Any preview of an art scene as bountiful as Maine’s is going to be incomplete. But one important anchor for this fall is a celebration of Alison Hildreth initiated by Speedwell Projects in Portland. It is, in fact, inconceivable that something of this scale has not happened before, considering that Hildreth is not only one of the state’s great treasures, but also a prolific talent who is, on the cusp of her ninth decade, continuing to produce astonishing works in a variety of media. Her moment in the Maine sun is long overdue.

In a typically self-effacing interview on the Lights Out Gallery website, Hildreth explains, “I’m just translating the things that I read and see and think about and daydream about.” That could explain most anyone’s artistic practice. But the difference is what Hildreth is reading and thinking and daydreaming. Her ceaselessly curious mind rambles across a vast terrain that encompasses Roman and Greek mythology, Gothic and Renaissance art, Baudelaire, philosophy, texts about mycology, the archeology of ancient libraries, books on natural phenomena (such as how flowing forms occur in water or the swarm intelligence of insects), anything about cartography, and on and on.

Essentially, her work is about connection, specifically how nothing in the universe occurs in a vacuum. Everything we do will always affect something else. To fully experience Hildreth’s work is to recognize the outsized impact humans can have, even though proportionally, and within the infinite miracles of the universe, our species is relatively insignificant. You can fully immerse yourself in Hildreth’s oeuvre at our first three “must-see” shows of the season.

New Era Gallery, Vinalhaven, “Alison Hildreth Prints and Drawings,” through Oct. 9. neweragallery.com

The works here concentrate primarily on natural phenomena and include images of bats, beetles, lunar phases, plants and so on. You can get a head start by listening to her gallery talk on the site.

Speedwell Projects, Portland, “Alison Hildreth: 50 Years,” Sept. 22 through Jan. 7. speedwellprojects.com

This retrospective spans self-portraits, sketchbooks, pastels and paintings. The self-portraits will be the earliest works on view at the various venues, offering a glimpse into the origins of Hildreth’s art studies and interests, providing a valuable jumping-off point from which to understand how her singular bodies of work developed over time.

CMCA, Rockland, “Darkness Visible,” Sept. 30 through Jan. 7. cmcanow.org

You could say this exhibition occupies a middle ground between Hildreth’s earthly and cosmic interests. It will assemble various vertical works on Gampi paper and oil paintings — the former consisting of aerial perspectives of land, the latter imagined views of the night sky and deep space. Several of these are brand new works. The delicate appearance of the Gampi paper adds an exquisite, shimmery sense of fragility to the first body of work, while the oil paintings express the awesome immensity and infinite depth of the cosmos.

OTHER SHOWS NOT TO MISS

Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, “Exploding Native Inevitable,” Oct. 27 through March 4. bates.edu/museum

If you think of Indigenous art primarily as basketry, rugs and jewelry, this show will “explode” those notions. The subtitle is “an exploration of contemporary Indigenous art from the land we now call America,” which hints at some pretty provocative content. Jaque Fragua (Jemez Pueblo), for instance, incorporates the visual language of punk, graffiti, protest art and Native American imagery to “create paintings and murals of visual resistance and public interventions that repurpose his culture’s iconography.” Alison Bremner’s (Tlingit) “Wat’sa with Pearl Earring,” uses the reverse appropriation of Vermeer’s most famous work to comment sardonically on what is usually a white art world phenomenon. The multimedia experience will include experimental videos, expressionistic painting, ceramic sculpture, performance and more, and will spill into the surrounding community over its run, making it a fully immersive, exploratory endeavor that aims to forever alter the way we conceive of the art of First Nation peoples.

Cove Street Arts, Portland, “In the Moment,” Oct. 12 through Dec. 2. covestreetarts.com

This paper’s longtime former arts writer Bob Keyes teams up with independent curator Wes LaFountain to assemble a show about sports in art. If you’re rolling your eyes, remember the iconic boxing scenes of George Bellows, the scullers of Thomas Easkins, or even the ancient Roman discus thrower (a copy of the lost original bronze Attic sculpture from the 6th century BCE). The show will include work by many prominent contemporary Maine artists, including Joel Babb, Lucinda Bliss, Evelyn Dunphy, Jessica Gandolf, Tom Hall, Sean Alonzo Harris, John Laurent, Tom Paiement, Robert Shetterly and John Whalley.

Greenhut Galleries, Portland, “Taking Shape,” Nov. 2-25. greenhutgalleries.com

The juxtaposition of three artists promises to navigate an interesting tension between chaos and order, representation and abstraction, spontaneity and deliberate intention. Matt Demers’ energetic, colorful abstractions express the “everything everywhere all at once” conditions of life – the perpetual swirl of stimuli, memory, aspiration, happenstance, action and stillness. Keri Kimura also celebrates color, though her works channel it through the multiple phenomena of light – streaked, prismatic, broken and morphed by the movement of water – in the natural surroundings. They are nominally landscapes, but fractured, disassembled and reassembled on the surface. Thomas Stenquist presents contradiction in a way that bridges the spontaneity and order of these artists, sculpting a perceptually rigid material (various kinds of metal) into unexpectedly animated, ribbony forms with colorful oxidized surfaces.

Maine Jewish Museum, Portland, “Sunlight, Water & (Sea)Weeds,” Aug. 31 through Oct. 27. mainejewishmuseum.org

Nanci Kahn, curator of photography at the museum, pairs up with Meredith Kennedy to explore the effects of light and water on photography. Cyanotypes of aquatic flora the two produced in the studio provide a jumping-off point. These were submerged in water and photographed, and the resulting images ripple and glint as they record transitory moments and phenomena and, in this way, portray the temporary nature of perception.

