Currently and coincidently, both the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine are opening major photography exhibitions this weekend. The Currier is filling two large galleries with a show of 125 modernist photographs from its own collection. The Portland Museum of Art is showing a selection of the 600 photographs in post-modernist photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander’s social media portrait project, Are You Really My Friend?

Brett Weston, (Untitled) Tide Pool and Kelp c. 1980, gelatin silver print, 10 9/16 in. x 13 11/16 in.

   The Currier owns a sizable and significant collection of fine art photographs thanks in large part to good offices of the late Robert M. “Mac” Doty, director from 1977 to 1987. Doty attracted three major gifts of photographs to the museum, photographer Lotte Jacobi’s collection of her own work and that of her contemporaries, a group of photographs from the Paul Strand Foundation, and some 300 photographs from the collection of photographer, collector, and art dealer Vincent Vallarino. The Currier subsequently acquired 50 photographs from the collection of Portsmouth resident Jonathan Stein and almost as many photographs Brett Weston. The Weston gift, given by Brett Weston Archive founder Christian Keesee, is highlighted in A New Vision: Modernist Photography (February 4 thru May 13).

Margaret Bourke-White, Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co., 1928, gelatin silver print,

   By “Modernist Photography” the Currier means 20^th century photography that reacted against 19^th century pictorialism and its narrative attempt to imitate “real art,” i.e. painting. The fundamental modernist tenet is that a work of art is a thing-in-itself, not a picture of something else. It is the object, the image itself, not the illusion that is primary.

    As the Currier brochure notes, “the modernist photographer found dynamic, abstract compositions in the emerging industrial landscape – skyscrapers, power plants, factories, and other engineering feats – as well as in details of the prosaic, the insignificant, and the mundane – seeds, roots, leaves, and peeling paint.”

Paul Caponigro, Two Pears, Cushing, ME 1999, gelatin silver print, 7 9/16 in. x 9 11/16 in.

   A New Vision features photographs by a who’s who of 20^th century photography, among the greats being Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Lotte Jacobi,  Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston. The show also features late-modernist works by contemporary photographers such as Paul Caponigro, Lee Friedlander, and Frank Gohle.  

   Modernism covers a lot of complicated ground from abstraction to surrealism to minimalism. Post-modernism essentially rejects the inherent formalism of modernism in favor of a more conceptual approach to art, one in which the art object is less important than the idea it embodies.

Samantha Appleton by Tanja Alexia Hollander

   Are You Really My Friend? by Tanja Hollander fits the post-modern bill perfectly because, superficially, it consists of environmental color portraits of the artist’s family, friends, and online “friends.” Conceptually and collectively, however, the portrait photographs ask the question, “Is friendship something photographable?”

   Hollander, one of the co-founders of the Bakery Photographic Collective, began her social media project a year ago while simultaneously writing a letter to a friend deployed in Afghanistan and sending a Facebook message to another friend making a film in Jakarta.

   “On one hand,” Hollander writes, “the letter has a tangibility that makes it seem more genuine and real, while on the other hand social networks provide an immediate way to be part of people’s lives all over the world, often through photographs.”

   In order to explore the mode of social media communication and the meaning of friendship, Hollander resolved to travel all over the country photographing her 626 Facebook friends.  The visual dimension of the project is given depth by the fact that the artist is physically visiting and meeting face-to-face with her cyber-friends. Hollander has been gathering support for the Facebook project by, among other things, selling what amount to subscriptions the prints to underwrite her travels and her work.

Toby and Lucky Hollanfder by Tanja Alexia Hollander

   As Hollander is an artist, many of the portraits are of fellow artists and their families. My favorite is Hollander’s portrait of Samantha Appleton, a Maine woman who until recently served as the White House photographer. I also got a kick out of Hollander’s portrait of her parents, because the photograph was taken in the Hollanders’ dining room, which for 40-plus years was my grandparents’ dining room. 

   There are both a social and personal aspect to Are You Really My Friend? that highly recommend it to public viewing, just as there are social and historical aspects to A New Vision that make it a must-see.

