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Fruition | Nate Luce and Allison Cekala – Hughes Gallery curated by Meg Hahn
Through painting, photography, collage, and carved wood, Fruition brings together the work of Allison Cekala and Nate Luce, two interdisciplinary Midcoast artists and frequent collaborators. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “….it is often…inner immensity that gives their real meaning to certain expressions concerning the visible world.” Distilled from their individual meditation practices, forms exemplify the blurring of boundaries between work, art, and spirit; materiality celebrates human creativity; and attention to the environment shows us how to see the sacred in the humble. The ability to nurture an inner spiritual vastness creates deeper meaning in the physical forms we encounter, as the artists show us how to live a life that imbues this perspective into everything.
Curved forms appear throughout the exhibition: intimately painted gestures and carved letters in wood, enlarged canvas cut to bodily circumference, and photographed pyramidal heaps. Rounded and softened edges represent the removal of conventional hierarchies between creative exploration, community engagement, and spiritual questioning. How the artists seamlessly move between mediums echo how they approach their personal and creative lives. Cekala leads The Rockland Observationalists, a community that makes and shares observation-based artwork. Luce operates Luce Spirits, a distillery and tasting room, a flexible social space and continuation of creative alchemical explorations. These are among the many ways they feed all aspects of life with equal tenderness.
Materiality of the artworks demonstrates a handmade quality, as the marks’ textures contain evidence of the joy and importance of human creativity. For Cekala, painted forms are built through an inner poeticism. Translucent washes introduce new forms when material bleeds together and control is relinquished. At other times, thick gestures act as a record of thinking through process. Luce’s canvases, which are part of a larger series from an outdoor performance, contain techniques involving paint, embroidery, and beads; an example of smaller forms becoming part of a larger whole. For both artists, meditation through repetition, along with material experimentation, represents the importance of nurturing inquiry and demonstrates the capacity for the human hand to convey spiritual truths.
Cekala and Luce’s work remind us of the wisdom and humor within the unassuming moments of our environment. Cekala’s ongoing photographic series American Pile serves as a record of transient scenes found across the country (the series extends on Instagram @americanpile). Like historic pyramids constructed across the world, this famous shape persists as anthropological notes of our time. Luce’s series of painted toilets (which continue nearby at the Rockland Water Pollution Control Department) was created primarily as a tool for meditation. Rather than solely depicting the object, the works suggest that even ignored parts of existence can lead to greater insight. Inspired by artist Laurie Anderson’s residency at NASA, this facet of the series again blurs boundaries and labels. Luce’s tombstone-like carved text sculptures which reproduce the last words heard at a Zen monastery each night plead us to not take a moment for granted. By bringing attention to the humble details of life, our understanding for creative potential widens within the unexpected.
Grounded in observation and meditation, the dimensionality of inner spirit is expanded into every aspect of Cekala and Luce’s practices. Bachelard closes his chapter on Intimate Immensity stating:
“Immensity has been magnified through contemplation. And the contemplative attitude is such a great human value…to declare ephemeral and special…it is not enough to resort to ‘impressions’ in order to explain them. They must be lived in their poetic immensity.”
Cekala and Luce’s artworks plant the seed for self-reflection by showing us the artificial boundaries between art, work, and life; the profane, humorous, and serious. They ask us to be fully open to internal and external observation. To experience the beauty and strangeness our shared world has potential to convey, we summon ourselves to a new awe.
About the Artists
Nate Luce is a multimedia artist who studied art at Bennington College and religion at Harvard University. Beyond painting, embroidery, and sculpture, his practice extends to music, installation, Zen meditation, and experiments in distillation and rectification. In 2024, he was the first living artist to present a solo exhibition at the Langlais Art Preserve (Cushing, ME); other recent highlights include a solo exhibition at BUOY Gallery (Kittery, ME, 2022), as well as participation in the 2023 CMCA Biennial. Additionally, Nate has completed residencies at Hewnoaks (Lovell, ME, 2021) and the Zen Mountain Monastery (Mt. Tremper, NY, 2024). He currently lives and works in Rockland, ME, where he also oversees the Master Clam Meditation Hall, a space open to all for weekly sitting practice; and operations Luce Spirits, an eccentric and beloved nano-distillery and bar.
