Just Looking: New England Art from YankeeMagazine.com

'Wedded Bliss' in Salem, Massachusetts

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Of all the types of art exhibitions -- group shows, career retrospectives, recent work, juried competitions, survey shows, exhibitions organized around periods and styles, etc. -- the shows I find most satisfy are theme shows, those in which art and artifacts are assembled around a central idea. Art, after all, is a form of knowledge, so when images and objects are assembled in service of a concept they tend to have resonance beyond their own internal and inchoate meanings.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, looks to have a real winner in this regard in Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony. The sumptuous Wedded Bliss catalogue just arrived in the mail and I can't wait to get to Salem this summer to see the show, especially as I have a daughter getting married in September.

Organized by curator Paula Bradstreet Richter, Wedded Bliss uses some 130 disparate objects, from paintings and sculpture to jewelry, fashion and even wedding cakes, to take an international look at all manner of marriage made manifest in art from 18th century to the present.

The show is organized into five thematic sections in order to explore both conventional notions of wedding and elements of ceremony, symbolism and marriage ritual that may not be as familiar to western eyes.

The first section, "Wedding in White," examines the transformational symbolism of white purity as expressed in everything from a Christian Lacroix wedding gown to a Lesley Dill sculpture in the form of a paper wedding dress printed with Emily Dickinson's poem, "The Soul Has Bandaged Moments." Dill's didactic gown was made for an AIDS auction. As I tend to associate Salem with the sea, I am particularly interested in seeing Maine artist Brian White's seashell wedding dress and veil, an iconic embodiment of desire that speaks in folk accent to both sailors' valentines and haute couture. "Artful Negotiation" uses everything from Winslow Homer's 1874 painting Rustic Courtship to bride price shell money from New Guinea and spear-blade currency from the Congo to invoke aspects of how marriages are arranged, both socially and romantically.

"Color and Symbolism in Wedding Attire" features nuptial textiles from around the world, from Chinese silk tunics and satin robes from Japan to a vintage Indian sari and a brocade Mayan-inspired wedding coat from Chiapas, Mexico, to celebrate the very fabric of marriage.

"Art and Ceremony" deals with the scared spaces created by arts and crafts for the wedding ceremony. Among the offerings, a 19th century Korean screen, a chupah or wedding canopy by artist Ricky Tims, and sculptor Louise Nevelson's "Dawn's White Wedding Chapel II," one of the artist's monochrome found-wood constructions.

"Remembrance" features images and objects meant to memorialize weddings, such as a Tiffany anniversary napkin ring and an anniversary teapot.

Multi-cultural, multi-media and multi-faceted Wedded Bliss promises to be a marriage feast of an exhibition, serving up everything from fine art by Picasso, Chagall and Homer to an exquisite wedding cake created just for the exhibition by Cile Bellefleur Burbidge, the Danvers, Mass., baker who supplied wedding cakes to high society for decades.

The Peabody Essex Museum, with a quarter million square feet of exhibition space, bills itself as the second largest museum in New England. It is a rare and eccentric museum with strengths in Asian arts and a campus that features period gardens and 24 historic properties. Now don't you want to go to Salem this summer? I do.

Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem, MA, 978-745-9500, pem.org.

Phillips Academy's Addison Gallery

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

An elite New England prep school might not be the place you'd expect to find one of the wild men of contemporary American art having a show, but then few if any prep schools have a museum to match Phillips Academy's Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Fewer still have such illustrious artist alumni as minimalist sculptor Carl Andre '53, maximalist painter Frank Stella '54, Neo-Geo star Peter Halley '71, or the wild man in question, visionary painter/printmaker Carroll Dunham '67.

From May 10 through July 13, the Addison Gallery of American Art is featuring Carroll Dunham Prints: A Survey, a traveling exhibition of some of the 300 lithographs, etchings, drypoints , linocuts, wood engravings, screenprints, digital prints, and monoprints Dunham has made since 1984. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of Carroll Dunham Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1984-2006 by Allison N. Kemmerer and Elizabeth C. DeRose (Yale University Press, 2008; $65).