 [Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester NH, 603-669-6144. Portland Museum of Art, Congress Square, Portland, ME, 207-775-6148.]

  Back in 1987, the then-DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, mounted New England Now: Contemporary Art from Six States, a truly authoritative regional survey of the sort that New England needs. The DeCordova became the New England regional hub for new art under curator Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, but, now renamed DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the museum has taken a new direction, scrapping its annual exhibitions in 2010 in favor of curated biennials. Not sure yet what I think of the new direction.

   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.

Capitalism Works for Me! True/False by Steve Lambert

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 pretense and I can’t quite bring myself to do it. But, okay, enough with the small town homer’s lament.

Blooms, Efflorescences, and Other Dermatological Embellishments by Lauren Kalman

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), Megan & 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.

From Spectrum of Inevitable Violence by Caitlin Berrigan

“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. I just wish a few Maine artists had been invited to play.

 [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.]

    When John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury moves from the Portland Museum of Art to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for its January 28 to March 18 run, the landmark Marin show will be complemented by Land, Sea, and Sky: Contemporary Art in Maine, an exhibition of recent landscape paintings by nine artists curated by Addison director Brian Allen.

Island Ship by John Marin

“As the two exhibitions attest,” notes the Addison website, “Maine’s rugged coast and rocky topography has long been a fertile source of artistic inspiration.”

  Traffic on the Maine Turnpike would grind to a halt if all the landscape painters in Maine tried to leave at once, but Brian Allen has not, for the most part, chosen conventional landscape artists as Marin companions. Of course, Marin was not a traditional landscape painter by any means, abstracting the downeast coast with his modernist vision of broken color and dynamic brushstrokes.

Schoodic Point at Noon by Terry Hilt

The artist whose work most closely approximates Marin’s is probably Terry Hilt, an artist who paints the Maine coast in a brushy mix of watercolor, acrylic and wax resist.

   “Maine coastal modernists, especially Marin, Betts, and Thon, went beyond Cezanne’s accomplishment of fractured space adding exciting motion to their work,” writes Hilt in her statement on the website of Aucocisco Galleries, the Portland gallery that represents most of the artist in the Addison show. “In my expressionist landscapes, I am influenced by this concept of abstracted movement. Monhegan artists, James Fitzgerald, and Leo Brooks have influenced my use of thick watercolor as medium.”

Untitled monoprint by Susan Shatter

The most conventional landscape painter in the show is the late Susan Shatter, represented here by naturalistic shoreline watercolors. University of Maine professor Michael Lewis conjures romantic, mystical landscapes that may be Maine but might also be imaginary. I must confess I did not get a preview of the contributions that the late Robert Solotaire, one of Maine’s consummate urban realists, makes to Land, Sea, and Sky

Island Luncheon by Katherine Bradford

Dozier Bell shows a pair of her cosmic skyscapes. Katherine Bradford, who is not really a landscape painter at all, paints seriocomic narratives such as five people gathering around a banquet table for a luncheon on a sea ledge.

Brief Divergence by Alan Bray

Alan Bray is also a narrative painter, though he does stick closer to the central Maine landscape, capturing the mute drama of trampled paths through a hayfield and the abrupt insertion of a stand of yellow tamaracks in a lilac forest. For my money, Bray and Dennis Pinette, both Maine natives, are the best contemporary Maine landscape painters. Pinette paints man-altered landscapes such as highway sand piles and flaming fields.

   While I am very familiar with most of the artists in the show, I was most delightfully surprised by the work of Vivien Russe, a painter who has made a dramatic breakthrough in her art in recent years. Russe, who is both a fine artist and a professional nurse, has taken to juxtaposing landscape imagery and objects in most startling and instructive ways, in many case pairing natural images with paintings of pillows.

Scarborough Beach by Vivien Russe

In Scarborough Beach, the gentle surf of Maine’s most beautiful sand beach rolls in above a crisp white pillow that is itself a kind of human landscape.