Links: https://www.nateluce.website/
Instagram: @lazynatey
Allison Cekala is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer living in Warren, Maine. She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, a BA from Bard College in Photography and Environmental Studies, and a teaching certificate through the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. Cekala’s interests lie primarily at the intersection of visual art, education, and ecology. She has received recognition and support from the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Cary Center for Ecosystem Studies, and the Monson Arts Artist in Residence Program among other institutions. Professional highlights include solo shows at the Museum of Science, Boston, and the Volland Foundation, Kansas, screenings at the American Film Institute, the Lisbon International Film Festival, Portugal, and teaching positions at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Montserrat College of Art. Locally, Cekala is known as an avid beekeeper, lead guitar player and singer in Bonnie, co-founder of the Rockland Observationalists, an informal collective that meets regularly for plein air and life drawing sessions, and culinary teacher at Camden Hills Regional High School.
Links:
https://www.allisoncekala.com/
MacDowell’s Residency, 2015
Volland Residency, 2023
365 Days 365 Artists Interview, 2015
LEF Fellow, 2017
Instagram: @allison.cekala(private), @americanpile
About the Curator
Curator: Meg Hahn
Instagram: @mmeghahn
(CMCA Bio) Meg Hahn is a painter, curator, and arts organizer living in Portland, Maine. She received her BFA in Painting from Maine College of Art & Design. Her work has been exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; University of New England Art Gallery, Portland, ME; The Distillery Gallery, Boston, MA; Perimeter Gallery, Belfast, ME; Dunes, Portland, ME; and SOIL, Seattle, WA, among others. She has attended residencies at Surf Point, The Golden Foundation Residency Program, The Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks, and the Monhegan Artists’ Residency. She has curated and organized exhibitions with Border Patrol, a curatorial collective she is a co-director of, SPACE, where she is currently the Development and Special Projects Manager, and the Lewis Gallery at the Portland Public Library.
The Sun, Trying to Disappear – Brown Gallery curated by Dylan Hausthor (they/them)
The Sun, Trying to Disappear is a show of entanglement. The sun, the source of reflection that all six artists in this exhibition put their faith in, is the very thing that allows the falsehoods of the world to become visible. The systems at which these artists shine their mirrors are forces of destruction: natural disasters, the melting of late-stage capitalism, forced control of bodies, and flickering candle-lit gasps of stumbled-upon beauty. Each artist references the histories of utopia, futurism, landscape, and defiance specific to their own communities. They do this not through hope-based sermons communicated through imagery, but instead rely on beauty, fiction, self, and wonder as modes of transcendence that extend past oppression. The images in this exhibition flutter between icons and mistrusted memories;dumpster-found advertisements; and miracles of moments that feel fully divine. As we wade through systems that try to engulf us, these artists use their imaginations as a way to survive above the flames. They may be above them, but they’re certainly not looking away from them. Image-making necessarily cannot be of the inside. The process of seeing weaves together the physiological, the genetic, and, most importantly, the memetic. The artists represented in The Sun, Trying to Disappear dance through these references, uncovering and making visible spaces and characters that we recognize before dragging us deeper into the specificity of their worlds. You may be reading one story, but they are likely telling another one. The sun can never see the shadows that it casts, but we can.
About the Artists
Carmen Winant: This showing of Carmen Winant’s The neighbor, the friend, the lover, acts as another step in a consistently recontextualized (or decontextualized?) icons of archive—double-sided book and magazine pages that, when put in the “correct” light, seem to cast a new spell. Winant’s work demands autonomy. This piece of Winant’s was originally gestated after finding a stack of National Geographic magazines at a dump in Skowhegan, Maine.