Carroll Dunham, born in the conservative art colony of Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1949 and educated at Phillips and at Trinity College, would seem to have the pedigree of a traditionalist, but in truth he's anything but. He arrived on the New York art scene in the late 1970s and had his first critical success with hallucinatory abstractions that were admittedly drug-induced. As he has matured and sobered, he has nonetheless continued to pursue a wild, sometimes comic, sometimes disturbing, vision of a surreal society of the mind, a cartoony dystopia primarily populated by biomorphic phantasms and painterly alter ego, a top-hatted figure with a phallic nose.

Heir to the mantle of tragi-comic figuration of the great Philip Guston (1913-1980), the painter who freed Dunham's generation from the orthodoxy of abstraction by himself turning away from formalism and back toward content with a cartoon quality, Dunham has plumbed the depths of his own psyche and that of his time in manic imagery that the artist himself traces back to his childhood. In a New York Times article written on the occasion of Carroll Dunham's 2002 retrospective at the new Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Hilarie M. Sheest quoted Dunham as saying, "I drew what I think I referred to as 'savages being inundated by tidal waves.' That's still what I'm doing."

"Savages being inundated by tidal waves": an eerily appropriate evocation of the 21st century.

A more empirical take on the deterioration of the material world can be had in the Addison's Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke (April 12-July 13). Gohlke came to the fore as one of the New Topographics photographers in the 1970s, a designation given a group of photographers whose intentionally undramatic imagery was in part a reaction against the picturesque romanticism of legendary photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

Gohlke, along with photographers such as Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, chose to focus their considerable attentions on the bland, the suburban, the everyday. Gohlke's work is all about the man-altered landscape, whether he's photographing the aftermath of a tornado in Wichita Falls, grain elevators in the Midwest, or the effects of the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

Concurrent with the Carroll Dunham and Frank Gohlke shows, the Addison Gallery is also featuring Then and Now, a survey of its own collection, which began in 1931 with 600 works and now numbers some 16,000. Plenty of reasons to get thee to Andover.

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 180 Main St., Andover MA. 978-749-4015; www.addison gallery.org

Simple Beauty of Lois Dodd

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

In terms of a sustained vision of everyday beauty, painter Lois Dodd would be hard to beat. Since the 1950s, Dodd has pursued a simple, direct, pleasurable approach to painting the stuff of ordinary life -- the landscapes around her, the environments she inhabits, her gardens and yards, her homes and her friends -- all depicted in a sure, brushy confection of painterly realism that never seems dated.

Now, in her 81st year, Lois Dodd has simultaneous exhibitions opening this spring at the two poles of her existence: New York City and Maine.

The Alexandre Gallery, a New York gallery that primarily represents artists with connections to Maine and New England, is presenting Lois Dodd: Landscapes and Structures, an exhibition of some 45 paintings of Maine and the Delaware Water Gap region of New Jersey.

The nonprofit Center for Maine Contemporary Art has mounted Lois Dodd: Directly Considered, a retrospective exhibition of 50 mostly small-scale paintings done directly from nature as opposed to in the studio.

Later this summer, Dodd's work will also be featured in a group show at the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine, not far from her summer home in Cushing.

Lois Dodd is a pioneer of the contemporary realist colony of New York artists who migrated to the Maine coast in the mid-20th century when abstraction was all the rage and representational painting was somewhat out of fashion. Her peers in this regard include painters such as Rackstraw Downes, Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver.

For many years, Dodd has made her summer home in Cushing, a rural community has also been the home of the late sculptor Bernard "Blackie" Langlais, the photorealist painter Alan Magee, and the iconic Maine painter Andrew Wyeth. Indeed, the motoring hordes pass right by Dodd's modest little farmhouse and studio barn on their way to Hathorne Point to visit the Olson House, the cultural landmark celebrated in Wyeth's Christina's World. On the whole, I prefer Lois's World.

As easily overlooked as it is, Lois Dodd's artistic world is rich in simple, elemental forms both natural and cultural. As painter and critic Robert Berlind wrote in 2004, Dodd possesses a Shaker-like "gift to be simple," a capacity for embracing only what is essential in the material world. Her paintings are almost artless in the best sense of the word: natural, free from deceit, genuine.

Over her long career she has focused her gentle attentions on a number of recurring motifs: from the trees in her yard to the flowers in her neighbor's garden; from the framing quality of doors and windows to the sheltering structures of houses, barns, and sheds; from nudes in the landscape to the dance of the moon and stars across the night sky.

