, a Boston-centric biennial, a Hub show rather that a New England hub show. The again, being from Maine and seeing no Maine artists in the mix, I may be guilty of provincial chauvinism myself.

   Curator Dina Deitsch and co-curator Abigail Ross Goodman, formerly of the Judi Rotenberg Gallery on Newberry St. in Boston, reportedly visited close to 100 studios and reviewed even more portfolios in coming up with the 23 artists featured in the 2012 biennial. Twelve of the selected artists work in the Boston area, three are from the North Adams, Mass., artpost, at least four are from Providence or went to school in Providence. Two live in Vermont, one in New Hampshire. None of the artists work in Connecticut (which is generally viewed these days as a suburb of New York and not part of New England at all) and, as I said, none are from Maine. Odd, since Maine artists such as Randy Regier, John Bisbee, Mark Wethli, and Greta Bank have headlined at the museum in recent years.

   As with most curated shows, who gets in generally has a lot to do with who you know and who knows you. The 2010 DeCordova Biennial had several Maine artists in it, probably because the advisory board inlcuded Portland Museum of Art director Mark Bessire and Yale curator Jennifer Gross, who was once the curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. The 2012 advisory board had folks from New York, Connecticut, and North Adams on it.

   I’m also not sure when the DeCordova started going by lower case deCordova, but it smacks of Euro pretences and I can’t quite bright myself to do. But, okay, enough with the small town homer’s lament.

   The essay in the 88-page catalogue that accompanies the 2012 DeCordova Biennial breaks the art down into five vague categories. Steve Lambert (Jamaica Plains), Joe Wardwell (Jamaica Plains), and Jonathan Gitelson (Brattleboro) fall under the category of Language. Joe Zane (Cambridge), Kim Faler (North Adams), Chris Taylor (Providence), Meghan & Murray McMillan (Providence), Matthew Gamber (Boston), and the team of Antoniadis & Stone (Boston) are all united by concepts of Failure/Fakery/Skepticism.

   Laura Kalman (Detroit by way of Mass Art), Anna Von Mertens (Peterboro NH by way of Brown), Jo Dery (Chicago by way of RISD), and Matt Saunders (Cambridge and Berlin, Germany) are considered practitioners of Hybridity/Materiality/Third Wave Craft. Kalman pierces her own body as an art form.

   Taylor Davis (Boston), Ann Pibal (North Bennington, Vermont, and Brooklyn, New York), Corin Hewitt (East Corinth, Vermont, and Richmond, Virginia), Mary Lum (North Adams), and Cullen Bryant Washington, Jr. (Roxbury and Brooklyn, New York) all wear the one-size-fits-all label Abstraction.

   And Ven Voisey (North Adams), Jessica Gath (Boston), Eric Gottesman (Cambridge), Caitlin Berrigan (Boston), and the South End Knitters (Boston) are engaged in art forms identified as Public/Performance/Participation.

    Not confined to the DeCordova museum and grounds, this year’s biennial will also take place at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Cyclorama where Steve Lambert’s Capitalism Works for Me! True/False sign will flash and Caitlin Berrigan’s Spectrum of Inevitable Violence class war will rage.

    “Part installation, part public performance,” expl;ains the biennial catalogue, “Berrigan’s piece invites participants to fill out a survey to determine their rank in four categories: Class Status, Socioeconomic Status, Cultural Capital, and Cultural Mobility. The resulting status scores are grafted onto a four quadrant platform, which serves as the stage for this spectacular, semi-choreographed conflict. With personal territories staked out and participants boldly standing their ground, the battle will ensue and

weapons will fly – in the form of expired foods that Berrigan has selected

for their colors, softness, and colossal mess-making properties.”

   Sounds like fun to me.

[DeCordova Sculpture Park & Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Rd., Lincoln MA, 781-259-8355. Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St. Boston MA, 617-426-5000.]

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Caledonia

The Stess show is one of the Portland museum’s Circa series, a program of exhibitions by living artists sponsored by hedge fund millionaire S. Donald Sussman. Sussman and his wife, First District U.S. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree were among the crowd of viewers who attended the April 5 opening of Blueberry Rakers on First Friday, an evening the Portland Museum of Art is always jammed with visitors and the streets of downtown Portland are crawling with gallery-goers, vendors, and street performers.

I don’t ordinarily comment of the social aspects of an exhibition, but the Stess opening had the feeling of a real event. Stess was up from New York City where he lives when not working in Maine. His parents were there from California, as was his brother. There were fellow artists and photographers, students, teachers, old friends, rakers and blueberry growers down from Washington County, critics, the media and museum staff, all present to enjoy and applaud the life’s work of David Brooks Stess.

Winnowing

Following the opening there was a reception at the Portland loft of Heather Frederick, whose Vox Photographs represents Stess. Among the guests, who were served blueberry pie the photographer had made for the occasion, was Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo (Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, Elsewhere) who wrote a brief appreciation of Stess’s photographs for the exhibition’s brochure/poster.

Where PMA press materials compare Stess’s photographs of blueberry rakers to Josef Koudelka’s photographs of gypsies and Danny Lyons’ photographs of motorcycle gangs, Richard Russo takes a more romantic view of the black and white gelatin silver prints upon which Stess presents a timeless view of hand harvesting fast being replaced by mechanical harvesters.

“For me,” writes Russo, ”looking at a David Stess photograph is like reading a Thomas Hardy novel, where the borders between character and object and landscape blur, where tools become inseparable from the men and women who wield them, the tool smoothed by the hand that holds it, the hand in turn calloused by the tool, as if each were trying to become the other, and both molded, you could almost say ‘determined,’ by a landscape that’s both beautiful and restless.”

David Stess at work raking blueberries.

Back in 2009 I had the opportunity to travel with David Stess to the migrant labor camp where he pitches his tent with the other rakers and earns his days’ pay with back-breaking labor. Unlike documentary photographers who drop in briefly to exploit an interesting, colorful or compelling situation, Stess is a bona fide raker, known to his fellow harvesters as “Super Dave” for his prowess swinging a metal-tined blueberry rake through the low bushes of wild berries. Because he has privileged and intimate entre to the rakers, who range from locals scraping out a living in the make-do economy of rural Maine to Micmac crews from across the border in Canada and migrant laborers up from Mexico, Stess makes a practice of giving photographs to the people he photographs. To date, he has given away more than 10,000 photographs.

David Stess at work photographing.

In the Stess spirit of sharing the experience and the images, I gave the museum four blurry snapshots I took of David on the blueberry barrens back in 2009. I’m long accustomed to seeing my words in print, but I was unprepared for the kick I got out of seeing my amateur photos on television and in the newspaper. I have reproduced a couple here in order to show David at work.

David Brooks Stess captures the elemental lives of laborers on the barrens of Maine with an authenticity born of experience. It is rare and unusual for a documentary photographer to be one with his subject matter, but we are all visually richer for the long, hard work David has done to capture the personal, social and environmental realities of Maine’s wild blueberry harvest.

[Portland Museum of Art, Seven Congress Square, Portland ME, 207-775-6148.]

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The fritted glass curtain wall of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion reflects the surrounding Colby College campus.

The $15 million Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion, Harold Alfond having been the founder of Dexter Shoe and one of Maine’s most generous philanthropists, is a 26,000 square feet glass box, 10,000 square feet of which is new exhibition space, giving Colby 38,000 square feet of exhibition space and 64,000 square feet overall. The new pavilion was designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects of Los Angeles, the same firm that designed the 1999 Lunder Wing that houses Colby’s permanent collection of American art.

The Alfond-Lunder family has been incredibly generous to Colby over the years, the football stadium, field house, gymnasium, admissions building and now two wings of the museum bearing the family names. The late Harold Alfond gave to institutions all over the state. The Lunders have focused their educational giving on Colby, Peter Lunder being a 1956 graduate, and have made substantial gifts to the Maine General Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. The Lunders have homes in Scarborough, Maine, Boston and Palm Beach.

Finette, 1859 etching and drypoint by James McNeill Whistler. The Lunder Collection

Peter Lunder, a nephew of Harold Alfond who ran Dexter Shoe for many years, and his wife Paula began collecting seriously in the 1980s and their collection now numbers more than 600 works of art. While the opening exhibition of the Lunder gift (July 13 to June 8, 2014) is arranged by broad themes — children, seasons, cowboys and Indians, etc. — what visitors who pay attention will see is the progress and evolution of the Lunders’ taste. The Lunders began collecting conservative European art and then became more and more focused on American art, the collection having pockets of concentration on Santa Fe artists , James McNeill Whistler, American masters and, most recently, contemporary American art. The collection spans 1796 to the present and is a fine survey of American art.

The works that drew the most attention from the 15 to 20 members of the press at the March 25 preview were Claes Oldenburg’s 1977 stainless steel, cement and aluminum Typewriter Eraser, a Pop Art statement goofily dated now that typewriters are a thing of the past, and Duane Hanson’s 1973 Old Man Playing Solitaire, a life-like portrait of the artist’s father in resin and fiberglass.

Typewriter Eraser by Claes Oldenburg. The Lunder Collection

Duane Hanson’s 1973 Old Man Playing Solitaire, polyester resin and fioberglass polychromed in oils, Colby College Museum of Art director Sharon Corwin, and Maine Sunday Telegram art critic Daniel Kany.

The Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion houses galleries, studio space and educational space for the museum’s k-12 school outreach program. Though its severely minimalist glass box form is a dramatic departure from the predominant red brick Georgian architecture of the Mayflower Hill campus, the new wing glows from within at night and during the day reflects the surrounding buildings in its peculiarly muted glass walls. When I first saw the rendering below, I mistakenly assumed the building was still covered in construction plastic, but that is just the dulling effect of the horizontal striations of the fritted glass used to diffuse daylight and conserve energy.

Do not adjust your set. The photo below is a view of construction workers on the roof of a new science building under construction across the street as seen through the fritting of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion.

For the next ten years, a soaring wall painting by Sol Lewitt will grace the street side of the glass wing. The courtyard entrance features Richard Serra’s steel cubes, minimalist sculpture that foreshadows the high seriousness of the Alfond-Lunder.

The Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion illuminated from within revealing the Sol Lewitt wall drawing on loan to the museum for ten years.

[Colby College Museum of Art, 5600 Mayflower Hill, Waterville ME, 207-859-5600.]

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The exhibition that caught my attention is New Blue and White (through July 14), a show of some 70 objects by 40 artists and designers that might have been called Neo-Delft, Modern Ming and/or Blue Willow Now. Emily Zilber, curator of contemporary decorative arts at the MFA, has assembled works in ceramics, glass, sculpture, fashion and furniture that that make modern, updated use of the distinctive blue and white aesthetic associated with Dutch Delftware, Ming vases and Blue Willow porcelain houseware.

Work 0808, 2008, by Harumi Nakashima. Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie. Photo by Geoff Spear

The works in the show range from abstractions such as Harumi Nakashina’s glazed stoneware polka dot polyps to functional pieces such as a pair of shoes by Rodarte (Kate and Laura Mulleavy) and conceptual works such as Spin, a set of bone china plates by Robert Dawson that start out with a traditional Blue Willow pattern and become increasingly blurred.

Organizing an exhibition around the color combination of cobalt blue and china white is a refreshing and insightful conceit. I’d love to see what curator Emily Zilber could do with international orange.

Mele Department Store, c. 1900, probably by Aleardo Villa

The elevation of the everyday to the status of art object, the ephemeral to the eternal, animates The Postcard Age: Selection from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection (through April 14), an exhibition of some 700 vintage postcards from the collection of Leonard Lauder, retired chairman of the Estée Lauder Cosmetics Company, who has given the MFA tens of thousands of a rare postcards, promised a gift of 100,000 more, and endowed the Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Visual Culture position at the MFA. Lauder Curator Benjamin Weiss co-curated the postcard show with Lynda Kilch of Hunter College.

“The MFA shares my vision of the postcard as both a modern art form and a revolutionary means of communications,” says Mr. Lauder, 80. “This exhibition highlights both the beauty of the postcard and its historical importance. The MFA’s commitment to exploring visual culture brings postcards into a dialogue with other forms of modern art – like posters and books as well as prints and paintings.”

Lauder’s collection, which began with a postcard of the Empire State Building he purchased when he was seven years old, is now one of the world’s most extensive and is focused on the decades around 1900 when postcards were the text messages and Twitter of the times. Lauder’s fine art and fortune has largely benefited the Whitney Museum of American Art, but he has been placing his postcard collection elsewhere with prior gifts both to the Boston MFA and the Curt teach Postcard Archive of the Lake County Discovery Museum in Illinois.

Delftsche Slaolie (Delft Salad Oil)Johannes Theodorus Toorop (Dutch, 1858 -1928),1894. Color lithograph printed in black and yellow. Lee M. Friedman Fund. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Hand in glove with the Lauder postcard exhibition, the MFA is also featuring 40 of the turn of the century posters from its collection of some 2,500 posters. Art in the Street: European Posters (through July 21). Posters are the medium through which many of us first acquired fine art imagery if not fine art itself. In my case, it was posters of works by Andrew Wyeth and Ben Shahn. The posters in the MFA show date from 1878 to 1941 and were designed by artists such as Toulouse Lautrec, Bonnard, and Kandinsky.

TRH The Duke & Duchess of Cambridge, London, 2010* © Mario Testino

Finally, the MFA has taken some critical grief for a pair of exhibitions of photographs by celebrity fashion photographer Mario Testino. Mario Testino: In Your Face (which came down February 3) featured 122 often large-format glamour portraits of celebrities such as model Kate Moss, rock star Mick Jagger, and Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Mario Testino: British Royal Portraits (through June 16) features 16 somewhat more subdued photographs of the British Royal Family.

Mario Testino is one of the most famous fashion photographers in the world, but the glitzy nature of his work apparently makes some people uncomfortable with it in the relatively staid confines of the MFA. But then the MFA has a gallery named after fellow glamour photographer Herb Ritts, who in 2007 gave the Boston museum $2.5 million and 180 of his own photographs. Fine art it certainly is not. Fun it surely is.

[Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston MA, 617-267-9300.]

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I’ve been thinking about murals lately as I prepare an essay on public art for a forthcoming book on contemporary art in Maine. I’m interested in the Rhode Island murals – two more by illustrator David Macaulay are scheduled for later this year – both because I have personal connections – I lived in Pawtucket as a boy and my daughter Hannah lives in Providence – and because the RI murals represent an example of official recognition that art helps create a sense of place, that it can edify as well as beautify.

Gretchen Dow Simpson is best known as an artist who between 1974 and 1993 created 58 covers for The New Yorker back in the day when The New Yorker was still The New Yorker, the magazine with the highest standards of any mainstream American publication. Simpson’s art consists of clean, spare images of architectural elements that have the power to evoke very specific places, from Block Island to Vinalhaven, with an economy of means.

Simpson’s Pawtucket mural consists of repeated images of a window in an old mill on Cottage Street. It is a view looking from inside the mill, the light from outside falling upon a bench in the foreground. The mural was painted on the retaining wall by master muralist Johan Bjurman.

Johan Bjurman has painted several murals that make use of the tromp l’oeil device of creating the illusion of a surface peeling away to reveal a different scene beneath. That happens to be the trope of one of the murals I visited last week on a walking tour of public art and street art in Portland, Maine.

The peeling blueprint of the 48 Free Street mural has become a local landmark since it was painted in 1986 by Chris Denison, C. Michael Lewis, Toni Wolf, Josephine Mussomeli, Steven Priestly, and Bertelle Brookings.Denison, Priestley, Wolf, Chris Hayes, Karen Sarfaty and Scott Kern repainted it in 2002. The mural pretends to be a blueprint applied to the entire side of the building, the blueprint peeling back to reveal the actual building.

Blueprint mural in Portland, ME

Murals everywhere tend to concern themselves with expressions of local pride and/or documentation of lost pasts.

Perhaps Portland’s best-known mural is the Tommy’s Park mural in the Old Port just a few blocks from the Free Street blueprint mural. Designed by Chris Denison, C. Michael Lewis and architect Winton Scott and painted in 1985 by Denison, Lewis, Toni Wolf, Josephine Mussomeli, Matt Blackwell, Greg Chesaux, Wesley Stevens, Don Thayer, Art Cross and Donna Bachle,  the Tommy’s park mural recreates a façade of the old post office that once occupied the park space.

Tommy’s Park in Portland, ME

Up on Congress Square across from the Portland Museum of Art, a mural painted in 1997 and 2002 by Tony Taylor and Ken Tacka on the side of the old Eastland Hotel presented a bifurcated view of the way the corner of High and Congress looked in the 1920s and the 1950s. The Eastland mural itself, however, is now about to become history as renovations overtake it.

Ocean Gateway Parking Garage mural in Portland, ME

One of the most recent Portland murals is the 2008 Ocean Gateway Parking Garage mural by Elizabeth M. Burke and Rebecca Pease. Based on a c.1910 postcard view of Portland Harbor, the mural covers what would have been a huge blank wall with sepia tone images of sailing ships.

Nostalgia is the stuff of murals, whether Gretchen Dow Simpson imagining placid mill windows along a busy highway or Burke and Pease plastering a 19^th century vista on a 21^st century eyesore. To me one of the most unusual and successful murals around makes an even more surprising use of the romance of history.

Asylum mural in Portland, ME

The mural on the back wall of the Asylum night club in Portland uses the conceit of a “Greetings from PORTLAND” postcard but it was painted by a group of graffiti artists led by Mike Rich. Taggers with street names such as Learn, Nasty, Cemek and Ember each painted a separate letter in his own aerosol style. The result is street art with a reverence for the past.

Every city of any size sprouts murals and street art, whether sanctioned or not. Exploring your city for public acts of art can tell you a lot about where you are.

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Snake Cup, lithograph, 1984, by Elizabeth Murray

St. Jerome in His Study, 1514 engraving by Albrecht Durer. Bequest of David P. Becker

David Becker devoted 40 years of his life to the study and collection of prints, beginning in college at Bowdoin (Class of 1970). David’s passion for prints spanned the entire gamut from rare Renaissance impressions to contemporary ephemera. The last time I saw David was the summer before he died. I ran into him at the college library’s special collections room where he was donating a selection of printed posters by the Beehive Design Collective, a global graphics workshop headquartered in Machias, Maine. David was enthusiastic about the Beehive posters in part because they were pure manifestations of the democratic nature of prints – a medium for disseminating ideas and images, in the case of the Beehive Design Collective, ideas and images of a progressive, grassroots art activist nature.

Beehive Design Collective poster

“Prints are in many ways the most democratic visual medium – at least before television and computers – and they are found not only in museums, but also within historical societies, libraries, corporate archives, antique shops, bookstores, and of course private homes – not to forget newspapers, magazines, compact disc covers, and street posters,” wrote David in the introduction to The Imprint of Place: Maine Printmaking, 1800-2005, the landmark book that documented 2006 Maine Print Project, a statewide collaboration of 25 art institutions.

The Reader, 1892 lithograph by Odilon Redon. Bequest of David P. Becker

In a strange way, prints are fundamental to my own conception of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, so I can completely understand how David became so enthralled with the medium there. When I think of Bowdoin in the 1960s, when I first started to look at art, I think of the deathly images of Leonard Baskin.

In 1962, director Marvin Sadik, who put the Bowdoin museum on the national map with his ambitious exhibitions, curated a major Baskin show at Bowdoin. Decades later, when I interviewed Baskin for Maine Times, I spent time at Bowdoin pouring over its collection of Baskin prints, beautiful, dark, often grotesque images of human mortality. When my daughter told me she was going to take a printmaking class, I dug out the 1969 etching of a hunchback that Baskin gave me when I visited him at his farm outside Northampton,Massachusetts and gave it to her.

Humpback, 1969 etching by Leonard Baskin

I also connect art at Bowdoin with Thomas Cornell, who began teaching at the college in 1962 and who died in December at the age of 75. Early on, Tom was an artist in the Baskin mold. He even published a collection of 21 etchings and drawings of figures from the French Revolution with Baskin’s Gehenna Press. In more recent times, Tom’s romance with the past took the form of gorgeous, idyllic paintings of modern people living in harmony with Nature. He was deeply devoted to the moral power of art.