   “I’ve chosen a particular care-giving task, performed in my other vocation of nursing, making innumerable pillowcase changes as a symbol for ‘health,’” Russe explains. “This direct visual metaphor captures the tension between stasis and movement; symbolically the pillow suggests dreaming while the dreamer is transported in ways impossible to do when awake.”

   Go for the Marin modernism, but don’t miss the Maine moderns.

 [Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 180 Main St., Andover MA, 978-749-4015]

Earlier this year, I had my eyes opened to the current vogue for mechanical and digital interactive media in a show at Maine College of Art’s Institute of Contemporary Art called Fracturing the Burning Glass. Last week while visiting family in Providence I stopped by the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University where I got another lesson in techno-art in the form of a five-artist exhibition entitled Nostalgia Machines (through Feb. 19, 2012).

OUTNUMBERED by Jasper Rigole

According to former Bell curator Maya Allison, who organized the show, while technology and new art are usually future-oriented “this exhibition springs from the growing body of work by artists who make free use of technology in ways that undermine this past/future dichotomy. Paradoxically, the sculptures in this exhibition use mechanics to nostalgic effect.”

The most obvious example of this technology-in-service-of-nostalgia aesthetic is Belgian artist Jasper Rigole’s OUTNUMBERED:a brief history of imposture in which a computerized camera on a robotic arm constantly scans a found 1936 panoramic class photograph focusing on individual children as a recorded narrator gives brief fictional lives of the randomly-selected subjects.

Packing Tape by Gregory Witt

The nostalgic element is less obvious in works such as Gregory Witt’s Packing Tape, a mixed media sculpture machine that sits on the floor and makes both the gesture and the sound of applying packing tape to a box.

150 prepared dc-motors, filler wire by Zimoun

Swiss artist Zimoun’s 150 prepared dc-motors, filler wire 1.0 mm is a kinetic installation that sets 150 wires spinning against the wall with a soft metallic patter that sounds something like rain on a roof.

Umbrella Torque by Meridith Pingree

Recent RISD graduate Meridith Pingree’s Yellow Star and Umbrella Torque are creepy machines suspended from the ceiling that respond to the viewer’s presence by moving in motions evocative of cringes and shrugs.

Measuring Angst by Jonathan Schipper

Jonathan Schipper’s Measuring Angst appeared to be the most dynamic machine in the show, designed to repeatedly break Corona beer bottles, the action carried out by the curved armature being played and replayed on videotape, but it was not working the day I visited. The trope being played is presumably the tension between creation and destruction, life and death in mechanical terms.

All of these clever, creative contraptions trace their lineage most directly to the 1960s art machines of Jean Tinguely. In a sense, the entire cutting edge art machine trend is an expression of nostalgia for the iconoclastic sensibility of Duchamp and Dadaism. Tinguely and Duchamp, however, created their art as ironic critiques of manufactured culture. I got the sense that most of these young artists were being sincere and playful. Pingree, Schipper and Witt all attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, giving Nostalgia Machines a nice local connection.

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

http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/David_Winton_Bell_Gallery/index.html

   Tyler Green, the eminently informed and informative writer behind the art blog Modern Art Notes, posted his list of the top art books of 2011 on his November 28 blog I was pleased to see that one of Green’s selections is John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury by Debra Bricker Balken, the catalogue for the Marin exhibition that just closed at the Portland Museum of Art and will re-open on January 27 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury

My nomination for art book of the year would probably be the new 954-page biography of Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, who won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for their biography of Jackson Pollock, but since I’m still wading into it, I’ll reserve judgment. My bookshelves are filled, however, with hundreds of art books from which, with your indulgence, I would like to share a few of my favorites.

Van Gogh: The Life

Be forewarned, I am not a deep intellectual, more of middlebrow, so for the most part my favorite art books tend to be those that speak intelligently to intelligent readers.

The Shock of the New

Still the best survey of modern art that I have found is Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New. Based on the 1979 BBC series, Shock of the New was updated in 2004, but I still rely on my 1980 edition when I want to understand our modernist roots.