There's an appealing empiricism and pragmatism to Dodd's vision -- a solid and appreciative grasp of what passes before her eyes and through her hands to the canvas or, as often as not in her recent plein air paintings, small pieces of aluminum flashing.

Lois Dodd is among the purest painters in America. Her paintings are plain, frank, and humble, speaking quietly to the essential goodness of life in an age when much of contemporary art is obsessed with dysfunction and despair. Her vision is thus not only wonderfully sustained but also sustaining.

Lois Dodd: Landscapes and Structures, April 10-May 29, Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th St., New York NY. 212-755-2828; www.alexandregallery.com

Lois Dodd: Directly Considered, April 26-July 19, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 162 Russell St., Rockport ME. 207-236-2875; www.artsmaine.org

Caldbeck Gallery show, June 18-July 12, 12 Elm St., Rockland ME. 207-594-5935; www.caldbeck.com

Grand Re-Opening for Renovated Currier

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The wind was blowing hard and cold through Manchester, New Hampshire, the first week of April when I paid a visit to the newly renovated Currier Museum of Art, now re-opened after two years of construction. The stiff wind was enough to set the curls of scrap metal atop the Currier's new hood ornament, a 35-foot black-and-red-steel sculpture by Mark di Suvero titled Origin, turning slowly but perceptibly, as though the kinetic abstraction somehow possessed the power to reduce the forces of nature to slow motion.

The Currier is Manchester's mini-Met, a very fine regional museum with an important survey collection of American and European art. The $21.4 million expansion, designed by Ann Beha Architects of Boston, which also designed the New Britain Museum of American Art, adds 33,000 square feet to the Currier's residential side street art palace, giving it now 90,000 square feet to exhibit its collection of some 11,000 objects.

The chief attraction of the renovation, however, is the wonderfully light and airy Winter Garden Cafe, which now occupies the heart of the museum, with galleries arrayed around it. The enclosed courtyard space was jammed with visitors, as was the museum proper. After two years without the Currier, Manchester seemed hungry for art, museum-goers taking advantage of free admission during opening week to check out the new design and the newly installed exhibitions.

The dramatic skylit cafe is enlivened by Wall Drawing #1255: Whirls and Twirls (Currier), a festive color square abstraction by Sol LeWitt that appears to be a sister piece to his Wall Drawing #1131: Whirls and Twirls (Wadsworth), which graces the central staircase of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. The Currier's LeWitt, designed just before the artist's death last year, covers the wall on either side of the grand glass entry doors to the galleries. The combination of the di Suvero sculpture on the entrance plaza and the LeWitt drawing in the Winter Garden give the Currier a lively new contemporary accent to update its classical 1929 building and eclectic collection.

It's fun to visit a museum when the galleries are packed shoulder to shoulder with visitors, but it's not really the best way to take a serious look at the art. Still, even distracted by the crowd and the attractiveness of the new design, I did manage to find some old friends and new acquaintances among the work on display.

I find there are two ways I tend to approach a museum visit. I can try to look at everything, which runs the risk of viewer fatigue. Or I can look selectively for works that speak directly to me. In the latter case, I either look for art that's known to me or for art thatâs new to me. Wandering through the crowds at the Currier, I found myself drawn to paintings by Rouault, Picasso, and Hartley in the modern galleries and Motherwell, Rothko, and Albers in the contemporary galleries. I didn't really stop to look at the colorful collection of glass paperweights in the hallway gallery, but these beautiful baubles did draw a lot of admirers.

One gallery is devoted to "Celebrating New Hampshire Artists," an exhibition that includes works by Granite Staters such as James Aponovich and Gary Haven Smith. Aponovich's 1987 self-portrait in studio seemed a particularly apt signature piece, as the Currier sometimes seems a museum stuck in the 1980s -- museum time not often coinciding with an artist's lifetime, especially where small provincial museums are concerned.

That sense of aesthetic stop-time was reinforced by seeing Gregory Amenoff's 1980 expressionist abstraction Down by the Pylons, Jonathan Imber's strong 1984 self-portrait, and my old friend the late Neil Welliver's 1980 landscape Blue Pool. Poor Neil! Even in death his methodical approach to modernizing the art of landscape paintings is misunderstood. "Paint by numbers," one gentleman quipped as I walked by.