Snapping Turtle, 1968 etching by Thomas Cornell

David Becker paired a Baskin etching of a Deer Isle landscape with a Cornell etching of a snapping turtle in The Imprint of Place. He had a wonderful eye, superb taste, an unsurpassed love and knowledge of the medium, and now he has shared that love with Bowdoin museum audiences in perpetuity with his gift of prints. I am pleased that my youngest daughter has been among the first to receive David’s invaluable gift.

(Bowdoin College Museum of Art,245 Maine St., Brunswick,ME, 207-725-3275.)

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      Simen Johan was born in Norway and came to theUnited States in 1992 to study at the School of Visual Arts. As photography made its aggressive move on the fine art world, Johan was one of those adulterators who early on made heavy use of Photoshop to create cyber-surreal tableaux, many seemingly inspired by or aspiring to children’s fairy tales.

      Johan’s “Until the Kingdom Comes” bestiary began in 2006 and consists of large (five foot dimensions and more) color photographs of animals taken in zoos and wildlife parks, on farms and using taxidermy and road kill and altered more subtly such that there is something peculiar and “off” about them. These are not animals in nature. They are denatured fauna meant “to confuse the boundaries between opposing forces, such as the familiar and the otherworldly, the natural and the artificial, the amusing and the eerie.”

   So, for example, we have a great dirty bison resting quietly in a landfill, a pair of flamingoes doing the flamingo, a grass-stained sheep sitting up on his haunches (the farmer who held him in this awkward position Photoshopped out), a rhino reclining on a beach, and a pair of bull moose fighting in an arid landscape that looks as though it hasn’t seen a moose since the Ice Age.   

      Johan’s moose remind me of “The Final Charge,” the moose at L.L. Bean stuffed just as they died and were found in the wild, antlers locked together for eternity. Johan has his own version of this mortal combat in a photograph of a pair of caribou frozen in death, horns locked around a tree.

   Animals are always entertaining subjects and Johan’s photo trickery adds to the fascination, which for the artist is “an existential search for spiritual and philosophical truth.” I suppose there is an element of the apocalypse to “Until the Kingdom Comes” as Johan’s animals await the peaceable kingdom, but mostly the philosophical inquiry here is one of epistemology – how images convey and contain meaning.

   Simen Johan belongs to a generation of photo-artists for whom photographic technology is no longer a means of apprehending reality. Everyone now knows that photographs are cunning lies. So Johan used photography to create a reality, a fiction but a convincing one.

   The beauty of these beasts is that they can be enjoyed simply for their curiosity factor or they can be appreciated as exercises in the creation of meaning.

[David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University,64 College St.,Providence RI, 401-863-2932.]

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Gov. Paul LePage had hardly settled into office in March 2011 when, sight unseen and in response to an anonymous e-mail complaining that the mural in the DOL waiting room was too pro-labor, he ordered the mural removed. Artists and organized labor were quick to respond. Marching first on the labor department and, after LePage made good on his order to remove the mural and had it hidden away, on the State House itself, hundreds of “muralistas” (myself included) complained of government censorship and championed the cause of freedom of expression.

Mural in Maine State Museum lobby

The $60,000 mural at issue was commissioned by the Maine DOL, was largely paid for with U.S. DOL funds, was dedicated in 2008 and was painted by Maine artist Judy Taylor. It depicts scenes from  Maine’s labor history on 11-panels measuring a total of 36 feet. In a figurative style that reminds some of social realism and some of graphic novels, the mural records child labor, women textile workers, secret ballot voting, the first Labor Day, labor organizing in the Maine woods, a 1937 shoeworkers’ strike, FDR’s U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (a Maine native), Rosie the Riveter, the 1987 International Paper strike, and the future of Maine labor.

In March of 2012, a lawsuit brought by three artists and two union members was heard in U.S. District Court in Bangor. Judge John Woodcock sided with the Maine Attorney-General’s office, which argued that LePage was simply exercising an act of “government speech” in ordering the mural removed. It seemed to most of us that only in Orwellian doublespeak could a clear act of censorship be considered free speech. The state’s theory of the case would seem to presume 1) that the governor IS the state and 2) the governor would be exercising “government speech” if he ordered books he didn’t like removed from the state library or portraits of past governors he disapproved of removed from the capitol rotunda.

In November of 2012, however, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld Woodcock’s decision.

Also in November of 2012, Gov. LePage’s controversial administration was dealt a heavy blow by voters, who took away control of the state legislature from Republicans and, thus, returned appointment of constitutional officers such as Attorney-General to Democrats. Some folks in hindsight seem to think that the appointment of Democratic AG Janet Mills, who does not support LePage’s mural ban, had something to do with it coming out of the closet. I’m not so sure.

   My fellow muralistas were quick to cry “Victory” when the surprise announcement, an unusual Sunday press release, came, but again I am not too sure. Two years ago when LePage ordered the labor mural removed there were offers to hang it both at Portland City Hall and the Museum L-A in Lewiston, but mural defenders would have none of it. They demanded that the mural be returned to its original site in the DOL waiting room. If hanging the mural where the public can see it is victory, then we could have had victory two years ago by hanging it in Portland or Lewiston.

Jeff Young, the lead attorney in the mural lawsuit, had suggested in recent months, however, that the Maine State Museum might be a logical home for the labor mural. Most of us figured it would just be a matter of waiting until LePage left office before the mural would be taken out of storage and rehung somewhere.

    “While this is not the legal outcome I would like to have seen,” writes Jeff Young, “I think our efforts succeeded in making the mural such a public piece of art that as the Gov’s spokesman apparently said, it is now a part of Maine history.”

The solution to many problems in this life is simply for enough time to pass for the problem to disappear on its own. What seems to have happened in the case of the Maine Labor History Mural is that, with litigation at an end, new Maine State Museum director Bernard Fishman, former director of the Rhode Island Historical Society, approached new Maine Labor Commissioner Jeanne Pacquette about exhibiting the mural in the museum lobby. Artist Judy Taylor was consulted on the move and consented. Gov. LePage apparently had no objections. And the U.S. DOL, which paid for the mural and had been demanding its money back if the mural were not exhibited, agreed that it would be okay for the mural to hang, at least temporarily, in a non-labor department facility.

Mural in DOL waiting room days before it was removed. Photo by Eric Lewis for The Daily Kos.

Some mural defenders were certain that the mural had been ripped from the labor department walls and must have sustained damage, but, having attended the January 14 press conference, I can attest to the fact that the mural is in perfect shape and looks as though it was meant to hang in the Maine State Museum lobby all along. And, with its new-found fame, the mural will now be seen by thousands more people than would ever have seen it in the tiny, airless DOL waiting room.

Don’t you just love happy endings?

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Lois Dodd: Catching the Light at the Portland Museum of Art (through April 7) is an exhibition of close to 65 paintings created between the 1950s and now. The exhibition originated at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Portland museum has added 15 recent little oil paintings on roof flashing to the 50 or so that constituted the original show.

Self Portrait in Green Window, 1971

As Lois Dodd has been coming to Maine since 1951, part of a New York cohort group that includes Alex Katz, Neil Welliver and Yvonne Jacquette, it is fitting and proper that one pole of the exhibition should be in the Pine Tree State, but this exhibition should have originated in New York City, not Kansas City.

Dodd’s New York street credentials are well established. She was born in Montclair NJ, just west of the city, in 1927. She graduated from Cooper Union in 1948, was a founding member of the cooperative Tanager Gallery, taught at both Brooklyn College and Queens College for many years, lives in New York (and Cushing, Maine) and has shown there her entire career.

I suppose the fact that Dodd mostly paints interiors, landscapes, gardens, flowers and female nudes in a very matter-of-fact modernist style of realism might explain why New York area museums – in love as they are with flash and fads – have failed her.

Night Sky Loft, 1972-73

In his essay for the Lois Dodd: Catching the Light catalogue, critic John Yau allies Dodd with artists Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Catherine Murphy and Josephine Halvorson as “observational painters.”

“These artists, all of whom are women, constitute a loosely allied tradition that is distinct from mainstream art, which is dominated by men.”

There is, of course, a persistent gender bias in the art world.

Back in 1985, a group of anonymous art activists calling themselves the Guerrilla Girls began calling the art world’s attention to the institutionalized exclusion of women artists by pointing out that only 13 of the 169 artists featured in a major international survey exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art were women.

When you look at the rosters of leading art galleries in New York, you see that the proportion of women ranges roughly from 10% (Sperone Westwater) to 25% (David Zwirner). Alexandre Gallery, which represents Dodd, does better at 31%.

Artists who have experience in both New York and Maine will tell you that Maine is much friendlier to women artists. Indeed, Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Dodd’s Maine gallery, can boast of gender equity with 51% of the artists it represents being women.

As it happens, Lois Dodd is also featured at the moment in an exhibition at the University of New England Art Gallery in Portland that is part of series designed to redress the grievances of the past and to celebrate the accomplishments of women in contemporary art.  Maine Women Pioneers III-Homage (through March 3) is one of four all-women exhibitions this year at UNE, Homage being devoted to work by veteran artists Dodd, Maggie Foskett, Susan Groce, Beverly Hallam, Alison Hildreth, Frances Hodsdon, Lissa Hunter, Dahlov Ipcar, Yvonne Jacquette, Frances Kornbluth, Rose Marasco, Marylin Quint-Rose and Katarina Weslien.

Globe Thistle, 1996

Maine Women Pioneers III, organized by UNE gallery director Anne Zill, curator Gael Mae McKibben and Portland gallerist Andres Verzosa, is the long overdue post-World War II installment of the Maine Women Pioneers series that began with an exhibition of 19^th century artists in 1981 and pre-World War II artists in 1985. (Dahlov Ipcar is the only artist included in both the 1985 and the 2013 show.)

As I contributed an essay to the Maine Women Pioneers III catalogue, I will not promote the exhibition other than to note that women artists are still under-represented in most art gallery rosters and museum collections. This bias is nowhere more apparent than in New York City. Thus it falls to the more enlightened institutions and audiences of Maine to hold up a great artist such as Lois Dodd for celebration and veneration. She is not flashy or trendy; she’s better than that.