Moss Galleries, Falmouth, “Counterbalance,” Sept. 8 through Oct. 28. elizabethmossgalleries.com

David Wolfe is well known as a printmaker, as well as a collector of old printing machines and tools. This love affair with the medium continues in his solo show, but with a substantial twist. Though his new works start with various printing techniques – woodcut, photography and intaglio – he paints and draws onto these surfaces with a variety of printing tools, and also silk screens over them, altering the initial images intuitively, without the calculated results of most print work. It’s an exciting departure that promises to explore freer, looser creative territory, while also expanding the print medium.

Moss Galleries, Portland, “How Do I Look,” Sept. 29 through Nov. 24. elizabethmossgalleries.com

Feminist art has, by now, a long and rich history. Often confrontational and politically and/or socially loaded, artists like Barbara Kruger, the Guerilla Girls and Pussy Riot have worked hard to subvert sexualization and objectification of women by media and culture. This mood permeates a few works in this show, which was curated by longtime Moss director of art sales Lauren Donovan. But Donovan, while not skirting the very serious issues still facing women and their relationships to their bodies, includes works that also rejoice in her subject matter, presenting paintings by artists such as Darien Bird, James Parker Foley and Rachel Hayden that mine a more joyful and at times mystical view of the female body.

Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, “Ever Baldwin: Down the Line” and “Spontaneous Generation: The Work of Liam Lee,” both through Nov. 12. ogunquitmuseum.org

Double dare: Try to find a picture of artist Ever Baldwin on the internet. It’s nearly impossible, and for good reason. Baldwin’s art is adamant about not fixing oneself on a single self-imposed (or societally imposed) image, whether that involves the temporal masks we employ to conceal the rich complexity that a human being is, the fluidity of identity and sexuality in our non-binary world, or the “enshrinement” of image that society demands so that we might maintain a sense of human order and predictability. Baldwin is out to challenge everything everyone takes themselves to be, and he does it with lusciously applied paint and voluptuous forms that morph from body parts to costumes and prosceniums to roadways and landscapes. We see influences of Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, but Baldwin’s style is incontrovertibly his own. Framed in charred-wood sculptural borders, the paintings feel like ritualistic shields, shrines, ceremonial masks or holy icons.

Also at the museum are the bizarrely fascinating textiles and furniture of Liam Lee. Enoki mushrooms, coxcombs, brains, intestines, seed pods, microscopic organisms, viruses, worms, snakes … these works evoke all of them and none of them at once. You can’t actually tell what you’re looking at, but it is definitely compelling. Through these works, Lee wants us to consider origins: what is organic and natural and what is mimetic and manmade. It’s a vital question for our increasingly AI world. In a way, though, the biophilic reference points and natural forms of these hand-felted works can also comfort us, and Lee’s vibrant sense of color is more uplifting than creepy.

University of New England Art Galleries, Portland, “Rose Marasco: Camera Lucida,” through Oct. 8. library.une.edu

In 2003, renowned photographer Rose Marasco bought a circa 1837 house in Portland’s West End at auction for $167,000. In her newly published book, “At Home,” Marasco writes, “Thinking about my own relationship to the house over time helped me see how, just as my efforts had shaped the present form of the house, the house in turn had been a major influence on my creative efforts … I started to realize all the ways that the house felt connected to other themes in my life.” This was the germination of this fascinating show. Marasco uses her premise to bring together various bodies of work she created in the house (where she still lives). They range from simple documentation of the over 80 objects she discovered in the structure to room interiors on which she projected vintage imagery of women. What’s most interesting is how she pushes the definition of photography using various creative approaches – photograms, images created with sunlight and acetate, others using old-fashioned overhead projectors, and still others produced with digital manipulation and scanners. The show brings to mind Bill Moyers’s observation that “Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.”

Portland Museum of Art, Portland, “Fragments of Epic Memory,” through Jan. 7. portlandmuseum.org

Is there more to be said about colonialism and the legacy of enslavement in the Caribbean than the narratives that have become rote at this point? The PMA, in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), aims to bring us more nuance than what we’re used to on this subject by pairing the work of contemporary artists of Caribbean descent with over 100 photographs from the AGO’s Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, which focus primarily on the reverberations of colonialism in the aftermath of enslavement in the region. The contemporary works will span many media, including photography by Vanley Burke, Dennis Morris and Abigail Hadeed; video from Rodell Warner; painting by Gomo George and Leasho Johnson; and mixed media by Christopher Cozier. These will face off against 19th- and early 20th-century images of Black and Brown Caribbean people working boilers, selling bread, harvesting bananas and sugar cane, laboring in cotton factories, and more. Likely, this show will confirm our views and rekindle outrage. But it also promises to present a picture of the manifold artistic heritage that continues to emerge out of tragic diasporic experiences in a way that feels undaunted, resilient and immensely creative.

Lights Out Gallery, Norway, “Little Sparks,” through Oct. 8. lightsoutgallery.org

Just for sheer volume of art by Maine artists, this small-works show, in a repurposed snowshoe factory in Norway, should not be missed. It will include about 60 artists from the 75 interviewed for the gallery’s archives (filmed during the pandemic and later, and a valuable sort of oral history of artists in Maine), as well as about 65 who sent works through an open call. The show is a fundraiser for a new roof, so much of the work is donated (some artists will take a small percentage of sales). Katherine Bradford’s “Moon Over Maquoit Bay” will be auctioned on their website, with bids accepted until 11:59 p.m. Sept. 7. Among the lengthy roster of participating artists are: Matt Blackwell, Al Crichton, Lois Dodd, Pea Guilmot, Duncan Hewitt, Munira Naqui, Abby Shahn and Emily Stark-Menneg.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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