Among the Currier's recent acquisitions are a bravura print by pop-art star James Rosenquist and a sculpture installation by Marisol Escobar. Rosenquist's 1989 print House of Fire, with its arsenal of lipsticks and bag of groceries, speaks to the go-go years of the 1980s, now alas given way to the desperate years of the early 21st century. Marisol's (she went by only her first name until recently) mordant 1963 The Family, a blocky wooden construction of father and mother with children and baby carriage, was wonderfully apropos on a day when visitors to the museum were kept busy dodging strollers.

No complaints, though. It was great to see the Currier come back to life, full of art lovers, sightseers, and the just plain curious. I made a mental note to return to Manchester in a few months when the hoopla has died down and the art can be properly seen and contemplated. Folks from out of town once again have a good reason other than cheap flights at the airport to go to Manchester.

Currier Museum of Art,150 Ash St.,Manchester, NH. 603-669-6144; www.currier.org

Maverick Maine Painters on the Web

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Over the years I've been fortunate enough to spend time with a great many artists, from the famous -- Neil Welliver, Andrew Wyeth, Alex Katz, Robert Indiana -- to the obscure. On the whole, I prefer the obscure -- painters who persist whether or not they ever achieve critical acclaim or commercial success. Why? Because their art is inseparable from their beings.

Museum exhibitions, gallery shows, patrons, and prizes have been the coins of the realm in the art world forever, but the advent of the digital age has given any artist who can afford a Web site a way for his/her work to reach the world. Three of my favorite Maine painters are online all the time.

What the late, great Carlo Pittore, the maverick Matt Donahue, and the mysterious Michael Waterman have in common are an uncompromising individualism and an eccentric authenticity beyond fashion and the marketplace. I call your virtual attention to them here simply because they're exactly what you want artists to be -- free and independent souls.

Carlo Pittore (1943-2005) was born Charles Stanley but became Carlo Pittore (Charles the Painter) while living in Italy in the 1960s. Carlo was the very soul of an artist, a man fierce in defense of artistic expression, which in his case meant figurative art. He painted human flesh like no other artist I know, but what he was always after was the human soul.

For many years Carlo lived in a yurt in the woods of Bowdoinham, Maine, in later life living, painting, and teaching in a studio apartment in a former chicken-processing barn. Shortly before his death in 2005, Carlo and some of his many friends established the Carlo Pittore Foundation for the Figurative Arts, which now maintains a Web site of the same name.

The Carlo Pittore Web site doesn't yet feature many of Carlo's meaty nudes and raw portraits, but it does include some of the postal works for which he was famous in the small world of mail art, as well as links to a great deal of information about his art.

I've known Matt Donahue since he was known as Magic Matt, the most prolific scorer in Westbrook (Maine) High School and University of Southern Maine basketball history. Matt always had two great loves, which he continues to pursue: basketball and painting. In high school, he specialized in portraits of sports heroes (something he still does on occasion to earn a little money), but I tend to think of Matt as the Picasso of the suburbs. His little studio above a garage in South Portland is jammed full of wildly imaginative and extremely colorful figurative abstractions that owe an obvious aesthetic debt to the greatest painter of the modern age, while somehow managing to remain pure Matt Donahue.

Many of Matt's paintings have religious themes (I own a wonderful painting of the Holy Family), but they run the emotional gamut from celebration to lamentation. There are people who own dozens of Donahues; some now own nothing but. As Matt's work exists on its own outside the established art scene, you can see it only at his studio, at J.P. Thornton's cafe in South Portland, and online.

Michael Waterman is a Ryder-esque figure whose lightly surreal work conjures the spirit of his native city of Portland, Maine, better than anyone who paints it more precisely. Waterman paints the essence of a magical place by the sea where a boy may walk around with a fish on his head, a woman may use the cityscape as an umbrella, or the earth itself may wash up on the shores of Portland Harbor. Michael does show locally at the Aucocisco Gallery but his melancholy and strangely beautiful paintings may also be seen at www.mwaterman.com.

When I think of Carlo, Matt, and Michael, I think of Gulley Jimson, the hero of Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth and the finest fictional painter in literary history. It was the immortal Gulley Jimson who said, "Go love without the help of anything on earth; and that's real horse meat. A man is more independent that way, when he doesn't expect anything for himself."