[Portland Museum of Art,7 Congress Square,PortlandME, 207-775-6148. University of New England Art Gallery,716 Stevens Ave., Portland ME, 207-221-4499.]

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Serge Rossolowsky photos and artifacts

Serge Rossolowsky (1895-1976) was a Russian born painter who lived and worked in Portland,Maine, in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a colorful downtown character who cut a distinctive European figure pulling his little cart along Congress St.dressed in a black topcoat and beret. His studio was in the Congress Building and I worked at the Portland Public Library next door. That’s where I met him in 1972 and how I came to look after him the last year of his life.

Mr. Rossolowsky and I became friends when I volunteered to help him try to write what he called “my terrible history,” a memoir of a life that ran from the Russian Revolution in St. Petersburg through Stalinist concentration camps, World War II on the Western front, forced labor under the Nazis, and emigration to theUnited States in 1951. He lived a brutal life, beaten up by history, losing his freedom every time he turned around, losing his parents to the Bolsheviks and his wife and daughter to Stalin.

   The constant in his “terrible history,” which Mr. Rossolowsky imagined becoming a “chronicle roman” or historical novel, was painting. He began taking private painting lessons as a boy at his family dacha and continued to study at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Most of the paintings I have seen are urban landscapes, whether observed or imagined, painted in a loose, brushy style after Utrillo, though I’m sure the primary early influence most have been Isaac Levitan, the greatest of the Russian landscape painters.

Even exile and imprisonment did not stop Mr. Rossolowsky from painting. When he was sent to work on the Belomar-Baltic White Sea project, he painted scenery for plays produced at the remote forest camps for the officers and overseers. He subsequently painted sets for a floating opera company on the Volga River and painted signs at a truck factory in Germany after being captured by the Nazis during World War II. After surviving the Dresden Fire Bombing, he escaped to the American zone, working at the PX in Heidelberg before emigrating to America in 1951. For a decade he lived in New York City and painted lampshades for a living.

New York by Serge Rossolowsky. Collection of Kevin Daniel

While living in New York, Mr. Rossolowsky exhibited his paintings at the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibition, which played a role in his coming to Maine. When Mr. Rossolowsky won a prize at the Washington Square show, it was reported in the Russian language newspaper New Russian Word. A childhood friend who was living in the Russian colony in Richmond, Maine saw the report and invited Mr. Rossolowsky to Maine in 1963. Mr. Rossolowsky found the Tsarist community in Richmond a little too conservative for his tastes and settled in Portland.

I find it hard to believe that 40 years have now passed since I met Serge Rossolowsky and 36 years since we buried my old friend on a snowy day in October, 1976. What fascinated me about Mr. Rossolowsky was that he was living history, as though a character had stepped out of a Russian novel to wander the streets of Portland. I tape recorded several hours of conversations and took a hundred pages of notes in his hot little apartment on Cumberland Ave. I promised Mr. Rossolowsky on his deathbed that I would write his story and I have yet to do so, though not for lack of trying. I have written his life as fiction, non-fiction and a screenplay. I will get it right if it’s the last thing I do, and the way things are going, it may well be.

Happy New Year!

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   In my library, I have a Maine art bookcase that holds five shelves jammed with catalogues and books gathered over 34 years of writing about art and only a handful are hardcover monographs about individual artists, among them examinations of the art of Thomas Crotty, Connie Hayes, Eric Hopkins, Dahlov Ipcar, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz and Andrew Wyeth. Add to that list of properly published artists Joel Babb

Copley Plunge, 1990

.

   I had an opportunity to share my thoughts about Joel Babb’s incredibly complex and detailed urban landscapes of Boston and natural landscapes of Maine on this blog back in September 2009 on the occasion of an exhibition at Vose Galleries in Boston and subsequently at Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, about 30 miles from where Babb lives in rural East Sumner. Ten years ago, I spent time with him in Sumner to write a feature profile in another magazine and Babb is one of the 100 artists profiled in Maine Art New forthcoming from University of Maine Press in spring 2013.

Lily and Cypress, The Corkscrew Swamp, Florida, 2001

A couple of weeks ago an advance copy of Nature & Culture: The Art of Joel Babb (University Press of New England, February 2013, $50) arrived in the mail accompanied by a letter from Babb. I have been looking at that hand-written letter almost as much as at the book in an effort to understand (or is it comprehend?) how Babb achieves such preternatural realism in his paintings.

   I believe we all basically understand the world in relationship to ourselves. The fact that I write for a living yet am cursed by nearly illegible handwriting makes me fascinated by Joel’s fine, elegant, even hand. I keep thinking that somewhere in his most basic ability to write legibly lies the secret to his meticulous illusions of cultural and natural landscapes.

Boston from the Prudential, 2005

Conceptualization tends to trump craftsmanship in contemporary art. Painstaking realism tends to be seen as an old fashioned virtue unless employed ironically. Joel Babb is one of the few painters I can think of, only Rackstraw Downes comes easily to mind, who applies photorealism to the modern world without irony or romanticism. His sheer talent is dazzling, and that is not something you can say about many serious contemporary artists.

   Nature & Culture contains a preface by novelist Anita Shreve, an introduction by curator Christopher Crosman, text by critic Carl Little, Babb’s own comments on some individual paintings, and an afterwards by scientist Bernd Heinrich.

   “Babb’s art speaks to me of consummate skill, focus, caring, and a seemingly infinite patience to process what what he has seen and transferred through the mind and hand, and to distill the essence of it on canvas,” writes Heinrich, one of America’s most articulate scientists.

   I mean no disrespect to Heinrich or any of these fine and astute writers, however, when I suggest that the essence of Joel Babb’s art ultimately escapes their words, as it does mine.

   Back in 2002, having seen a bit of Babb’s methodology first-hand, I tried to describe how he creates such amazingly detailed, panoramic paintings:

Gulf Hagas, Maine, 2011

“All of Babb’s paintings begin with direct observation. He starts by producing small oil studies based both on observation and photographs. In his most recent work he has scanned multiple photographic images of a scene into his computer in order to manipulate them into a photomontage he can use for reference. When he has composed a painting using photographs, he tiles off a canvas into a grid of squares and transfers the composition. Then he executes a complete tonal underpainting in shades of brown and yellow. At this stage in the process, his paintings resemble nature as seen through the yellow lenses of sportsmen’s sunglasses. Finally, he paints over the underpainting in oil, working anywhere from six to eight weeks on each major painting.”

   The dazzle of a Babb cityscape or landscape is that the viewer is able to see orders of magnitude more detail in his art than with the naked eye, a kind of brick-by-brick, leaf-by-leaf conjuring act. But the magic of a Babb cityscape or landscape is that he possesses the innate ability to 1) see with such clarity and 2) make manifest what he sees in colored oils. So much information rendered by hand is beyond nature and culture.

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Rabbitt by Jeff Koons

This Will Have Been was curated byICA chief curator Helen Molesworth and was shown at theMuseum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before coming home to roost inBoston. At each stop it has provoked comment, conversation and criticism as one woman’s view of a turbulent art decade (actually 1979 to 1992).

   Julian Schnabel, an opulent Neo-Expressionist egomaniac made famous by his broken plate paintings, was represented in the exhibition by a portrait of Andy Warhol, the prince of 1960s Pop Art, painted on black velvet. Tacky as high art. I may be wrong, but I believe Schnabel was metaphorically “banned in Boston.” He is not listed in the ICA press release and Helen Molesworth told Boston Phoenix art critic Greg Cook, “I don’t deal with a lot of what was super embarrassing. You won’t see [Francesco] Clemente and [Enzo] Cucchi. I don’t do the big Neo-Expressionist ’80s, and I think some of that stuff was embarrassing.”

   What Molesworth seemed to be saying is that she decided not to deal with the top of the market, the big money boys of the 1980s. Her vision of the 1980s is a far more egalitarian one animated by feminist, gay and minority artists. Still, the signature piece in This Will Have Been is probably Jeff Koons’ Rabbit. The master of expensive kitsch and a vigorous self-promoter (another characteristic of the 1980s), Koons produced a balloon bunny in stainless steel. More tacky as high art.

   Death runs through the exhibition like, well, an epidemic. Among the artists in the show who barely outlived their 1980s youth are Jean-Michael Basquiat (graffiti artist turned fine art star who died of a heroin overdose) and Robert Mapplethorpe (the beautiful boy fetishist who was the finest photographer of his time), David Wojnarowicz (passionate performance artist and filmmaker) and Cuban-born process artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, all three of whom died from AIDS.

Advantages by the Guerilla Girls

A lot of the art of the 1980s came loaded with messages for the conservative Reagan-Bush establishment. The feminist activist group Guerilla Girls addressed the under-representation of women artists in major art galleries and museum collections with a satirical poster entitled The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist.  Donald Moffett spoke for the gay community with a 1990 light box bearing the White House telephone number and the message, “Call the White House. Tell Bush we’re not dead yet.”

How Ya Like me Now? by David Hammons

And Black artist David Hammons thumbed his nose at American racism with a portrait of the Rev. Jesse Jackson entitled “How Ya Like Me Now?” Hammons’Jackson is fair-skinned with blond hair and blue eyes.

   Appropriation art (which by any other name would be plagiarism or copyright violation) was big in the 1980s, the borrowing, quoting or re-contextualizing of images from commercial media being seen as an act of edifying the mundane. The Prince of Appropriation was and is Richard Prince, a photographer who grew up in Braintree,Massachusetts and attended Nasson College in Sanford,Maine. Prince is represented by a photograph of the Marbleboro Man, which was an advertising photograph when Sam Abell originally made it but became fine art when Prince “rephotographed” it. Don’t ask me. I don’t get it either.

   This Will Have Been features 100 works by 90 artists and is organized around four themes – The End Is Near, Democracy, Gender Trouble, and Desire and Longing. Whether Helen Molesworth redeems the material and emotional excesses of the 1980s by ignoring some of the art stars and focusing on the art workers remains to be seen. But this is an exhibition you will want to see if only to be entitled to an opinion about it.