Carmen Winant is a Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art and an unaffiliated member of the faculty. Winant is an affiliated faculty member in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and has taught in Ohio prisons through The Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP). She has also served as the Dean of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2013-2015). Winant’s work poses a challenge to the ways that we understand women’s power, pleasure, labor, healing, and liberation to function, querying the aesthetic and political legacy of second-wave feminism. Winant’s appropriative installations and artist’s books grapple with this question for all of its contradictory impulses: the awe of living in a revolutionary moment, a shared preoccupation with the female body as a zone of political strife, cognizance of the racial and class-based limitations of the second-wave movement; the mine- and not-mine nature of historical legacy. In using found photographs, Winant acts upon primary evidence (rather than indexical reference); the images incorporated into her work contend directly with the complex notion of socio-political inheritance. Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim fellow in photography. She has shown her work in the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Contact Photography Festival (Toronto), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), ICA Boston, el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, The Print Center (Philadelphia), MIA (Minneapolis), Sculpture Center (NY), The Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus) and other sites. Winant’s work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MoMA, and Henie Onstad; it has been written about in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, Vogue, Frieze, Aperture Magazine, and Art in America.
Winant is the mother of two sons, Carlo and Rafa, with her partner Luke Stettner. They have lived in Columbus since 2014.
Areas of Inquiry & Teaching Interests, Installation, performance, research-bound practice, and collage modalities, Second-wave feminism; contemporary feminisms, Liberation struggle and the potential of political imagination. Alternative archive-production and amalgamation
Links:
https://www.carmenwinant.com/
Fondazione Imago Mundi Foundation Interview, 2018
MOMA Exhibition 2018
Unconditional Interview, 2019
Instagram: @carmen.winant
Elle Perez is hope. Their work simmers, slowly cooking off until you’re left with something so pungent it changes your life. Their images come from a lineage of mosh-pit-like energy—punk denialism, demanding a new future of safety. Their work sees through the histories of fiction, violence, and hope in photography and leaves you with a deeply authentic vulnerability.
Elle Pérez is an artist from the Bronx, New York, who lives and works in New York City. Pérez primarily works in photography and moving image, depicting intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and visceral details within their portraits, landscapes, and films.
Their work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, and has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA (2023); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2022); the Carnegie Museum of Art (2021); Public Art Fund (2019); and MoMA PS1 (2018). They were included in the 59th International Venice Biennale (2022), the Whitney Biennial (2019), and have been featured in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2022), Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2022), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Barbican Centre, London (2020); and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2019).
They have been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, Lightwork and a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2023, Pérez was the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Pérez is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art. They have previously held appointments in the Art, Film, and Visual Studies department of Harvard University, Williams College, The Cooper Union, and taught photography at the Educational Alliance Art School in New York City. They were a Dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from 2016 to 2021.
Pérez’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. Pérez is represented by 47 Canal, New York and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.
Links
https://cargocollective.com/elleperez
Art21 Works Between the Frame
FlashArt Interview, 2024
Carneige Museum of Art, 2021
Instagram: @elleperex
Ian Kline’s practice is one of miracle-seeking. Traditional questions of reality aren’t even important. His world seems to leak the divine, washed out by color giving way to a haunted place that you recognize. You have memories there. That lake is a place where you went skinny dipping in high school, that car is the same model as the one that your aunt drove into a tree, and that red is the same color as the back of your eyelids during midwinter. Kline knows the world that we live in and shoplifts from it, Portland connection.
Links
https://iankline.com/
Cultured, 2024
C41 David Billet and Ian Kline meet a world of open minds, 2020
Instagram: @iankline
Kate Greene’s work leans back into the recognizable until it tumbles into the mystical. Her images literally drip with a perspective that transcends something knowable. In Greene’s work, the landscape holds power. The threats that humanity puts on the land are filtered through her, and suddenly we are not dangerous to the land: it is dangerous to us.
