Five Contemporary Art Spaces and Shows to Check Out in Maine This Summer

During the pandemic, the art world rediscovered the possibilities of mounting contemporary art shows outside of urban centers and engaged—often for the first time—with various local art scenes across the United States. Many of the target areas boasted well-established cultural communities, some initially launched by artists relocating to seek quieter and more inspiring environments for their creative work. As we saw with the upstate New York art scene and the Hamptons art scene, the sprawling arts communities and cultural institutions of Portland and mid-coast Maine grew during the pandemic. The vibe has shifted in a post-pandemic world but the momentum hasn’t slowed, especially in the summer season. In late June, NADA art fair organized a weekend program that invited people to discover the expanding contemporary art scene in Maine, and among the newcomers this year are Los Angeles’ Night Gallery with an exhibition in collaboration with local art space Dunes. Below, we’ve compiled a list of five must-see shows and art spaces for those interested in checking out what’s going on in the Pine Tree State.

Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine

The Farnsworth Art Museum is the realization of the vision of Lucy Copeland Farnsworth, the last surviving member of a prominent merchant family that settled in Rockland in 1850. When she died in 1935, she left $1.3 million along with three specific instructions: preserve her home and open it to the public, create an art museum and build a library.

Today, the museum plays a crucial role in the region’s cultural landscape, with a diverse array of exhibitions and educational programs across disciplines. The museum houses an extensive collection of more than 15,000 works, including paintings, sculptures and photographs, with a significant emphasis on work by the Wyeth family—with the most known being Andrew Wyeth, who in his hyper-realistic paintings explored the sense of isolation of rural life that doesn’t match the new rhythm of the world.

This summer, the museum is presenting a solo exhibition of his son, Jamie Wyeth, who continued his legacy despite remaining independent from all art trends of the time. The show focuses on his more uneasy and dark works, which are dense with psychological drama and intense human observation.

SEE ALSO: One Fine Show: “The Book of Marvels – Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages” at the Getty Museum

The other main show the museum has on is “Dawn to Dusk” by Louise Nevelson, a native of Rockland. As she explains in a note she wrote on the occasion of a show in 1985:  “ I was growing up in Rockland from grammar school to high school, there was no museum. One of the great joys of my life is that we have a first-rate one now—a beautiful building that encloses creative works that can stand with the great ones.” Nevelson donated eighty-seven art pieces to the museum, including fifty-six of her own works.

The show, which runs through September 29, traces the seminal years while the artist was developing her unique sculptural language via a selection of more than forty works, from early paintings, drawings and figurative sculptures to her later abstract painted wood constructions, collages and examples of the artist’s unique handcrafted jewelry.

Finally, on view through January 12, 2025, there is a show celebrating the vibrant abstraction of recently market-rediscovered abstract painter Lynne Drexler. The show focuses on her best work from the 1960s and how her explorations of abstraction were deeply inspired by her intimate and emphatic observation of nature, particularly in her experiences on Monhegan Island in Maine.

“Unsettled” by Jamie Wyeth and “Dawn to Dusk” by Louise Nevelson run through September 29 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland.

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland, Maine

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) is one of the leading institutions in the region, showcasing some of the best in contemporary artistic talent from the region and beyond. The building, designed by Japanese artist Toshiko Mori, is a remarkable work of contemporary architecture that completes the cultural triangle that consists of the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Strand Theater, anchoring Rockland as a major cultural arts destination in the Maine seacoast.

The museum is currently presenting the first show in the region by Donald Moffett, a leading figure of  ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the 1980s and the co-founder of its artistic arm, Gran Fury. His early works, such as He Kills Me (1987) and Call the White House (1990), critiqued the political neglect of the AIDS crisis. Over the years, Moffett developed a distinctive visual language that turns a minimalist and more conceptual abstraction into a repository of deeply personal and political narratives. Most recently, the artist has switched focus to the climate crisis and the precariousness of normal environmental circles.  Combining multimedia work, this early, ominous, and seductive show, “Nature Cult, Seeded,” presents the results of his deep studies into how art and the environmental crisis might collide. “The intensity of a cult is called for as we turn our attention to nature and its preservation,” says the artist in a statement accompanying the show.

Moffett has been a seasonal resident of Maine and his periods there in contact with nature may have informed and inspired most of the works on view, including the large-scale installation Lot 030323/24 (the golden bough), which consists of an assemblage of dead tree limbs painted gold and bolted together to form an undead yet ethereal totem come to life. Accompanying it is the haunting sound of the now-extinct male Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird calling for a mate that will never come. Moffett commented in a recent statement to the press: “I don’t think there are issues more important than nature and its health.”