[Institute of ContemporaryArt/Boston, 100 Northern Ave.,BostonMa, 617-478-3100.]

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Half Dome, Blowing Snow, Yosemite National Park, California, ca. 1955 by Ansel Adams

What we see in America in View is not only how the American landscape has changed from the romantic grandeur of 19^th century wilderness to the ironic blandness of 21^st century dystopia but also how photo technology has changed from labor-intensive chemical processes to digital virtual reality and how the interests of photographers have changed from the sublime to the offhand.

Organized by RISD Museum print, drawing and photography curator Jan Howard and RISD photography professor Debra Bright, the exhibition is arranged in five historic chapters – Surveying the Field (Civil War to 1880s), Luminous Realms (Pictorialists), Abstracting Nature (f/64 school), Topographic Developments (New Topographics photographers of the 1970s and 1980s) and Where We Find Ourselves Today (Deconstructed landscapes and orchestrated photographs).

Perhaps because I visited the museum with my daughter Tess, an environmental science major in college, a week after the devastating environmental wake-up call of Hurricane Sandy, I found myself gravitating to images of the landscape in distress. Tess stopped at Arthur Rothstein’s iconic 1936 photograph of a father and his two young sons caught in Dust Bowl dust storm and explained how it had been used in an environmental history. I turned from that to Ansel Adams’ famous c.1955 photograph of Half Dome inYosemiteNational Parkand wondered whether the snow blown face of the landmark was now pock marked with climbing gear.

In general, a walk through America in View is a walk from a dim, dark past into a lurid present, the classic photographers of old celebrating pristine nature, the photographers of the late 20^th century more interested in the human landscape, and the 21^st century photographers drawn to the strange beauty of nature in decline.

Cole Strip Mine, Power Plant and Waste ponds, 1984, by David T. Hanson

Among my favorite American wasteland photographs were David T. Hanson’s 1984 color print of abandoned strip mines inMontana and Ed Burtynsky’s milky white 1991 image of a calcium carbonate mine in Vermont. Such a purposeful raping of the land is almost breathtaking.

Smoke from a Wildfire Ignited by Sparks from a Burn Barrel, Champion Creek, Custer County, Idaho, 2005, by Laura McPhee

Far more subtle are Laura McPhee’s soaring landscape of smoke rising from a wildfire inIdahoand Alec Soth’s desert landscape in which the figure of a man can be seen within a dome he has built as a refugee from civilization.

One of the most recent and pervasive trends in fine art photography is the orchestrated image. Gregory Crewdson at Yale is one of the chief practitioners and apostles of this cinematic approach to staging pictures. In the RISD show, Crewdson is represented by a haunting image of a man standing on a porch watching a young couple stroll down a cement canal in a bleak, small town.

Smoke Bombs, 2000, by Justine Kurland

Justine Kurland, one of Crewdson’s former students, contributes my favorite landscape in the show. Kurland, who is known for images of naked women and children at play in a kind of arcadia of the imagination, is represented by a 2000 color print from her “Runaway Girls” series. The photograph depicts three teen-age girls playing with smoke bombs beneath a New Jersey highway overpass. This is the new feralAmerica, a landscape where the humans conquered the wild and then went wild themselves.

[RISD Museum,224 Benefit St.,ProvidenceRI. 401-454-6500.]
 

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   I chose Alan Bray. Of course, we were on our way to see the Alan Bray show at the University of Maine Museum of Art, so my choice was no surprise. Still, if you were looking for a living artist whose work distills the essence of Maine the way Homer, Wyeth and Welliver once did, Alan Bray would have to be on your short list.

Lost Ground by Alan Bray

At The Edges: Paintings by Alan Bray at the University of Maine Museum of Art in downtown Bangor (through January 5, 2013) is one of the best Alan Bray shows I have ever seen and one of the best painting shows I have seen in Maine in recent years. Bray is a very deliberate and not very prolific painter. I usually see his work a few paintings at a time at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, so a chance to see 21 major paintings produced in the 21^st century is special and rare.

   Born in Waterville, raised in Monson, and a long-time resident of Sangerville, Bray is a true son of Maine and it is to the landscape of central Maine, a place at once wild and domesticated, natural and feral, that he turns for his distinctive take on theMaine reality. Bray was educated at the University of Southern Maine and the Villa Schifanoia in Florence,Italy, and his style of magical realism is a combination of fine and folk art, like a synthesis of New England regionalism and Italian Renaissance.   

   “Bray’s paintings of familiar places,” states the museum press release, “convey the ebb and flow of natural phenomena; and depict moments of the profound beauty that often lie at the edges of our perception.”

   All of the paintings in the UMMA show are done in casein, the milk-based paint Bray has used since he was in Italy in the 1970s. Applied in a painstaking, mannerly way, Bray’s brushwork combines with his slightly odd choice of subjects to create an edgy vision of a Maine landscape at once recognizable and mythic, a storybook landscape in which the drama is somehow off-stage or in the past.

   One of my favorite paintings in the exhibition, for example, is Lost Ground (2010), a painting of bare trees standing in a snowy landscape at the edge of a yellowed field. The uniform trees are strange enough, but then it becomes apparent that the trees in a neat, subtle square at the edge of the woods are either of a different variety or size. What is this lost ground? A former burial ground? An old farmstead? Or just a field gone fallow and returning to woodland?

Deer Stand by Alan Bray

Deer Stand (2003) is another wintry scene in which the wooden platform a hunter has erected in a tree next to a game trail stands covered in new fallen snow while beneath the tree is evidence of deer browsing. The hunter and the hunted are absent, leaving just the temporary traces of their life-and-death game in the snow.

   First Snow (2012), the image on the exhibition invitation, is a chilly scene of winter, the foreground occupied by cold blue ripples on a pond, the background by a drowned forest rimed in snow. The ghost of a hill can be seen through the trees and wood duck boxes affixed to two of the trees attest to the proximity of man.

First Snow by Alan Bray

I spent a lot of time looking at Footbridge (2012), a vertical casein on panel of a view from a wooden footbridge up a murky stream into a snowy forest. It is snowing in the woods, the falling snow rendered by Bray in long, slanting lines of white. This atmospheric painting reminded me of Neil Welliver’s snowing paintings in which he would apply a screen of tens of thousands of tiny white dots to capture the effect of looking at the landscape through falling snow.

   Alan Bray and Neil Welliver are very different painters, despite a certain first glance resemblance in their work. Welliver was a landscape painter who had grown up in an age of abstraction. Illusion was anathema to him. Welliver’s big Maine landscapes are diagrammatic in that he always insisted that his work be a flat painting before it was a three dimensional illusion of nature. He was painting an equivalent of nature.

   Alan Bray is an environmental storyteller. His small Maine landscapes are as much allusion as illusion, referring to natural and human history in oblique ways. Cheese Factory Spring (2007) is the apotheosis of Bray’s gnostic talent for evoking the hidden narrative of landscapes. A small springfed pond surrounded by mossy stones stands in the midst of snowy woods, laden evergreen branches reflected in the surface. Where once there was human industry – the dug pond, the wall of stones – there is now an indifferent nature standing in mute testimony to the passing of man.

   The edges implied by At the Edges: Paintings by Alan Bray are the margins where the man-altered landscape meets the wild. Alan Bray is the visual poet laureate of nature reclaiming central Maine even as man attempts to suburbanize it. His vision of Maine is the best and the purest I have seen.

 [UniversityofMaineMuseumofArt,40 Harlow St.,BangorME, 207-561-3350.]   

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   While the Portland Museum of Art biennials have become the primary juried shows of new art in Maine, the CMCA biennial this year is a real eye-opener, at least for me. I like to think I pay attention to who’s doing what in Maine, but of the 17 artists in the show, nine were previously unknown to me. That’s great, because the primary function of a biennial is to bring new art and artists to public attention.

"Ice Melts Tyrant;s Spell by Lisa Kellner

The format of the 2012 CMCA Biennial Exhibition (through December 2)is different than most biennials as seven of the artists were invited and 10 were selected from 415 artists who submitted by CMCA director Suzette McAvoy and independent curator Daphne Anderson Deeds from Connecticut.

   “The jurors’ vision of this year’s Biennial,” notes the CMCA press release, “was to present a balance of concepts, volume, color, and texture for the exhibition as a whole.” Not sure how meaningful that jurors’ statement might be, but biennials tend to be democratic free-for-alls that no one expects to cohere.

"Colorless Field" by Lauren Fensterstock

The best-known artists in the show are Lauren Fensterstock and Aaron Stephan, a Portland couple who are conceptual artists with emerging national reputations, Fensterstock for her craft-based paper constructions and Stephan for his sculpture-based installations. Fensterstock was invited to exhibit; Stephan was selected.

"Kris and Daniel" by David Stess

Two of the best photographers in the state are also in the biennial. Luc Demers of Portland is known for his haunting, darkened room interiors and abstract photographs of light tracking across a photo-surface. David Stess of Cherryfield and New York has been participating in and photographing the blueberry harvest in downeast Maine for decades, documenting the migrant culture and the barren landscape in classic black and white.

"All This Time" by Cassie Jones

Sculptor Cassie Jones of Brunswick creates funky abstract wall sculpture out of upholstered fabric. Grace DeGennaro, my neighbor in Yarmouth, is perhaps Maine’s first symbolist painter, creating elegant, precise, mandala-like images that resonate with both spiritual and empirical power.

   Kenny Cole of Monroe is one of Maine’s rare political artists, using his visual talents to social ends. Cole’s recent paintings, drawings and constructions have explored the human aspiration toward a higher power, focusing on everything from space flight to ascension into Heaven. Lynda Litchfield of Cape Elizabeth is a purely abstract painter who uses oil and encaustic to explore surface and substance.

   Those are the eight artists whose work I am familiar with to varying degrees. The artists who are new to me are Tom Butler of Rockland, Lisa Kellner of Rangeley, Kitty Wales of Vinalhaven (invitees) and Robin Mandel of Cushing, James Marshall of Brunswick, Jonathan Mess of Jefferson, Benjamin Potter of Belfast, Kate Russo of Rockland, and Erik Weisenburger of South Portland (juried in).

