The color has many connotations, from growing things to climate change.
The window of my office at home looks out on a stand of trees between my building and the next. I have lived in this apartment for nearly a year, so I have seen nearly one full cycle of their seasonal colors. Right now, the leaves are green again, friends who have left and then returned to me.
Here in New England, we always talk about fall colors, that explosion of reds and oranges that brings leaf peepers by the droves. Don’t get me wrong — I love the ruby and citrine gems that will blanket my driveway in two months. But something about the full branches I see from my window also makes my writing feel full at this time of year. My mind is ripe, like the peaches I might pack for a summer picnic under a shade tree.
I asked four curators at Maine museums to show me something green on view right now. And I want to see what you see. Did you make something green? Did you see art in a gallery or a museum or on the side of a building? Send me a picture with all the details at mgray@pressherald.com.
“The Land That Claims Us” (2022/2023) by Mel Beaulieu (Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq Nation), Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor
This work is inspired by the artist’s favorite place — the bog at Kouchibouguac National Park in New Brunswick.
The slow pace of growth in these wetlands means that some trees are hundreds of years old, but still only a few feet tall.
“This creeping passage of time reminds Mel that despite the modern borders and shifting control of the land resulting from colonization, ‘the land still looks the same’ and ‘remembers us,’ ” the wall text next to this piece reads.
The making of this work must have also been a slow process. It is 32 inches wide and 17 inches tall, made up of tiny antique and modern glass beads. The shapes and shadows are intricate and deliberate, interspersed with quills and sewn onto felt.
Aaron Miller, curator of exhibits and collections, said the Abbe Museum acquired this monumental piece last year. He is interested in showing more depictions of land by Wabanaki artists.
“It is really important in a place like Bar Harbor and Maine, where so many people come from around the country or the world, they’re coming to Wabanaki homelands to be able to reinforce the fact that Wabanaki people have been here since time immemorial,” Miller said. “It’s an important reminder that we’re in the Dawnlands. I feel like landscapes help us do that.”
The Abbe Museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. It will also be open on two upcoming Saturdays: Aug. 30 and Sept. 27. Admission is $18 for adults, $14 for college students and seniors, $10 for children and teenagers. It is free for children under 4 years old and members, as well as those with a tribal ID or a military ID. For more information, call 207-288-3519 or visit abbemuseum.org.
“Sore Loser” (2021) by Sasha Gordon, Ogunquit Museum of American Art
On this tennis court, we see a moment of victory. Or is it a moment of defeat?
“Whose perspective is true?” Devon Zimmerman, curator of modern and contemporary art, asks. “Is it the winner’s? Is it the loser’s? Is it the audience? Is it ours?”
This painting is on view this summer in “Where the Real Lies,” a collaboration with the Spaghetti Western Collection that brings together 19 contemporary artists who are reckoning with the breakdown of a shared reality in the 21st century. The result is deeply personal, fantastical and even whimsical. And this painting, Zimmerman said, embodies the show.
It is a diptych, which means it is on two canvases, and nearly life size. Gordon, born in 1998, is of the generation that has always known smartphones. The characters are her doppelgangers, and her scenes are drawn from her own experiences. The details of this painting are hyper-real — the weave of the sweater, the texture of the court — but the geometry is askew. But which person in this scene is her?
“It becomes this interesting meta reflection on our gaze,” Zimmerman said. “We also become spectators to this event and how we then take culpability in looking and seeing and how we see and what we bring to our processes of seeing on the individual level.”
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art is open until Nov. 16. During the season, the museum is open every day 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $15 for adults and $13 for seniors and students; members and children under 12 get in free. For more information, visit ogunquitmuseum.org or call 207-646-4909.
“Chrysalis: Reflections on the Interstitial” (2020) by Carlie Trosclair, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland
This one is, of course, not literally green. The color is a sort of beige.
But green has many connotations. We often think of this color as representative of the climate, and this artist is thinking deeply about the Gulf Coast climate where she grew up.
The daughter of an electrician, Trosclair spent her childhood in historic New Orleans buildings at varying stages of construction and renovation. She was also a college student when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in her hometown 20 years ago this summer. She later spent 10 years in St. Louis but moved back to New Orleans in part to dig into her own memories of that experience. She has said that she started thinking about the feeling of being in between hurricanes and the fragility of existence in New Orleans.
This piece is on view in a solo exhibition called “the shape of memory” this summer. Trosclair made “Chrysalis” by layering liquid latex onto a porch from a historic shotgun house in New Orleans. She allowed it to dry and then peeled it off, and the sculpture is that ghostly skin.
“There’s so much going on in all of Carlie’s work about the way that objects carry history and therefore carry memory,” Grant Wahlquist, curator at the CMCA, said. “But those histories and those memories are always at risk of being lost from misuse or neglect or, in this case, climate catastrophe.”
“The shape of memory” will be on view through Sept. 7. Summer hours at the CMCA are Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. General admission is $10. Seniors and students get in for $8, and admission is free for anyone under 18 and members. For more information, visit cmcanow.org or call 207-701-5005.
“Kingdom of the Blind #3” (2008) by Hew Locke, Portland Museum of Art
Take a close look at this sculpture, and you’ll find all kinds of surprises. There are Mardi Gras beads and dinosaurs and stars and tigers and flowers. It would almost be whimsical, except that the figure is also more than 8 feet tall and towering over you.
Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, said he was thrilled when a donor gifted this piece to the museum this spring. It is one in a series of 13 sculptures by Locke, a Guyanese-British artist. The figures are based on a fictional mythological ruler who is growing in size and pursuing conquest. The work reflects the artist’s interests in critiquing colonial expansion and destruction, and the result is something sinister and eerie.
“What this is supposed to evoke is the horror of unchecked greed when consumption overtakes,” he said. “This leader is so despotic and sucks up everything in his path.”
In that context, the winding vines and fake foliage become not pastoral but political.
“The green here for me is really about the destruction of the natural world,” he said. “Conquest comes with destruction of the environment and the need to take, take, take. That includes not just material things and lives but the literal natural world around us.”
The Portland Museum of Art is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. On Fridays, the museum stays open later with free admission from 4 to 8 p.m. Admission costs $20 for adults and $18 for seniors and students. Members and visitors under 21 get in free. For more information, visit portlandmuseum.org or call 207-775-6148.
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