Main Gallery

Featuring work created in the past fifteen years by Don Voisine (b.1952), a native of Fort Kent, Maine, now based in Brooklyn, New York, the exhibition X/V provides an in-depth and introspective look at the abstract works of the artist. Rooted in the language of architecture, Voisine’s paintings, prints and drawings convey a sense of shifting spatial interactions through the use of symmetry, color, surface, and precise, hard-edged forms. Opening reception: September 2, 2016; 5-8pm donvoisine.com    

“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson The first full-scale retrospective of the work of artist Sam Cady, this exhibition presents a broad selection of the artist’s emblematic shaped and rectangular paintings created over four decades, as well as a sampling of drawings, studies, and recent “fragments,” painted abstractions culled from the remainders of the shaped canvases. Ever tuned to seeing aesthetic possibility in…

For more than two decades, artist John Walker has been painting the view from his property at Seal Point, Maine, and his tough, lush, muscular paintings from this place have been described as “existential images.” Seal Point is for Walker what Mont Saint Victoire was for Cezanne, a subject to be revisited time and again until, as the artist says, “one knows more about it than anyone else. That is what Seal Point is to me.” For the first time,…

  You begin with the possibilities of the material. –Robert Rauschenberg The question of how and why an artist uses materials has long been a topic of consideration in art history. Today, many artists are looking to this question and seeking to find a balance between what they use to make work and the concepts behind them. Providing agency to the materials themselves, artists are looking at materials as a means of communication, whether they are expanding on traditional media…

This survey exhibition of paintings and drawings by John Moore (b. 1941) is the artist's first solo exhibition in a Maine museum, and his first at CMCA (then Maine Coast Artists) since the group exhibition, Looking at the Land, in 1993. A highly esteemed teacher and painter, with more than forty-two solo exhibitions to his credit, Moore has lived and worked in Belfast, Maine, for more than a decade, first seasonally and more recently full-time, since retiring from the University…

American Steel is the first solo exhibition in Maine of sculptor John Bisbee’s work in nearly a decade. Bisbee, a resident of Brunswick, Maine, is celebrated for his masterful work created exclusively from forged and welded nails, transforming their simple form into sculptures that defy the imagination. As Glenn Adamson writes in the catalog essay accompanying the exhibition, “We hear a lot these days about the decline of American manufacture. Communities in the so-called ‘rust belt’ are struggling to cope…

In partnership with the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, CMCA presents the inaugural exhibition of the 2018 Ellis-Beauregard Fellows—artist team Wade Kavanaugh (Bethel, Maine) and Stephen B. Nguyen (Portland, Maine). Kavanaugh and Nguyen were selected as the first recipients of the Fellowship award through a blind jury process from a pool of more than 200 applicants by jurors Jeffrey Peabody, Vice President and Director, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York City, and Alison de Lima Greene, Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Museum of…

  “If engaging with climate is not a matter of winning, but more a matter of character and style, then the making of art, story, and literature also becomes part of our responses.” —Per Espen Stoknes, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming How do we confront what climate strategist Jorgen Randers calls “the burden of ‘Big Grief,’” when nature is increasingly destroyed around us? The artists in Melt Down present evidence of the undeniable impact of…