DeCordova Museum's Presumed Innocence

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, is one of my favorite New England art museums and always well worth a visit, if only for a stroll around the art-studded grounds. The current tour de focus photography exhibition, Presumed Innocence: Photographic Perspectives of Children, however, makes the DeCordova a must stop between now and the time the show closes on April 28.

Presumed Innocence features 114 photographs of young people from the collection of Revere, Massachusetts, periodontist Dr. Anthony Terrana and his wife, Beth, supplemented by photographs from the DeCordova's own collection. If you're thinking kiddie portraits, think again. Presumed Innocence features photographs of children by many of the world's greatest photographers, past and present. In many ways, the show recapitulates the history of modern photography with a focus on how children are seen.

Among the legendary photographers represented are Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lewis Hine, and Dorothea Lange -- Lange's classic Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 being the most iconic image in the exhibition.

The most famous contemporary photographers in the show include Sally Mann and Jock Sturges, both of whom have long engendered controversy by virtue of the candor and intimacy with which they portray young people. Modern masters Robert Frank, Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Parr, Sebastiao Salgado, and Alex Webb are also featured.

Presumed Innocence makes thoughtful use of its ambivalent theme, presenting images of children that range from the winsome and playful to the weird and disturbing.

"The 114 photographs selected for this exhibition," writes DeCordova Museum Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, "fall loosely into the following thematic and often overlapping categories: the child alone, family relations, children and animals, the child observed, the child at play, the child at risk, rites of passage, and constructed narratives."

The dark heart of the exhibition is on the fourth floor, where the strangeness of childhood fantasy and the horror of children as victims are presented. To me, however, the most obvious and compelling tension in the exhibition is that between the seductive timelessness of small black-and-white photographs and the overpowering immediacy of huge color prints. That a little gelatin silver print can have as much aesthetic weight as an oversize c-print is a thing to behold and contemplate.

I went looking at Presumed Innocence with an eye to New England photographic artists, and I wasn't disappointed. The cover image of the Presumed Innocence catalogue is an ambiguous portrait of a little girl in a nightie standing stock still on a rocky seashore, by Jocelyn Lee of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and Princeton, New Jersey.

My favorite photograph in the show is a 60x40 color print of a teenage girl holding up a huge dead turkey, by Laura McPhee of Brookline, Massachusetts. McPhee's Massachusetts College of Art colleagues Abelardo Morell and Nicholas Nixon are also well represented, making Mass Art my nominee for best supporting role by an art school.

Among the other contributing artists to whom New England can lay claim are Shelby Lee Adams, Andrea Frank, David Hilliard, and Robert Lyons from Massachusetts; Julee Holcombe from New Hampshire; Anne Hall of Rhode Island; and Andrea Modica of Vermont. Paul D'Amato now lives and works in Chicago, but he taught for many years at Maine College of Art. And Lalla Essaydi, who is represented by a quartet of her signature portraits of Muslim girls covered in calligraphy, is now in New York, but she graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and first emerged in Boston.

Presumed Innocence is accompanied and documented by a very fine 160-page, full-color catalogue ($39.95) with essays by curator Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and Barnard College art history professor Anne Higonnet. The catalogue features full-page reproductions of every work in the show but one, that being a small Cartier-Bresson photo the museum could not reproduce owing to copyright restrictions. The show is perfect; the catalogue almost so.

DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Point Road, Lincoln, MA. 781-259-8355, decordova.org

The Art of Katahdin and Conservation

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The Bates College Museum of Art is currently featuring two exhibitions of art in the form of environmental advocacy.

Wildness Within Wildness Without: Exploring Maine's Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail features large-format, visionary color photographs by Bridget Besaw.

Taking Different Trails: The Artists' Journey to Katahdin Lake presents paintings, drawings and photographs by 20 artists involved in the Katahdin Lake Campaign.

Bridget Besaw's brilliant visual interpretation of the places visited by Henry David Thoreau on his three trips to the Maine woods was a bonus when I visited the Bates Museum in Lewiston, Maine, on Saturday, March 8. Besaw's photographs, some of which were previously exhibited in Maine at the University of Maine and the College of the Atlantic, were scheduled to come down on March 4.

Besaw originally undertook her exploration of Thoreau's journeys in 2005 at the behest of Maine Woods Forever in order to promote the preservation of the wilderness around mile-high Mt. Katahdin.