   It is entirely possible that I may have seen work by one of two of these artists in group shows, but because I have not yet had a chance to get to Rockport to see for myself, I am reluctant to comment. Instead, I will let a few of the artists speak for themselves.

   “My studio practice,” writes British-born Tom Butler, “conspicuously conceals found images of people by incorporating personal symbols such as hair, hoods, mirrors, and masks and in the process attempts to reveal aspects of imaged inner personalities.”

"Triplets" by Kate Russo

“When working on graph paper,” writes Kate Russo, who is married to Butler and is the daughter of novelist Richard Russo, “the grid becomes a template or skeleton for an infinite number of variations in pattern and color. My drawing practice is consumed by what can live within this predetermined, man-made environment.”

   “History, itself, is my primary focus,” writes Lisa Kellner, who has been coming to the Rangeley Lakes area from her home in Virginia in recent years. “The capacity to interpret and digest historical notions – within the subject matter, its geographical and chronological place, and the formal presentation on the surface – are the constants in my work.”

   That doesn’t begin to explain Kellner’s wonderfully bubbly, oozy fabric installation in the CMCA stairwell, so I guess I’m just going to have to stop by the gallery one day soon.

   On Tuesday, October 16, I drive up to Rockport with gallerist Andres Verzosa and artist Terry Hilt. I guess I should have know, given the Suzette McAvoy is a superb curator, that she show would be better than advertised (and better than I imagined or suggested). That bland, generic statement about “balance” that put me off in the press release made sense once I saw the show.

   It’s not so much balance as cohesion that distinguishes the CMCA Biennial. The fact that it combines juried and invited artists means that it’s not the usual open juried grab-bag. Not only does the show cohere, it is very thoughtfully and subtley organized.

   The work on the ground floor – from Cassie Jones’ wall of cushion sculpture to Benjamin Potter’s wooden floor cutouts – evinces a devition to craft, as does much of the work in the show and in Maine. The work on the second floor – from Grace DeGennaro’s symblic paintings to Lauren Fensterstock’s black marsh of quilled paper — has a solemn, meditative feel. But what I was not prepared for was the weirdness in the basment galleries.

Gogol Dancer by Kitty Wales

Tom Butler’s alteration and adulteration of 19th century cabinet card portraits, erasing faces and replacing them with all manner of strange designs, is disturbing and mysterious. But the work I got the biggest kick out of were the mechanical sculptures by Kitty Wales, an artist who teaches at Boston University and spends much of the year on the island of Vinalhaven. Wales’ animatronic figures of animals, birds and human figures are at once amusing and disquieting, kind of like cuckoo clocks with minds of their own.   

   “The subtext to this show is obsession,” Suzette McAvoy told me.

   And I saw what she meant. Whether obsessed with material properties, formal patterns, political agendas or conceptual ideas, the artist of the CMCA Biennial demonstrate how the most peculiar and particular interest can rise from personal inquiry to meaningful public statement.  

[Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 162 Russell Ave., Rockport ME, 207-236-2875.]

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Winslow Homer at Prouts Neck

At a time when America and American art were still searching for an identity, Homer cut through all the froth and frippery of European Impressionism and derivative American Impression to establish a style of muscular naturalism that defined the independent American spirit. Homer’s art was all about man versus wild, the elemental struggle between the forces of civilization and the forces of nature.

The paintings that established Homer as an American master were the seascapes he painted at the end of his life and he might not have painted them at all had he not moved to Maine in 1883. As I have written elsewhere, “If Homer’s career had ended prior to his moving to Prouts Neck in Scarborough, he might be remembered as an important graphic artist and as a painter of American genre scenes, yet not even one universally admired by the critics of his day.”

In what has been billed as a Year of Winslow Homer, the Portland Museum of Art is celebrating its cultural connections to Homer and Prouts Neck with the opening of the newly-renovated and restored Homer Studio, an exhibition of Homer’s Maine work, and an exhibition of contemporary photographs taken at Homer’s Studio,

In a sense, the Portland Museum of Art owes its current existence to Winslow Homer, or rather to the late Charles Shipman Payson’s gift of his Homer paintings and a subsequent gift of cash that created the 1983 Charles Shipman Payson wing, a modernist landmark and art treasure box on Portland’s Congress Square.

Weatherbeaten by Winslow Homer

The masterwork of the Payson collection is Weatherbeaten, a signature 1894 painting of waves pounding against the rocky coast at Prouts Neck. For its Homer celebration, the museum has placed its masterpiece in the context of 37 other works created during Homer’s final decade in Maine.

Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine (through December 30) features oil paintings, watercolors and etchings borrowed from private collectors and other museums. The museum is adding a $5 surcharge to see the Homer show to its usual $12 admission fee.

Restored Homer Studio

The occasion for the Year of Winslow Homer is the opening of the Homer Studio, which the museum acquired and restored at a cost of $2.8 million, the total Homer Studio campaign running to $10.8 million to preserve and endow Maine’s most important art historical landmark. (The only other places that come close are the Olson House in Cushing made famous by Andrew Wyeth and maybe the Cape Elizabeth lighthouses painted by Edward Hopper.) The studio will be open to the public on a limited and controlled basis between September 25 and December 2. For a fee of $55 each, ten studio visitors at a time will be driven in a van from the museum to the studio. There will also be a spring visiting season between April 2 and June 14, 2013.

The limited public access is a concession to the Homer Studio’s unfortunate location behind the locked gates of Maine’s most exclusive summer colony. Back in 1936, on the centenary of Homer’s birth, a memorial exhibition of 70 of his paintings was held at the Homer Studio. Some 2,200 people viewed the exhibition during its two week run. Prouts Neckers today would have conniptions if the public were allowed to visit the Homer Studio at will.

In the past, the Homer Studio was open mostly by appointment and what visitors ushered in by the late Doris Homer would find was just a dark, dank room filled with Homer reproductions and a few moth-eaten mementoes. It was Prouts Neck itself that inspired Homer’s greatest work. His spirit was in the wind and the waves, not the musty old studio. I’m sure the renovated Homer Studio is lovely and grand, but I have a feeling Homer still isn’t there.

Razor, Found in Winslow Homer's Studio, tintype by Keliy Anderson-Staley

In keeping with Portland Museum of Art director Mark Bessire’s mission of making the past relevant, the Year of Winslow Homer is also being celebrated with a contemporary exhibition entitled Between Past and Present: The Homer Studio Photographic Project (October 6 to February 17, 2013). The exhibition features the work of five photographers who work in antique processes. Abelardo Morell (camera obscura), Keliy Anderson-Staley (wet-plate collodion), Brenton Hamilton (salt prints and gum bichromate), Tillman Crane (platinum prints) and Alan Vlach (salted paper prints) use technologies available in Winslow Homer’s day to interpret his studio and environs.

 [Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland, ME, 207-775-6148.]

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Untitled painting by Ahmed Alsoudani

Ahmed Alsoudani/ MATRIX 165 (through January 6, 2013) features six of the artist’s untitled acrylic and charcoal on canvas paintings from 2010 to 2012 in the Wadsworth’s ongoing series of contemporary exhibitions. The reason I say he is fortunate to have been born in Iraq is not that he is not talented, he is, but the fact that his images of conflict and violence are informed by the authenticity of the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War gives Alsoundani a street cred he would not have if he had grown up a suburban American kid and painted the exact same pictures.

   Alsoudani was born in Baghdad in 1975 and fled Iraq in 1999. He was already 30 years old in 2005 when he graduated from the Maine College of Art where he studied with Sean Foley (see my most recent prior post), the artist whose work Alsoudani’s most closely resembles. Foley’s exuberant biomorphic abstractions gave Alsoudani a visual language to unleash the demons of his Iraq experience and he has been pursuing them ever since.

Untitled painting by Ahmed Alsoudani

Collectors were already seeking out Alsoudani while he was pursuing his MFA at Yale (2008). Francois Pinault, the owner of Christie’s, Converse and Samsonite, became one of his biggest collectors. Charles Saatchi bought paintings for his fabled London collection. Just three years out of grad school, he was chosen to represent Iraq in the 2011 Venice Biennale and he was having solo shows in Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York. In 2013, the Portland Museum of Art is planning a one-man Alsoudani show that will travel to the Phoenix Art Museum.

   Drawing on past experience, memory, observation and imagination, Alsoudani fills his canvases with colorful, grotesque images of body parts that evoke references to the war paintings of Goya and Picasso and to the figuration of DeKooning and Guston.

   “I am not trying to make ‘war paintings,’ but paintings about war,” Ahmed Alsoudani explains in his Wadsworth exhibition statement. “I’m more interested in depicting the effects of war on people who live under these circumstances. So generally, I don’t show actual battle scenes in which there are soldiers, or fighting or weapons. I’ve been in the unique and painful situation of observing the war and being in the U.S. while my family remains in Baghdad. I’m away physically, but I talk to my family very often, so I feel caught between. The state of being ‘between’ two places and two worlds allows me to see and hear things from a different point of view.”

   Alsoudani, then, participates in the art of identity politics that is so prevalent on the contemporary art scene. The conflict he paints is not so much the political and sectarian violence of his native Iraq as it is his own conflict. It is a conflict between the peaceful, privileged world of the artist and the violent, painful world of the war on terror.

 [Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main St., Hartford CT, 860-278-2670.]

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The current exhibition (September 7-29) at Verzosa’s Aucocisco Galleries, The Crux of the Matter, is reason enough to risk a conflict of interest as it pairs two fugitives from the Maine art scene in what might be thought of as a minimal-meets-maximal Maine show.

Cross (Light Red, Dark Red) by Joshua Ferry

Joshua Ferry, who grew up in Maine, attended Maine College of Art, and spent 15 years in New Jersey before returning to Maine this year, is the minimalist. Sean Foley, a Midwesterner who had an enormous impact on Maine art and artists while teaching at Maine College of Art from 1998 to 2006, is the maximalist.

Years ago I read an interview with the great abstract painter Frank Stella to the effect that his early work was all about minimalism, trying to reduce color and form as much as possible while still retaining a creative dynamic, and that his later work was all about maximalism, trying to see how much color, form, pattern, texture, structure and illusion he could pack into one painting without it falling apart. I once stood in front of a recent Stella at the Museum of Modern Art watching glitter fall off onto the floor and wondering whether I would be guilt of art theft if I took some of the debris as a souvenir.