Other shows on view include Carla Weeks’s “On This Island,” featuring a series of works by the Maine-born artist that translate the suspended beauty and atmosphere of the seacoast of Maine’s island into poetic airy abstractions consisting of repeating patterns rendered in muted color palettes. There’s also a presentation of art in conversation by Bronlyn Jones and Robert Bauer, featuring a series of intimate and attentive drawings made by the artists over the last seven years.

All exhibitions at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) run until September 8.

The Kenneth Noland Foundation in Port Clyde, Maine

Dedicated to preserving and promoting the legacy of Kenneth Noland, this foundation manages an extensive collection of the artist’s works and those of his contemporaries, promoting his legacy as one of the most prominent American abstractionists in Color Field painting and the Washington Color School movement. The Foundation also preserves his personal archives and maintains a research library.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1924, Noland immediately developed a deep fascination with and interest in painting. After his requisite service in the Air Force ended in 1946, he enrolled at Black Mountain College, just fifteen minutes from his hometown. After a long and distinguished career, Noland moved to Port Clyde, Maine in 2002, where he lived until his death in 2010. The Kenneth Noland Foundation is open for private tours, but we recommend reaching out well before your trip to Maine to ensure there are times available.

Dunes x Night Gallery in Portland, Maine

Opening on August 3, “The Wrong Sea” is a new show that the Portland-based gallery Dunes has organized in collaboration with Los Angeles’ Night Gallery. William Hathaway, partner and sales director at Night Gallery, told Observer that he wanted to “bring diverse, exciting contemporary art back to the place where I grew up. I hope the show opens up new possibilities for other young people growing up in Maine. This is the kind of show I wish had been available to me when I was a kid!”

The exhibition gathers artists from Night Gallery’s past, present and future programs, along with artists who have direct ties to Maine. While the artist here don’t all celebrate the pastoral or seaside life per se, each is researching with their work some retreat from the contemporary as a way of embracing beauty outside of urban life. Among the participating artists are well-known names in the contemporary art scene like Cathleen Clarke, Jerrell Gibbs, Bambou Gili, Danielle Mckinney, Lily Stockman, Owen Westberg and Coco Young.

When asked how the idea of this show came about, Dune founder Boru O'Brien O'Connell told Observer that it was “an organic relationship that has developed over the years between myself and Night Gallery with our respective lives on the coasts, crisscrossing from childhood until now. I enjoyed the idea of delving into our respective programs and relationships, and how those mirrored the coasts as well… the feeling of that distance, and how the contexts of the natural worlds of not just Maine but California have informed a lot of the work, not to mention the artistic traditions of those worlds.”

“The Wrong Sea” runs at Dunes in Portland through October 5.

Karma Gallery in Thomaston, Maine

The New York-based gallery Karma opened here in 2021, in a beautiful summer location in a deconsecrated Catholic church owned by painter Ann Craven. Every season, they host a summer exhibition in Maine, where paintings establish a conversation with the space and the local nature. This year, there is a group exhibition, “A Particular Kind of Heaven,” hanging salon-style with nearly one hundred and twenty works by over seventy artists from the gallery roster and beyond. The exhibition is titled after a 1983 Ed Ruscha text painting that calls attention to the idiosyncratic nature of our visions of the sublime and our projections about and on to the American landscape. While the sky unites as a leading theme of all the works in the show, the exhibition is divided into sections that follow the transformation of the sky over the course of a day, going from dawn to night. Among the highlights are masterpieces as Barkley L. Hendricks’s Winter Season en plain air works as he was “following the sun to the Caribbean,” poetic night skies views by artists Matthew Wong and Alex Katz and apricot-tinted dusk skies by Dike Blair, who will also have a solo show at the gallery this fall.

“A Particular Kind of Heaven“ runs at Karma’s Maine gallery through September 1. 

The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, Maine

Established by artists John David Ellis and Joan Beauregard in 2015, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation aims to contribute to Maine’s cultural landscape through grants, residencies and fellowship programs. The organization recently built a new facility to enhance its capacity to support artists in the visual and performing arts by creating a new “campus” with four live-work studios, a common area and a black box performance and exhibition space.

The foundation’s fellowship program is quite prestigious and attracts many artists, as recipients receive a $25,000 award along with a $5,000 stipend for a solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland.

The foundation’s efforts are led by Donna McNeil, the founding executive director, who is also a passionate art collector and has a strong background in arts advocacy and administration. The board includes notable figures in the arts community, including Denise Markonish (chief curator at MassMOCA), Daniel S. Palmer (chief curator at SCAD Museum of Art) and Rujeko Hockley (the Arnhold associate curator at the Whitney).