My favorite photograph depicts students from the Chewonki Foundation wilderness camp hunkered down in a snow cave, fittingly so as "Wildness Within Wildness Without" will be exhibited at the Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset during April and May. If you can't make it to Maine, you can see some of Besaw's wondrous photographs at www.thoreauwabanakitrail.org and www.bridgetbesaw.com.

"Taking Different Trails" grew out of the Katahdin Lake Campaign (For more information, see the Trust for Public Lands), which raised $14 million in order to add pristine Katahdin Lake to Maine's forever-wild Baxter State Park. The artists in the exhibition all donated works that raised money for the cause.

Painter Marsha Donahue, who owns North Light Gallery in Millinocket, helped organize the exhibition and contributed to the Bates show both a stark charcoal drawing of an inlet on Katahdin Lake and a brushy watercolor of the same scene. Painter David Little, who contributed an oil painting of a green canoe on the shore of Katahdin Lake, co-curated the show.

"Taking Different Trails" also features works by Bill Bentley, Milton Christiansen, Elaine Crossman, Evelyn Dunphy, Deborah Grabber, Chris Huntington, Dean Johnson, Bill Landmesser, Bruce MacDonald, Abbott Meader, Caren-Marie Michel, Jerry Monkman, Chris Polson, Jym St. Pierre, Paul Thibodeau, Michael Vermette, and Ian White. Not surprisingly, the predominant artistic view of the Katahdin Lake landscape is one of painterly realism after Marsden Hartley.

But if the majority of the landscape artists in the show share a conservative aesthetic outlook, they also share a conservation ethic -- a great and good thing as the wilds of Maine face unprecedented development pressures here at the outset of the 21th century.

Versions of the "Taking Different Trails" group exhibition opened simultaneously at North Light Gallery, Jameson Gallery in Portland, and at Bates, where it hangs until May 24.

Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St., Lewiston. 207-786-6158; www.bates.edu/museum.xml

The Farnsworth at 60

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The Farnsworth Art Museum is the engine that drives Rockland, Maine. For most of its 60 years, the Farnsworth was a sleepy backwater institution featuring a historic house museum, a private library, and an art gallery.

This little downtown complex, known by its proper name -- the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum -- was a bequest to the midcoast Maine port city from Lucy Farnsworth, the spinster daughter of the lime quarry and kiln baron whose name it bears in perpetuity.

In the go-go years of the 1980s and 1990s, the Farnsworth blossomed into a major regional art museum, acquiring an entire city block for its cultural purposes and becoming the New England pole of the wonderful world of Wyeth with the creation of a Wyeth Center and the conversion of a church across the street into a permanent Wyeth family art gallery.

As the Farnsworth attracted more and more money, art, and attention, the old fishing port evolved into an art mecca, with good cafes, bookstores, and arts-and-crafts galleries sprouting up all over downtown. In recent years, having lost the support it once enjoyed from credit card giant MBNA when CEO Charles Cawley, a local summer resident, retired in 2003 -- and having weathered the downturn in the U.S. economy and culture that followed the September 11, 2001 -- attacks, the Farnsworth, like a good many arts institutions, has been running a deficit and struggling to maintain its prominence and its great promise.

These days, however, the Farnsworth seems to have found new life and energy, owing in large part to changes in leadership. In 2006, Lora Urbanelli came to Maine from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum to take over as director. In 2007, the Farnsworth then hired new chief curator Michael Komanecky from the Phoenix Art Museum and new director of education Roger Dell from the Fitchburg Art Museum.

"I finally feel as though we have all the pieces in place to fulfill the vision we had when I came," says Lora Urbanelli. "We want to re-engage the community, become a national model for museum education, and bring people back into the Farnsworth."

Although the Wyeth Center is all Wyeth all the time and is a decided draw for the Farnsworth, the museum is celebrating its 60th anniversary by focusing on its own collection. (Most of the works by N.C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth are on loan from the family foundation.) In many cases, that means that art that hasn't seen the light of day in years will be coming out of storage.

The anniversary's focus on the museum's collection not only celebrates it core mission but also allows the new staff to familiarize themselves with the Farnsworth's riches. Roger Dell will use the Farnsworth's holdings, for example, to conduct a marathon 12-session course titled "Achieving American Art" (Wednesdays, April 2-June 18) using the Farnsworth's collection to recap American art history.