Kate Greene received an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been showcased in exhibitions at venues including the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park; the Worcester Art Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine; the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art; the Guatephoto Festival, Guatemala City; Museum Dr888, Drachten, the Netherlands; Bodega Gallery, Philadelphia; Daniel Cooney Gallery, New York; and Eighth Veil, Los Angeles. Greene’s work has been featured in various publications including the New York Times and has been favorably reviewed in the Boston Art Review, the Portland Press Herald, and Art News. She has taught widely, most recently at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Hartford Art School Photography MFA Program.
She currently lives in Rockland, Maine and is represented by Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
Links
https://www.ktgrn.com/
Grant Wahlquist Gallery
Lens/cratch Interview with Kate Greene: Photographing What is Unseen, 2024
Boston Art Review Interview: Kate Greene’s “Black Sun’ Toys with Photographic Distortion, 2023
Portland Press Herald, 2020
Instagram: @_kategreene_
Lieko Shiga reckons with natural disasters through images of doom and modes of community activism. Her large-scale images reject photography’s traditional mirror/window dichotomy—they act instead as portraits of a delicate and psychic state that feels primarily internal and haunted.
Shiga was born in Okazaki, Aichi in 1980. After graduating from high school she enrolled in Tokyo Polytechnic University. She left school halfway through the term and enrolled at Chelsea College of Arts in London in 1999. She graduated in 2004. From 2007 to 2008, Shiga was part of an Agency of Cultural Affairs program for young artists that allowed her to continue studying in London. While participating in the program she published Lilly, a photograph collection of people living in her apartment building. She also won the Kimura Ihei Award for Canary, a photograph series taken in Australia and Sendai. In 2009 she won an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York City.
After returning to Japan, Shiga moved to Kitakama, Miyagi, where she partnered with a local cameraman to photograph festivals and sports days while recording oral histories with residents. While there, she and the other people who lived in Kitakama were devastated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The earthquake destroyed Shiga’s studio, but more importantly it killed sixty people in the small village. Collecting over 30,000 photographs that survived the disaster, Shiga expanded them into the ‘Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Coast)’ (2008–2012) series. As she told the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018, the work consists of images from before and after the tsunami and centres on the spirit and history of the Kitakama village.
In 2012 Shiga won the Higashikawa Prize for new artists. In 2021 Shiga received, alongside Takeuchi Kota, the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (TCAA) 2021–2023. The Selection Committee said that her practice ‘condenses important elements for reflecting on the society in which we find ourselves, including concepts like human nature, center and periphery, death and mourning, regulation and freedom, and harmony with nature.
Links
https://www.liekoshiga.com/
1000 Words Review by Gerry Badger
Tokyo Contemporary Art Award, 2021-23
The side-eye energy of Sara Cwynar’s images pulls you into yourself. They remind you of your relationships with the things you see, the things you buy, and the things you’re desperate to gain meaning from. Dystopia and utopia are in lockstep with commodity in her work—the hyperreality of an organized world gives it less sense.
Sara Cwynar is a contemporary artist who works with photography, collage, installation and book-making. Cwynar was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1985 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Cwynar’s work presents a marriage of old and new forms that are intended to challenge the way that people encounter visual and material culture in everyday life.
Sara Cwynar is an artist working in photography and video. The artist’s photographs often take the form of sculptural constructions that are photographed, printed, tiled and re-photographed as new images. Cwynar’s videos similarly combine existing images from photographic history and from a personal archive to remix and re-present familiar imagery. Cwynar strives to situate an individual approach within the shared visual codes of popular culture.
Links
The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Awardee 2019
Interview Magazine, 2015
Gagosian Quarterly Interview, 2023
FlashArt Interview, 2024
Instagram: @cwynars
About the Curator
Dylan Hausthor is a conjurer of stories of dreaming and reality. They use photography, video, and installation to explore the complexities of the human condition in relationship to the natural world. Fact and fable, innocence and cunning, the spectacle and mystery of the seen and unseen. Their images imply dramas suspended, acts disrupted, and stories whispered, narratives woven with the miraculous and mundane. “Photography’s ability to promote belief is a power not dissimilar to that of faith,” they say. “I hope for these images to act as tarot cards, and the viewers exist as the medium between fiction and reality—to push past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.”