This Is Modern Art

For a more recent survey, I’d recommend This Is Modern Art by British artist/author Matthew Collings. His irreverent and idiosyncratic take on contemporary art at the turn of the 21^st Century is lively and well-illustrated.

Art In Its Own Terms

Fairfield Porter:Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975 is not a book about Porter but by Porter. The realist painter of Maine and New York was also one of the best art critics of his day, able to appreciate the advances of abstraction even as he remained resolutely representational. Published in 1979, the year after I started writing about art, Art in Its Own Terms became what I strove for as a critic.

The Sense of Sight

The Sense of Sight by John Berger is just one of the many Berger books I own, but I re-read his essay “The Moment of Cubism” at least once a year. It explains the entire history of art in less than 20 pages.

Lives of the Artists

Calvin Tomkins of the New Yorker is my favorite art writer because he understands that the lives of the artists are inextricable from the meaning of their art. My two Tomkins favorites are Post- To Neo-:The Art world of the 1980s and Lives of the Artists.

The Painted Word

For theoretical approaches to art, I’d skip all the Derrida deconstruction talk and go with more common sense approaches. Has Modernism Failed? by Suzi Gablik argues that “when everything becomes art, art becomes nothing.” Las Vegas philosopher and social critic Dave Hickey argues in his landmark 1997 Air Guitar that he “would like to see some art that is courageously silly and frivolous, than cannot be construed as anything else.” And if you’re real philistine, I suggest The Painter Word in which the foppish Tom Wolfe tries to make the case that most contemporary art is devoid of meaning and requires verbal explanations to prop it up.

Seven Days in the Art World

Sarah Thornton’s 2008 Seven Days in the Art World is the best sociology of contemporary art with chapters devoted to the roles of auctions, art schools, art fairs, criticism, studio visits, and the Venice Biennale in the post-modern landscape.

   And Don Thompson’s 2008 The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (the title reference is to an art work by Damien Hirst) attempts to explain the economics of contemporary art, how works of art acquire their prices if not their value.

   Coming soon: my favorite artist biographies and novels of all times. Happy reading.

   Amidst the busyness of the holidays, I confess that I neglected to visit a museum or gallery to feature this Thanksgiving week. But then that reminded me that museums and galleries aren’t necessarily the best places to see contemporary art. Like curators, collectors, critics and artists all over the world, I much prefer to see new art in artists’ studios, a luxury not always afforded the general public.

Alfred Chadbourn, Self-Portrait in Studio

Whatever I know about art I picked up in conversation with artists, mostly sitting around in their studios. This educational process of going to the source began with the late Alfred “Chip” Chadbourn whose studio was a skylit loft above his garage heated by woodstove. It was purchasing a painting by Chip back in the 1970s that originally sparked my interest in art and, after moving to Yarmouth, Maine, in 1982 I got to spend a lot of time up there in the studio amidst the smell of tobacco and turpentine talking art and politics.

   Last week I had a chance to visit painter John Walker, head of the Boston University graduate program, in his third floor studio in the former Fuller Cadillac building on Commonwealth Ave. One of the largest studio spaces I’ve ever seen, it was filled with Oceanic art, a library of art books, and huge abstract paintings begun on the coast of Maine. When I remarked that it would be a Herculean task to move the contents of such a large studio, Walker told me that most of his work had actually been moved to an industrial building in Maine.

   Often when I visit artists in their studios, even those fortunate few with ready markets and eager collectors, I find myself eying racks and racks of past paintings and sculpture and wondering whether all this art is eventually going to find a home. When my good buddy Carlo Pittore died a few years ago, the thousands of paintings and drawings and piece of postal art he left behind in his studio, which was once a chicken barn, became a full-time job for the foundation he established to care for and dispose of it.