Curator Michael Komanecky has learned the collection by mounting not one but five shows (all beginning March 8):

-- The Farnsworth and the Art of Our Time (thru June 15)
-- Uncommon Treasures: Folk Art from the Farnsworth (thru November 30)
-- Picturing the Decades: 60 Years of Photography (thru June 1)
-- Louise Nevelson (thru February 1, 2009)
-- Alex Katz and Friends (through October 26)

Sculptor Louise Nevelson grew up in Rockland, and the Farnsworth claims the "second-largest public holding of Nevelson's work in the world." Painter Alex Katz, darling of the New York art world and a Lincolnville summer resident, is more closely associated with the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, where a substantial collection of his own work is housed, but in recent years the Alex Katz Foundation has quietly been helping the Farnsworth purchase contemporary works by artists such as Philip Pearlstein, Janet Fish, Red Grooms, and Francesco Clemente who have little or no relation to Maine.

This ambitious summer season speaks volumes to the Farnsworth's aspirations to be more than the Maine repository of all things Wyeth, and to its determination to remain a vital player in the economic and cultural life of coastal Maine.

"When MBNA pulled its support, we did not cut back," says director Lora Urbanelli. "We gave ourselves five years to build the support level back up. We did not want to retract to meet the bottom line."

A public grand-opening party will be held Friday, April 4, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Farnsworth Museum of Art, 16 Museum St., Rockland, Maine. 207-596-6457; farnsworthmuseum.org

Photo Salon for the Exchange of Ideas

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Photography is the hottest medium in the art world at the moment and has been now for almost a decade. The accessibility of photo technology in a digital age is making it possible for a veritable army of artists to generate imagery for all intents and purposes.

A Photo Salon

As I've been writing monthly for Photo District News (PDN) since 1999, I was invited recently to a salon supper in Portland hosted by Heather Frederick of Vox Photographs, a new online photography gallery.

On a snowy Wednesday evening, I joined a half-dozen others for soup and a slide show in the seventh-floor apartment overlooking Portland City Hall, where Heather, who lives most of the time in Belfast with her husband, painter Linden Frederick, shows contemporary and vintage photographs by appointment.

Susan Danley, curator at the Portland Museum of Art; Anne Zill, director of the University of New England art gallery; Portland art dealer Dan Kany; and photographers David Brooks Stess and David Puntel braved the wintry mix and slick roads to share supper and attend a slide lecture by Brenton Hamilton of Maine Media Workshops.

Founded in 1973, Maine Media Workshops did business in Rockport as Maine Photographic Workshops until last year, when it became a nonprofit. The workshops offer some 250 courses a year, making Maine a mecca for photographers.

Hamilton surveyed the history of photography from 1900 to 1930 in some 50 slides, charting the evolution from stereopticon views through Pictorialism and the Photo Secession movements to the social documentary tradition in America and Modernism in Europe. He also explored the issue of the democratizing of photography as the cumbersome technology of glass and metal plates gave way to plastic Kodak film.

The liveliest part of the discussion that followed was over Vox Photography's motto: "A photograph should always speak for itself." Heather Frederick is of the purist mindset, believing that every viewer, sophisticated or naive, should be able to see whatever he or she sees in a photograph. I, on the other hand, feel that you can't really understand an image unless you know something about the artist's intent and the historical context in which it was created. Everyone knows what he or she likes, but very few people know why. There's a big difference been enjoyment and appreciation.

Frederick's Vox Photography represents nine contemporary photographers and also sells digital reproductions of vintage photographs by Anonymous, "my favorite photographer," as Brenton Hamilton put it. One of the wonderful and disconcerting things about photography is that it's possible for rank amateurs to take great photographs -- just not with the consistency of professionals.

Hamilton's talk about the sea change brought about by Kodak film reminded everyone of the current digital revolution, which makes everyone not only a photographer or videographer, but also photo editor and potential publisher. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The three photographers at the gathering all participate in well-established traditions. David Brooks Stess is a New Yorker who has spent summers in Maine for 20 years raking blueberries and documenting the migrant workers in the black-and-white social documentary tradition. David Puntel, who is in the process of selling his Maine farm in order to move to Berlin (Germany, not New Hampshire), is a modern master of the antique ambrotype process. And Brenton Hamilton works in the even more arcane cyanotype process, producing modern photographs with classical themes.