Hausthor received their BFA from the Maine College of Art and Design and MFA from the Yale School of Art. They are a 2024 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award, and a 2021 Hariban Award Honorable Mention, a 2019 recipient of a Nancy Graves Fellowship for Visual Artists, and a winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer Fund Grant. In 2022-2023, they were a Lunder Fellow at Colby College, and in summer 2024, they will attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have been an artist-in-residence at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, the Penumbra Foundation, and Light Work. They have also been a runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, and a W. Eugene Smith Grant finalist. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally, and they have three books in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. They work teaching ghost hunting, ritual, photography, and mushroom foraging. They live in mid-coast Maine.
Links
https://dylanhausthor.com/
Instagram: @dylan.hausthor
From the Collection of Lord Red | Kyle Downs (he/him) – Lobby curated by Tessa Green O’Brien
From the Collection of Lord Red is the first Maine solo show of exhibiting artist Kyle Downs, opening September 28 in the Marilyn Moss Rockefeller Lobby + Karen and Rob Brace Hall. Downs presents wall sculptures made from strips of discarded basketballs, referencing post-production practices, pop culture and the psychology of collecting.
Kyle Downs is a sportsman, and to see his basketball-strip tapestries, one might guess that his sport of choice is Basketball. In truth, Downs channels his athleticism through the thrill of the hunt, searching junk shops and flea markets for sturdy materials, rare records, and surprising objects with unlikely surfaces. Downs relishes the heightened state of intentional searching and the discovery of diamonds in the rough, reframing collecting as an act of material obsession to a more wholesome meditation on the quality of attention and honoring craft. Through dedicated hours of careful cutting, gluing, and rearranging, Downs transforms the recognizable object of a basketball, remixing a known cultural signifier into something surprising and new.
The artworks on view comprise three parallel series that each inform the next. The largest pieces are patterned, symmetrical abstractions that reference sacred geometry. The accompanying smaller works give further context to Downs’ worldview, adding humor and additional cultural references to the mix. In the pieces that Downs refers to as “flowers,” a single basketball is dissected & reassembled into cartoonish floral shapes, sporting uneven petal-like edges and a contrasting-color snaking line. Lastly, a series of “baseball cards,” feature cameos of male baseball players made from rubber basketball “pixels.” The wryness of the baseball cards contrasts the formality of the larger works, while simultaneously speaking to the work of collecting as an integral part of Downs’ creative process.
About:
Kyle Downs is an American artist known for his multidimensional works that often explore the intersections of urban and natural landscapes. A native of New Brunswick, Maine, Downs earned his MFA from Ohio State University in 2016. He has exhibited his work in various venues, including the ROY G BIV gallery in Columbus, Ohio, where he showcased pieces inspired by parking lots, gyms, and quarries. His art frequently incorporates materials like wood, metal, and asphalt, reflecting his interest in the boundaries and transformations of different environments. Downs’ creative process is highly influenced by his surroundings and the industrial landscapes he encounters. For instance, his work involving parking lots examines the line work and materiality of these spaces, often bringing outdoor elements indoors to challenge traditional perceptions. His sculptures sometimes play with familiar objects in unexpected contexts, such as a pommel horse reimagined within a Radio Flyer wagon, blending functionality with artistic interpretation. In addition to his exhibitions, Downs has contributed to the academic field as an adjunct professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University. His innovative approach and varied use of mediums underscore his resistance to a singular artistic style, instead embracing a diverse and evolving body of work. Downs continues to live and work in Bowdoinham, Maine, where he remains an active figure in the contemporary art scene
Links:
https://kyleaarondowns.com
Curator:
Tessa Greene is a Maine-based artist and curator. A Maine native, she received a BS in Fine Art from Skidmore College and an MFA from Maine College of Art and Design. She was a 2022-2023 Residential Fellow at The Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and previous residencies include Surf Point Foundation, Tides Institute, Monson Arts, Haystack, Hewnoaks, Vermont Studio Center, Joseph A. Fiore Art Center, and the Stephen Pace House. O’Brien co-directed Able Baker Contemporary gallery from 2019-2022, and continues to integrate curation into her creative practice. She has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, and has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, St. Botolph Club Foundation, Ellis Beauregard, Maine Arts Commission, and the Kindling Fund via SPACE Gallery & the Warhol Foundation. She lives in South Portland, Maine.