Charlie Hewitt

Charlie Hewitt seems to have studios all over Maine and New York. When I first met him in the 1980s, he was living and working in a raw warehouse space on the Bowery. His primary studio is now located in the former Calderwood Bakery building in Portland. Stepping into his studio as he prepared for a sculpture show was like stepping into a colorful 3D drawing.

   Walking around the studio, looking at and picking up the abstract metal sculptures, was an education in itself. You can’t really understand sculpture unless you can touch it. Weight and texture are tactile dimensions.

   The most unusual studio I ever visited was photorealist painter Richard Estes’ elegant ballroom workspace in his summer mansion in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Estes is such a fussy, fastidious artist that he paints in a vast hall with parquet floors and oriental rugs, simply rolling his easel out of the butler’s pantry to work, rolling it out of sight when done.

   The studio where I spent the most time and probably learned the most was the late Neil Welliver’s barn in Lincolnville, Maine. The huge skylight was actually one of the faulty windows removed from the Hancock Tower in Boston. Barn swallows swooped and pooped as he painted. The contrast between seeing Neil’s symphonic Maine landscapes in his barn studio and in the posh Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan was most instructive. It is the market that turns works of art into luxury goods, not artists.

Dennis Pinette

  In recent months I have visited painter Michael Waterman in his little Portland studio that doubles as his home, Aaron Stephan in his industrial space shared with a blacksmith on the outskirts of Portland, Eric Hopkins in his stylish new digs on the edge of Rockland, Dennis Pinette in the new studio he built onto the back of his home in Belfast after the roof of the old backyard studio became irreparable, and Barbara Sullivan in her fresco-filled barn studio in rural Solon.

Fresco objects in Barbara Sullivan's studio

It is a distinct privilege to visit the places where artists work and to see their work in progress. Of all the benefits of writing about art, permission to invite myself into artists’ studios is my favorite. You get to see their sources, their notes and sketches, the images they surround themselves with, the books they are reading, the space they inhabit. After the holidays I promise to get back to the museums and galleries, but for now a big thank you to the hundreds of artists over the years who have put with me kibitzing in their studios.

   If you live within a two hour drive of Portland Museum of Art and have not yet seen Gather Up the Fragments: The Andrews Shaker Collection (through February 5, 2012), I strongly urge you to do so. But before you do, it might help to get in the proper frame of mind. Take a few deep, cleansing breaths, empty your head of the clutter and head of daily life, and then enter into the spirit of exhibition.

   I suggest this because of the jarring dichotomy between the lively public art scene the evening I saw the Shaker show and the selfless quietism embodied in the 200 artifacts of Shaker material culture on display.

Oval Boxes c.1840

Portland’s First Friday Art Walks are not to be missed. There are thousands of people in the streets, hundreds wandering the galleries of the Portland Museum of Art (which is free on Friday evenings from 5 to 9), and block party atmosphere with street vendors and buskers prevails from Longfellow Square to the Old Port. But there’s something discordant about going gallery hopping then out for a meal and drink when the main event is an exhibition of objects made by people who withdrew from the world, sought to extinguish self and to glorify God.

   The fact that Shakers insisted on celibacy pretty much guaranteed their extinction. Where there were once 5,000 Shakers in the 19^th century, there are four or five today, the tiny community at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine. Indeed, Shakers themselves are museum pieces themselves in the 21^st century.

Shaker Basket

Edwin Deming Andrews (1894-1964) and his wife Faith Young Andrews (1896-1990) were pioneering Shaker scholars and collectors, acquiring their collection of Shaker furniture, tool, clothing, and art between the 1920s and the 1960s. Gather Up the Fragments, which is now touring, was first exhibited at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 2008 and 2009. The Andrews Collection came to Portland following stops earlier this year at the Stamford Museum and Nature Center in Stamford, CT, and the First Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, TN. When it leaves Portland, it will travel to the Mitchell Gallery, St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, WI.

Mitten and Stocking Forms

The objects on exhibit all manifest the Shaker aesthetic (or is it an ethic?) of plain, unadorned, functional simplicity. They are one-of-a-kind handmade objects that long-dead Shakers have taken great care to make for a world they rejected. There are excellent examples, of course, of the boxes, baskets and chairs we all associate with Shaker style, but I found myself spending the most time examining more unusual creations.