Cross Study (Violet)

Joshua Ferry follows the reductivist impulse. The painting in the 2005 Portland Museum of Art Biennial that brought him to wide local attention reduced the image of a flag-draped casket to red and white stripes on a field of green. In the formal minimalist tradition, Ferry painted his way through checkerboards and grids to a focus on the intersection of the lines. That reduction of form led to his most recent cross paintings, 20 x 16 acrylic on canvas abstractions consisting of a single bold, wide cross in one color against a field of another.

Ferry’s cross paintings at Aucocisco explore the cruciform for its own formal properties and chromatic possibilities, yet there is no denying the religion symbolism of the crosses, especially given both their vertical orientation and that Ferry’s father is a Christian minister.

“Crosses appear in contemporary paintings often without there being specific religious connotations,” notes Ferry. “I’m satisfied with the cross as a formal centering device and welcome associations that the viewer wishes to bring to the work.”

Deluge by Sean Foley

Sean Foley pursues the maximalist impulse out of surrealism into biomorphic abstraction. Though he has been teaching at Ohio State since 2006, Foley has retained his Maine and New England connections. During all of 2011, his 100-foot painting installation Ruse hung at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. In February of this year, Foley was featured along with seven of his former Maine College of Art students (Ahmed Alsoudani, Hannah Barnes, Natalie Larsen, Sage Lewis, Larissa Mellor, Patrick O’Rorke and Justin Richel) in an exhibition at Birke Art Gallery at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

Figure by Sean Foley

Sean Foley’s explosive, fantastical paintings sometimes strike me as a cross between the surrealism of a Salvadore Dali and the Pop Art of a James Rosenquist. He plays with shapes and illusions, patterns and forms, imagery and abstraction in ways that invite the viewer to wander around in the paintings if they dare.

“My process is tedious and slow. It drives me crazy, but I suppose it’s because I’m seeking an ‘event’ rather than any singular aesthetic resolution,” Foley said in his artist’s statement for the 2009 Portland Museum of Art Biennial. “I view the work, especially the installations, as a type of suspended animation. They precariously balance figuration and abstraction as well as numerous other contradictions.”

The concurrence of the quiet rectitude of Joshua Ferry’s crosses and the boisterous irreverence of Sean Foley’s visceral abstractions should make for a thought-provoking exhibition.

[Aucocisco Galleries, 89 Exchange St., Portland ME, 207-775-2222.]

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Oh, Canada was organized by MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish who made over 400 studio visits across Canada in order to put together an exhibition of some 100 works by 62 artists. This major undertaking, accompanied by a 400-page catalogue (Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America, MASS MoCA and MIT Press, $50), should go a long way toward raising awareness of the lively art scene thriving north of the border.

The Exhausted Landscape by Douglas Coupland

I’ll admit that I have never heard of any of the artists in the show, except Douglas Coupland who I knew only as the author of Generation X not as an artist. In fact, the only two contemporary Canadian artists, both photographers, I could name – Jeff Wall and Ed Burtynsky – are not in Oh, Canada. Given that Markonish found the Canadians “funny, nice, self-deprecating, obsessed with the landscape,” Oh, Canada, had it been mounted at some other museum or gallery, might have been an exhibition dominated by Canadian landscape paintings and wildlife art, but Markonish and MASS MoCA are primarily interested in project and installation art, art as experience rather than art as commodity. Oh, Canada is not a bunch of Robert Bateman bears and birds roaming the frozen north country, it is a lively celebration of cutting edge art from a place so near to us in New England that it is strange it remains such a terra incognita.

“Marshall McLuhan famously said: ‘Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity,’” writes Denise Markonish. “Part of this unknowing comes from the British-French divide, the tightly interwoven relationship with the United States, and the relatively young age of the country. But somehow it goes deeper into ideas of the landscape, human rights, and the perception of the country as a more tolerant place in contemporary world politics.”

My own reverse prejudice is that Canada, at least the provinces just north and east of my native Maine, are beautiful, gentle places where time passes more slowly than in the United States. Isn’t it still 1952 in Nova Scotia? When I entertain such romantic nonsense, I am forced to recall that the Nova Scotia College of Art was a redoubt of conceptual art as far back as the 1960s. It’s me, not Canada that is out-of-date.

The only Oh, Canada art I have experienced directly are some of the satiric art songs by The Cedar Tavern Singers AKA Les Phonorealistes, the artist team of Daniel Wong and Mary-Anne McTrowe. Referred to in a Canadian art magazine as “Art History’s House Band,” Wong and McTrowe, both of Lethbridge, Alberta, compose and sing little ditties about art world heroes such as Damien Hirst and Robert Smithson while accompanied on a guitar.

Cheerleading Pyramid by Sarah Anne Johnson

Humor is not a big part of contemporary American art, but the Canadians don’t seem to have quite the same prejudice against comedy in art that serious Americans do. The cover of the Oh, Canada catalogue, for example, is a conceptual photograph by Sarah Anne Johnson, a Winnipeg artist with an MFA from Yale, entitled “Cheerleading Pyramid” that consists of ten winter-clad people forming a human pyramid amidst a shower of confetti. The only way I can imagine improving on this gentle send-up of Canadian culture would have been to dress the poseurs in Roots gear.

Two Kindred Spirits by Kent Monkman

Markonish has included several First Nations artists, including Kent Monkman, a multidisciplinary artist of Cree ancestry. Monkman’s double log cabin diorama “Two Kindred Spirits” depicts Tonto and the Lone Ranger as well as Germany’s fictional buddies Winnetou and Old Shatterhan  “the love that dares not speak its name,” Oscar Wilde’s definition of homosexuality.

MASS MoCA has commissioned site-specific installations for strategic locations in its vast old factory complex. Calgary artist Gisele Amantea, for example, has create a 90-foot long black and white wall piece entitled “Democracy” and based on a decorative tomb design by architect Louis Sullivan.

Given the personal investment Denise Markonish has out into Oh, Canada I feel it is safe to say that we are unlikely to see a better or more informed survey of new Canadian art anywhere, at least not in New England. Get thee to North Adams.

[MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 413-662-2111.]

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The Gourley Museum of Art at Colby College? I like the sound of it, but it’s not likely to happen, at least not under the current college administration that never really seemed to appreciate what Gourley had created at Colby.

Hugh Gourley by Brian Speer/Colby Communications

Hugh Gourley was a good man, a gentle man, a quiet man, a sweet man. He had the best eye for art and hung exhibitions more beautifully than anyone I have ever met. Modest to the extreme, he gave all credit for the phenomenal growth of the Colby College Museum of Art to its many benefactors, but collectors, donors, artists and philanthropists were generous with the museum because they knew that Hugh would appreciate their art and make good use of their money.

A Providence native who graduated from Brown in 1953, Hugh came to Colby in 1966 after serving seven years as curator at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art. When he arrived on the Mayflower Hill campus, the Colby museum was really just a two-room gallery in the Bixler Art & Music Center. When I first met Hugh in the late 1970s, he had a small office in the connecting corridor between the Bixler building and the new Jette Galleries that were opened in 1973. For many years, the museum only had two employees, Hugh and an assistant. But what Colby did not provide in resources, it did allow in creative freedom.

As it grew under Gourley from a gallery into one of the finest college art museums in the country, the Colby College Museum of Art enjoyed a rare degree of autonomy. It was run by a board of trustees and had fundraising freedom that few museums connected to colleges have. Colby left the museum alone and it flourished under Hugh Gourley’s thoughtful nurture.

Alex Katz wing at Colby

The Davis Gallery was added in 1991, the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Art of Alex Katz in 1996 and the Lunder Wing to house the permanent collection in 1999. The collection nearly doubled in size to more than 4,000 objects. Gourley developed strong bonds with the founding artists of the Skowhegan School of Art & Sculpture, with the family of the great Modernist painter John Marin, with figurative artist Alex Katz, and with people like Maine native Jere Abbott, the first assistant director of the Museum of Modern Art and the long-time director of the Smith College Museum of Art. When he died in 1982, Abbott left Colby an art acquisition fund from which Gourley was able to make important purchases such as the landmark sculpture by Minimalist sculptor Richard Serra that graces the museum entrance plaza.

Richard Serra's 4-5-6

The Colby museum continues to grow like topsy with a new, 26,000 square foot glass addition set to open in 2013. The new Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion is made possible by a lead gift from the Alfond and Lunder families that founded the Dexter Shoe Company. If the Gourley Museum of Art at Colby doesn’t come about, naming the new wing the Gourley Pavilion would begin to honor what Hugh J. Gourley III created at Colby.

A memorial service is being planned at Colby in October.

The post Hugh J. Gourley, III (1931-2012) appeared first on Yankee Magazine.

Winter Cathedral

“I discovered that landscape is an intervention between what is seen and what is painted,” Aho wrote back in 2009 when one of his Ice Cut paintings, a square of black incised into blue-white ice and resonant for Aho of  saunas and his Finnish ancestry, was included in the Portland Museum of Art Biennial. “I use the terrain for my starting point for reference, content, and meaning, as well as for the simple pleasure of being outdoors.”

Back in 2002, I selected Eric Aho, a Melrose native and a Massachusetts College of Art graduate, as one of “Six To Watch,” one of New England’s finest emerging artists. A decade later, Aho has not disappointed, establishing his place in the art world by exhibiting throughout New England as well as New York, the U.S. and Finland.

Shower Over Ballycastle

What intrigued me then and intrigues me now is the virtuosity with which Aho handles paint while modulating along a spectrum of descriptive fidelity from painterly realism to pure abstraction. He was a student of George Nick at MassArt and he retains an allegiance to the visible world, yet Aho is also able to free himself from the bonds of description to explore the way paint on canvas becomes its own landscape, every bit as real, perhaps even more so, as a picture of a landscape.

Naturalist

“Aho’s latest abstract paintings capture the lived, remembered and imagined experience of being outdoors,” states the Currier press release. “Through the unexpected use of color, vigorous paint handling and surprising compositions, his paintings make palpable the immediacy of nature and the intangibles of light and movement.”