Instagram: @tessagreeneobrien
i forgot to remember | Katrina Weslien– Main Gallery Curated by Suzanne Weaver
The Center for Maine Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition i forgot to remember, featuring the work of Katarina Weslien. Drawing on a four decade-long multi-disciplinary practice, artist Katarina Weslien has created a large-scale and expansive exhibition for the Main Gallery at CMCA. i forgot to remember is immersive and experiential reflecting the artist’s “deep, on-going interest in the tactile and metaphoric power of cloth; how mute objects speak; and how objects elicit memories, emotions, and embodied imaginations in the face of impermanence, disorder, and displacement.” i forgot to remember opens on September 28, 2024, and runs through May 4, 2025.
Through architectural interventions and an elegant choreography of objects, Weslien creates an atmosphere in the gallery that is both serene and disarming. The viewer moves slowly through the space, encountering objects at all scales, both expansive and intimate. Massive Jacquard tapestries, outsized letters draped over metal armatures, a wall of reflective disaster blankets, a room made entirely of felt, and a brass bell waiting to be rung. As the viewer walks through the exhibition, their knowledge, perceptions, and understanding of what is being seen, sensed, or smelled is challenged and changed. Objects mysteriously invite and evade, expand and contract, and seem to exist in a liminal space between the physical and metaphorical, shifting architecturally from the minute to the monumental. Fragments, remnants, leftovers, and vestiges oscillate between integration and disintegration.
“At the heart of Weslien’s intelligent, insightful, and sensorial exhibition, i forgot to remember,” says curator Suzanne Weaver, “are the struggles and joys of finding new meaning through the coming together of fragments of our experiences, memories, loves, and desires. The importance of being present, aware of the physical and poetic interconnectedness of all life and to act consciously and creatively in finding solutions that shape us and our surroundings in positive and beneficial ways.”
Links:
https://katarinaweslien.com
Maine Artist Journal – Artist Stuck: Circle of Clarity
Portland Press Herald
Instagram: @keweslien
About
Katarina Weslien (b. 1952) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work spans cross-media installations, collaborative projects, textile constructions, and print media. She constructs her projects through extensive research, focusing on how images and objects evoke thoughts, emotions, and embodied knowledge. By exploring the potential interactions of materials, people, events, and the environment, her work uncovers the ways meaning is embedded and revealed within changing contexts. Weslien earned her BFA in Textiles from Utah State University and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She previously served as the editor of Moth Press at the Maine College of Art, where she also directed graduate studies. More recently, she has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she co-led study trips to India centered on material culture and pilgrimage studies. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Payson Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her pieces are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, among others. Originally from Sweden, Weslien now resides on Peaks Island and works in Portland, Maine.
Maine Connection: Lives on Peaks Island, Maine
Curator:
Suzanne Weaver is an accomplished curator with over two decades of experience in contemporary art. She most recently served as the Brown Foundation Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, where she also held the role of Interim Chief Curator. Prior to that, Weaver curated at the Speed Art Museum, organizing numerous exhibitions and expanding the museum’s community outreach. At the Dallas Museum of Art, she revitalized the Concentrations series, showcasing emerging international artists. Now retired, Suzanne Weaver is an Independent Curator living in Camden, Maine.
Instagram: @weaversuzanne
Virtual Tour