   There is, for example, a pine and butternut cobbler’s bench from the Mount Lebanon, NY, community that just begged to be sat upon, the seat and work surface upholstered in leather. And there are wooden hat forms and hat shapers used to make the flat-brimmed hats that Shaker men wore. Simple and functional and very agrarian, but it did occur to me that fieldworkers in other parts of the world fashion far simpler hats.

Herbal Preparation Labels, 1840-1860

The object I found the most captivating however, even a bit haunting, is an adult cradle of pine and red wash. Shakers used the adult cradles in their infirmaries to rock the elderly and infirm. The idea that some dear soul about to meet his or her maker was gently rocked in this contraption, essentially a narrow coffin on rockers, struck me as a testament to compassionate design.

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

When museum directors and curators move to new institutions it is not uncommon for them to draw on art and artists they have worked with previously for some of their first exhibitions at the new venue. Dan Mills, who came to the Bates College Museum of Art a year ago from Bucknell University’s Samek Art Gallery, has done just this with Tale Spinning (through December 27), a very entertaining and engaging exhibition of works by six artists organized around the theme of multicultural narrative and storytelling.

Bates College Museum of Art at 25. Sculpture by Charlie Hewitt

The six tellers of tall art tales are Iranian-born artists Shirin Neshat and Nicky Nodjoumi, Mexico-born Enrique Chagoya, Native America Brad Kahlhamer, African-American Alison Saar and Lesley Dill, an artist who grew up in Maine. Dan Mills, himself an artist, included Kahlhamer (a Native American adopted by a German-American family and brought up ignorant of his ethnic heritage) in a 2001 exhibition about identity issues when he was director of the Gibson Gallery at SUNY Potsdam. He featured Chagoya in a 2006 exhibition at Samek Art Gallery and Nodjoumi in a 2009 show of epic paintings, also at Samek.

Dress of Opening and Close of Being by Lesley Dill

Kahlhamer and Dill are the showstoppers for me. Kahlhamer’s work is not original in the least, appropriating illustrator Ralph Steadman’s manic drawing and lettering style almost wholesale, but the gonzo approach to prints and drawings is perfect for fantasizing about the Native American life Kahlhamer never got to lead. Dill, with New England roots not only in Maine but also in education at Trinity and Smith, is famous for the wedding of words (texts) and body forms. Her Dress of Opening and Close of Being is a life-size dress made of steel, metal foil, organza, thread and wire and inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem about mortality, the words of the title hanging like a necklace.

East of Mesa East, A 55 Plus Community by Brad Kahlhamer

Tale Spinning is accompanied by a truly lively and playful little catalogue designed by Victoria Blaine Wallace. I’m not sure I’ve even mentioned a graphic designer before, but the catalogue really is a work of art unto itself.

This year being the 25^th anniversary of the Bates College Museum of Art building, a brick basilica that is part of the 1986 Olin Arts Center, the lower level gallery is devoted to 25:Selections from the Permanent Collection. The Bates museum had its start in 1955 with a gift of Marsden Hartley drawings and archival materials. The collection has grown since then to some 4,500 objects. The collection is necessarily eclectic, but Bates has a clear focus on works on paper and Maine artists. It is the print repository for artists Charlie Hewitt, Sigmund Abeles, and Clair Van Vliet, and has acquired a significant collection of works on paper by William Manning, the Lewiston native who is one of the states foremost abstract painters.

Connoisseur of Chaos by Takako Yamaguchi

A small collection makes the gems sparkle ever more brilliantly. A pair of very small, early Maine landscapes by Hartley twinkle as you enter the lower gallery. They are the sorts of minor masterpieces that would be lost in a large museum. A recent acquisition, Bates graduate Takako Yamaguchi’s Connoisseur of Chaos, makes an apocryphal statement as one of the Japanese-born artist’s signature seascapes in which East meets West.