As the world goes high-tech, there's a small but determined and growing interest in returning to and preserving antique photographic processes -- their laborious, handmade, often one-of-a-kind nature appealing to artists leery of the disposable ease with which digital images are made.

Of Frank and Friedlander

Along with a return to the mechanical processes of the past, there's also a renewed interest in the photography of the past. Two great photography books arrived here within days of each other: one a modern classic; the other, more recent work by a classic American photographer.

Robert Frank's landmark 1959 "The Americans" has just been reissued by Steidl, the German firm that is perhaps the world's premier photo book publisher. The Americans ($39.95 hardcover) is arguably the single most influential photography book of the 20th century, its 83 grainy black-and-white photographs establishing an aesthetic that is still practiced and prevalent today.

Frank made the photographs in 1955-56 while traveling America on a Guggenheim grant. What he produced is the visual equivalent of Beat writer Jack Kerouac's "On the Road", so it was fitting that Kerouac, a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, wrote the introduction in his highly imitated hipster stream-of-consciousness style. The sad, sympathetic 1950s images of an American people in love with cars, televisions, celebrities, jukeboxes, and religion resonate with the America of today.

Robert Frank, 83, the deus absconditus of contemporary photography, has lived in relative seclusion in Mabou, Nova Scotia, for so long that it's sometimes surprising to realize he's still with us.

Lee Friedlander, 73, on the other hand, is very much with us and in evidence. Friedlander and the late Garry Winogrand were the godfathers of street photography, but Friedlander has remained amazingly productive to this day.

"Lee Friedlander Photographs: Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes" (DAP, $85 hardcover) features 89 tritone photographs of landscapes designed by FLO, the greatest American landscape architect. Although these are all cultivated landscapes, Friedlander generally prefers their wilder environs, with a particular focus and grand, gnarled trees.

Among the New England landscapes featured are the Arnold Arboretum, Charles River, Charleston Heights, Franklin Park and Jamaica Pond in Boston, World's End in Hingham, Massachusetts, Middlesex Falls in Malden, Massachusetts, and Cushing Island in Maine's Casco Bay.

"Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks," an exhibition of 40 of Friedlander's Olmsted landscapes, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11 should you be in Manhattan this spring.

Best Art Blogs in New England

Yankee Publishing (rss@ypi.com) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100

My limited experience with news blogs has given me the impression that they're wild and lawless places where rampant rumors, unvetted and untrustworthy, and partisan opinions, unexamined and unedited, are passed along willy-nilly by pseudonymous correspondents who could be anyone and anywhere. Of course, that may just be the old ink-stained wretch in me.

I'm aware, however, of some very fine art blogs -- idiosyncratic, yes, but also informative, insightful, and entertaining. I pass them along to you here, as I perceive blogging to be more a matter of conversation than competition.

Modern Art Notes is written by Washington, D.C., art critic and journalist Tyler Green and has been called "the most influential of all visual arts blogs" by the Wall St. Journal. That may be because Green is a professional print journalist who writes knowledgeably about art and artmaking, sharing his passion for contemporary art daily on his blog. MAN also features "Site Seeing," one of the best link lists to arts blogs that I've run across in my Net surfing.

The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research is a regional arts blog written by Greg Cook, an underground cartoonist and journalist rumored to live in or around Gloucester, Massachusetts. Cook's blog is an excellent source of art news and reviews and features a running list of free art exhibitions.

Megan and Murray is the blog of video and installation artists Megan and Murray McMillan, who live in Providence and comment as insiders on the art scenes of Providence and Boston.

Girl in the Green Dress is one of the most active arts blogs in New England. Written by Boston-based freelance interior designer Traci Roloff, Girl in the Green Dress is a feast of personal enthusiasms for architecture and art, furniture and fashion, photography and green design.

Blogs strike me as essentially high-tech diaries or journals, the frequent postings inviting a remote dialogue about art. It's my hope that Just Looking will become a form of dialogue. Although blogs seem less about permanent records of artistic endeavors than about immediate responses, they are nonetheless, like essays and reviews, part of the second life of art.