Daybreak

Paintings are analogous to digital imagery, varying in their degree of resolution from hi-res hyperrealism to low-res abstraction in which the phenomenal world breaks down into pixels of light and color. Aho’s art resonates at the low end so that paintings such as Winter Cathedral and Shower Over Ballycastle remain faithful and oriented to landscape while paintings such as Daybreak and The Naturalist are non-representational applications of paint inspired by but not restricted to landscape.

Landscape painting remains the coin of the real in the New England art world if not the art world-at-large and Eric Aho is one of its finest contemporary interpreters.

[Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St. Manchester NH, 603.669.6144 x108.]

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   I am hoping William Wegman: Hello Nature will answer some nagging questions I have about Wegman’s work. I mean no criticism of Wegman when I say that I have never really understood why his photographs of his silvery gray Weimaraner dogs are taken so seriously by the art world. Dressing up and posing the handsome, sad sack pooches is all very droll and amusing, but humor is not generally valued in contemporary art.

CamoFleur

   Back in 2006 on the occasion of the 40-year retrospctive William Wegman: Funney/Strange at the Brooklyn Museum, New York Magazine art critic Mark Stevens asked the salient question – “What makes them more than doggy kitsch?” I confess that I don’t know, but that probably argues a deficiency in my art appreciation. Stevens seemed to conclude that while Wegman’s dog photographs are silly on the surface, the stuff of calendars, greeting cards, Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street, they are poignant at a deeper psychological level, the noble canines suffering indignities of which they are not even aware. Something very human and touching about being unaware of how foolish one is.

The Hardly Boys

Though I understand that Wegman loves wordplay, I don’t even really get why his 2006 retrospective misspelled the word “Funney.” My hunch is that Wegman’s whole illustrious career is kind of an art world inside joke. Because Wegman was a pioneering video and conceptual artist before he was a popular photographer of goofy dogs, he’s accorded the respect of the cognoscenti as well as the approval of the hoi polloi.

FoxHole

William Wegman:Hello Nature is both outgoing Bowdoin museum director Kevin Salatino’s follow-up to last summer’s blockbuster Edward Hopper show and his swan song as he prepares to return to Los Angeles from whence he came in 2009. Wegman has summered in the Rangeley Lake region for many years and the exhibition will focus on his Maine work in multiple mediums. Wegman’s Weimaraner photographs can also be seen 24-hours a day, 365 days a week as murals in the Maine Turnpike rest stops in Kennebunk and West Gardiner.

Oops, that's my dog Rudy.

[Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, 207-725-3275.]

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   So wrote artist/poet Marsden Hartley of the strange 3,600 acres of woods, moor, boulder fields and abandoned 18^th century cellar holes in Gloucester, Massachusetts known as Dogtown in his autobiography Somehow a Past.

Dogtown, c.1934. Collection of Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum

Marsden Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877 and died in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1943. A sad, restless man, he spent much of his life wandering the world in search of inspiration and rest. He had been living and traveling in Europe before he settled down for a few months in 1931 in Gloucester to draw and paint the haunting, primal Dogtown landscape that had resonated with his metaphysical soul when he first saw it in 1920. Hartley would spend July through December of 1931 in Gloucester and return to Dogtown again in the summer of 1934 before wandering off to Nova Scotia and back to Maine.

   Marsden Hartley: Soliloquy in Dogtown at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester (through October 14) gathers 13 oil paintings and a dozen drawings Hartley did of Dogtown on his various visits. The title of the exhibition is taken from a poem Hartley wrote in 1931 and is the same title used for a similar exhibition back in 1985.

Summer Outward Bound, 1931

Dogtown, in the Gloucester-Rockport interior of Cape Ann, was a colonial settlement of some 100 families that was abandoned over time, the last inhabitant being hauled off to the poorhouse in 1830. Regarded as the province of vagabonds, prostitutes, witches and feral dogs, Dogtown is just the sort of place that fires the artist’s imagination. Not only did Hartley created several series of works inspired by the barren landscape, Dogtown is also the imaginative setting of much of poet Charles Olson’s epic three-volume Maximus Poems, (some of which he wrote sitting on a tree stump in Dogtown) and that of Anita Diamant’s 2005 novel The Last Days of Dogtown.

Whale's Jaw, Dogtown, 1931

Hartley’s interpretation of Dogtown runs toward the Expressionist take on regionalism that defined his later work, the heaviness of both the Expressionist style and palette and of the Dogtown erratics worked out in bold, black outline. His drawings sketch the scruffy contours of the twisted and torqued landscape with particular attention to local landmarks such as the Whale’s Jaw, a split pair of boulders that resemble the maw of a leviathan.

   Hartley scholar Gail R. Scott summed up the seminal importance of the Dogtown landscape to Hartley’s later work very nicely in her 1988 Marsden Hartley.

   “At Dogtown,” Scott wrote, “he learned that New England was not necessarily mountains and trees, tourists and Yankee tradesmen; he also learned that place is not a static mental or perceptual construct converted to paint and canvas. Place is the vehicle by which the artist moves out from his own creative center to discern the universal truths of man and his environment.”

   The late work that proved to be Hartley’s most original and personal, evocations of the peoples, places and things of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, and Corea, Maine, spring straight out of the shallow soil of Dogtown.

   The Cape Ann Museum has a full schedule of programs and events surrounding the Hartley in Dogtown show. This is a New England must this summer.

[Cape Ann Museum, 27 Pleasant St., Gloucester MA. 978-283-0455 x11.]

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CMCA in Rockport, Maine

   MCA became CMCA in 2002, by which time the Rockport gallery was well established as the primary venue for new art in Maine. But the ambitious expansion from a summer gallery of coastal artists to a year-round gallery of Maine’s best new art took its toll as the economy crashed in 2008 and CMCA almost went under in 2009.

   CMCA director Suzette McAvoy, who engineered the turnaround that saved the only non-profit gallery devoted exclusively to contemporary art in Maine, originally thought about celebrating the 60^th anniversary with a pair of large summer exhibitions, perhaps 60 artists in each show, but ultimately she came up with a more radical concept, a 60^th Anniversary Honors Exhibition (through July 8, 2012) featuring just five artists “whose work, throughout their careers, reflects CMCA’s mission of ‘advancing contemporary art in Maine.’”

   “The five honorees demonstrate through their art a willingness to continually challenge assumptions, to experiment, and to push past established boundaries—exemplifying a spirit of innovation and excellence that contributes to the expansion of contemporary art in Maine.”

   Three of the five 60^th honorees were included in the 40^th anniversary show – Katharine Bradford, Frederick Lynch, and Mark Wethli. The other two were either not in Maine in 1992 or not yet on Maine’s art world radar. Sculptor John Bisbee arrived in 1995. Photographer Todd Watts first came to Maine in 1974 to print for the late, great Berenice Abbott, but only became a year-round resident in 1999. Bisbee, Bradford and Wethli are all resident of Brunswick, where Bisbee and Wethli teach at Bowdoin College. Fred Lynch, who taught for many years at the University of Southern Maine, lives in Saco. Watts lives and works in rural Blanchard.

   It is a daring curatorial approach to select just five artists from among the hundreds of worthy artists in a state with literally thousands, but Suzette McAvoy has one of the best eyes in Maine and her judgment is widely respected. Bisbee, Bradford, Lynch and Wethli are inarguably among the best artists working in the state today. Todd Watts is as well, but he is the wildcard in the 60^th honors show, only becoming known in Maine in recent years though he has been in the state on and off for almost 40 years.

   The quality that McAvoy was looking for in her five honorees was a willingness to experiment and push boundaries. In that regard Watts is perhaps the most cutting edge of the quintet, a photographer whose images often look more like surreal paintings than pictures of the external world. Eschewing natural color, Watts creates highly manipulated images that he prints in an otherworldly palette of hot pinks, fiery oranges, and garish greens.

First Uncertainty by Todd Watts

Watts’ First Uncertainty, for instance, is a visionary image of Adam and Eve encountering one another as they explore a vast new plane of existence, a swirling Creation in which air and land, up and down, are as yet undefined. The only correlation between this bizarre, burning Garden of Eden and the hundreds of documentary black and whites Watts once printed for Berenice Abbott is that they are superbly printed.

This Is Only a Test by John Bisbee

John Bisbee, a sculptor known for his elegant creations in welded nails, shows not only organic abstractions built up of discrete welded units ranging from brads to spikes but also “drawings” created by “branding” heated nails on wood.

Mark Wethli installation view

Mark Wethli, who was represented in the 1992 MCA show by a sublimely realistic painting of a woman at a table lost in thought, 20 years later has transformed himself into one of the state’s foremost abstract painters, represented here by a series of acrylic on panel that read like private semaphores. What remains of Wethli’s realist past is the silence and the stillness.

Detail from East Beach by Katherine Bradford

Kathy Bradford, who was represented in the 1992 show by a painterly abstraction, 20 years later has transformed herself into a painterly imagist, a painter who tells imaginary stories on canvases covered with very elementary little figures such as bathers at a beach and boats at sea. What remains of Bradford’s abstract past is the playfulness and the humor.

   Frederick Lynch is perhaps Maine’s most rigorously pure abstract painter, an artist animated by the spirit of visual inquiry. Twenty years ago, one of his horizontal stripe paintings graced the cover of the On the Edge catalogue. I own one of Lynch’s stripe paintings from the 1990s and I still consider it one of the best and most beautiful paintings I have ever seen. But Lynch has long since moved on, delving deeper into his theoretical inquiry into the nature of a painting. For the 60^th honors show he is showing a series of his Division paintings in which the exploration of branching angles leads to abstract patterns much the same way combininations of John Bisbee’s welded nails lead to abstract structures.

   I suppose it is possible that Suzette McAvoy could have come up with five different artists who embody the CMCA ideal of advancing contemporary art in Maine, but I wouldn’t argue with any of her choices and I applaud the provocative nature of her exclusivity. She isn’t necessarily claiming these are the best artists in Maine, but she’s coming close.

[Center for Maine Contemporary Art,  162 Russell Ave, Rockport ME, 207-236-2875.] 

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