Small, light and quick on its feet, the Bates College Museum of Art does what good college art museums do as well as any – bring the world of art to campus, exhibit the best of local art, and place the best of local art in larger contexts.

[Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St., Lewiston, ME, 207-786-6158.]

   Even back in the 1970s when I was a graduate student in Boston, I wasn’t a big fan of the Museum of Fine Arts. I dropped in at the elegant and eccentric little Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum regularly just to smell the gardens in winter and breathe the ancient air, but the MFA struck me as somehow stuffy and academic.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

My interest in art is almost entirely contemporary and the MFA rarely seems to mount contemporary exhibitions that make me want to go to Boston. I’m much more likely to visit the DeCordova out in Lincoln or the ICA in Boston. But the MFA’s new $12.5 million Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, which opened in September, prompted me to give the MFA another try.

   The Linde Family Wing transforms the former West Wing back into a wing. It had been the main entrance for decades. The 80,000 square feet of new space provides 21,000 square feet of exhibition space for contemporary art in seven new galleries. The new wing may signal a new MFA commitment to contemporary art, but then the investment in the Linde Family Wings pales compared to the $504 million invested in the 53-gallery Art of the Americas Wing that open a year ago.

   While we’re on the subject of money, my wife Carolyn and I, our daughter Tess, and one of her college friends visited the MFA during its Columbus Day Fall Open House when admission was free. Otherwise it would have cost the four of us $84. Given the $18 I paid to park in the museum lot, I kept thinking I should be seeing the Red Sox for that kind of money. The MFA does, however, make the $22 adult admission fee “voluntary” on Wednesday’s after 4 p.m. All museums should be open free of charge at least one day a week.

From Jonathan Borofky's I Dreamed I Could Fly

The signal architectural statement of the new Linde wing is a soaring glass galleria that makes the museum look and feel a bit like an airline terminal. Or maybe a human aviary would be more apt as the lofty, barrel-vaulted galleria features several suspended male figures comprising Maine artist Jonathan Borofsky’s I Dreamed I Could Fly.

   Befitting a gorgeous fall Monday holiday with free admission, the MFA was packed with people. The new wing is a very social and sociable space with restaurant, bookstore, and kids horsing around in the courtyard. That’s the way I like a museum to be, lively rather than hushed. There’s nothing sacred about art. It’s interesting stuff, but it’s just stuff.

   The featured exhibition for the opening of the new contemporary art wing seemed an odd choice. Ellsworth Kelly: Wood Sculpture (through March 4, 2012) brigs together 30 of the artist’s unpainted minimalist sculptures, pieces so deceptively straightforward and bland that they prompted the bored gallery guard to occasionally quip, “Want to buy some lumber?” Kelly’s art is all about high key color. Subtle wood tones don’t do a thing for his hard-edge forms.

Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism by Josiah McElheny

The artwork that seemed to draw the most interest in the new wing was Josiah McElheny’s fascinating Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism, a glass vitrine filled with glass bottles and mirrors that begs the question, “Is it art or just an illusion?”

Lime Green Icicle Tower by Dale Chihuly (detail)

Another work of glass art commands the Shapiro Family Courtyard begging to be bought. Dale Chihuly’s 42-foot Lime Green Icicle Tower has been displayed with a little glass donation box asking the public to help “Keep the Icicle Tower at the MFA.” Some 1,000 visitors contributed more than $1 million to purchase the gaudy spike.

Please by Jeppe Hein

In general, I’d have to say the MFA makes a little took much use of light art. Maurizio Nannucci’s neon text, All Art Has Been Contemporary is a neon non sequitor.  Then there’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts grad Wade Aarons’ INTENT, a word-grid of incandescent light bulbs timed to burn out one by one. And Jeppe Hein’s Please reads like neon instructions for visiting the museum rather than a museum piece.

   The big fall-winter show at the MFA is Degas and the Nude through February 5, 2012), a scholarly exhibition of some 160 works lent from as many as 50 collections. It is a feast for the eyes, but the Degas show could actually use a little more light. I know light waves are destructive, but I can’t imagine Edgar Degas ever intended that his paintings be hung in darkened galleries.

Installation view of Degas and the Nude

Though I realize this little verbal visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston probably sounds a bit snarky, we all enjoyed our visit enormously. And the fact that the MFA is dedicating more and more important space to the art of our times will be enough to get me back more often in the future.

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

    “Last year I had the best year ever,” my old friend Eric Hopkins told me back in May when I stopped by to visit him at his new studio on the edge of downtown Rockland, Maine.

   Sometimes it seems as though Eric, one of the most popular and prolific painters in Maine, rules the entire midcoast. He came ashore from the island of North Haven a few years ago and set up a big studio and gallery just a block from the Farnsworth Art Museum. The gallery is still there, but now he’s got a new industrial-strength studio and loft overlooking Rockland Harbor and he spent much of the summer across Penobscot Bay on Mount Desert Island constructing three-dimensional paintings in a rented boathouse.

Fish by Eric Hopkins

Eric Hopkins is as positive a source of energy as you’re ever likely to find in the art world, an artist as force of nature, enthused, excited, engaged and in love with both art and the natural world, so it doesn’t really surprise me that he’s done well even in the midst of a recession. People just want to buy into that high energy, the beautiful vision that Eric has of cosmic life along the coast.

   This year seems to be shaping up as another good one for Eric, not the least of all because a new book about him, his art and his vision has just been published. Eric Hopkins: Above and Beyond (Down East Books, September 2011, $50 hardcover) is written by another of my old friends, poet and art critic Carl Little of Somesville on Mount Desert Island. Carl is the author of monographs on Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Dahlov Ipcar, and Beverly Hallam as well as several more on Maine art in general (and Maine island art in particular), and his good-natured prose is a perfect match for Eric’s enthusiastic art.

Blue island With Waves and Clouds by Eric Hopkins

“Whether throwing hot glass from the fourth-floor window of a building at the Rhode Island School of Design or sweeping his brush across blank canvas to capture the curve of the earth, Hopkins is an American action artist,” Carl writes in the introduction to Eric Hopkins: Above and Beyond. “The world spins; he paints and performs; we look on in wonder.”

   This 136-page, lavishly illustrated book tells Eric Hopkins’ story and reproduces a representative sampling of his art.

   The story, well known to those who already know Eric, is of an island boy who paints the first fish he ever caught. Not a picture, mind you. Eric painted the fish itself. He and buddies start “hellacious” bonfires on island reefs, stoking them until they are hot enough to melt bottles. That delinquent fascination with molten glass led to study with Dale Chihuly, the glass master of our times, at RISD and to assisting the great man with his glassmaking. Initially an up-and-coming glass artist himself, Eric, he of the unbounded energy and short attention span, started slinging ropes of hot glass around to create “pyros,” drawings made with fire. The arcs of the pyros correspond to the curvature of the Earth, a visual dynamic made even more explicit when Eric takes to the air, painting aerial flights of visual fancy over Penobscot Bay, the edge of the world, the center of his universe. 

Helios by Eric Hopkins

Carl Little connects Hopkins aesthetically to Modernist painters John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Charles Burchfield and Arthur Dove, to which lineage one might add Milton Avery as well. The connection with one and all is the artistic effort to simplify, to reduce phenomena to their most essential components.

Shell by Eric Hopkins

Eric Hopkins: Above and Beyond conveys the essential Hopkins enterprise. Whether drawing, painting, glassblowing, photographing, building, sculpting, or writing, Eric Hopkins is an artist who strives for the simple, the straightforward, the effortless, the free.

   “As sacrilegious as it may seem to some aficionados of contemporary art,” writes Carl Little, “Hopkins is an upbeat artist.”

   In an art world that primarily values the dark and ironic, it is no mean feat to be a serious artist who values the light and sincere, but Eric Hopkins pulls it off swimmingly.