Catch Ogunquit Art Exhibits Now!

Just 2 Weeks Left to See 2018 Season at the OMAA

Through October 31, 2018

The leaves are turning, which means the doors will soon be closing for the season at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) in Ogunquit, Maine. It's one of my favorite small museums, as it showcases exhibits unlike those you'd see at a larger institution. Three caught my eye this year.

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Lois Dodd: Drawings and Paintings casts light on a lesser known but highly respected modernist. Born in 1927, Ms Dodd was among the mid-century New Yorkers who drew inspiration from both the boroughs and the coast of Maine. Now 91, Dodd still occasionally creates from her homes in New York and Lincolnville, Maine. The OMAA show includes some 21^st century work, but the bulk is from the 1950s and 1960s. Sometimes it has a "dated" feel, but because Dodd is unfamiliar to most, she's worth exploring.

Dodd intrigues because she's hard to pigeonhole. Her paintings are often open and flat in perspective, and she uses geometrical shapes that skirt the line between realism and abstraction. An oil titled Chickens (1957) is true to its title, but it looks like cubism collided with a paint spill. The same effects can be seen in a simple look at laundry hanging from a line. 

A more recent work Four Nudes and a Woodpile (2001) is a Gauguin-like feminist take on Lunch on the Grass (Manet).  And Dodd's naked ladies are busy working on their winter fuel supply, not posing for the male gaze. My favorite, though, is one I call "Loose Moose"—her title is simply Moose—a collage of colors and shapes that define the beast. It's childlike in its wonderment, but artisanal in assembly.  

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The most provocative work of the summer is Boundaries, a collaboration between photographer Jacob Bond Hessler and poet Richard Blanco. Each photo comes with a side poem and theirs is an unabashed political statement about the Big Four social categories: class, gender, race, and ethnicity.   

Hessler's photos are strongly evocative. Do you think borders are rational? Take a look at Hessler's shot of the narrow Rio Grande River as it threads its way through a remote slot canyon. It's no wider than my driveway and easily waded. But if think a wall is a good idea, look hard into Hessler's Tijuana/San Diego divide. It looks more like a prison than the dividing line between two sovereign nations, a reminder that all such lines are political fiction.   

Hessler's work is strongest in Boundaries when he is at his most literal. Many of the other shots explore metaphorical boundaries or require foreknowledge of the subject matter—for example an empty street that you need to know was where a lynching once took place. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but Richard Blanco's poems throw that adage into doubt. If you ignore wall text when you're in a museum, this would be a good time to break that habit. Blanco, a gay Latino, was the youngest poet to read at a presidential inauguration. Blanco's "Burning in the Rain" makes the soul weep. Blanco wears his worldview on his sleeve, but what a glorious raiment.   

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Wood Gaylor

The View from Narrow Cove is simultaneously the OMAA's largest exhibit, its most conventional, and its most diverse. The art world often wars against itself. In each age there is art that critics and patrons treat as fashionable, but also outliers who rail against the fashion du jour. Outsiders, like misery, love company. For every formal school of art, you can find artist "colonies" where the outlaws gather. Ogunquit became such a place when Charles Woodbury moved there in 1888, and painted oils that Victorian elites didn't like.

Soon, a summer art school opened for those bored with society and salon painting. Some of the artists aligned with the Ash Can school, which favored gritty realism; others with avant-garde modernists and abstract expressionists. And so it went. The only constant is that most wanted to do anything other than what was en vogue in the moment.

It's not easy to display fungible principles. One of art's great ironies is that a lot of rebellious art gets "discovered" and becomes the new convention that future artists will reject. Keep this in mind, because a lot of The View from Narrow Cove might not strike you as outside the mainstream. It once was!

The most obvious thumb in the eye of convention is Wood Gaylor's whimsical Arts Ball (1921), a Roaring 20s Bacchanal that's equal parts burlesque, masked ball, and critique of the arts establishment.

Rockwell Kent

Vincent Canade

Rockwell Kent's Alaskan Sunrise (1919) is clearly in line with Canada's Group of Eight painters, especially Lawren Harris. Let's just say that Kent's landscape is miles from how Hudson River luminists interpreted nature, not to mention how it would have startled the early 20^th century stuffed and stifled middle class, which preferred tranquil park-like scenes. Marsden Hartley's bold look at snowy Mount Katahdin would have similarly baffling, as would the dreamy muted trees of Vincent Canadé, whose forest looks a bit like crystal rock candy in the early process of being consumed. 

Marsden Hartley

Bernard Langlais

Antonio Mattei was a neo-primitivist whose very style defied that of academically trained artists. His take on Maine village life is meant to be evocative, not photographic. There is also a superb painting from Jacob Lawrence in which he puts an African American spin on Matisse cutout, and Bernard Langlais, who chucked his formal training in favor of offbeat folk art sculpting. My favorite image, though, was Will Barnet's charcoal Emily Dickinson: Poem #1101. It's not Ms Dickinson, rather an evocation of Penelope that's linked to a Dickinson poem. The female figure looks away from us, her expression enigmatic, and brushes her hair. For me, it was as like a Pre-Raphaelite in the hands of a Japanese master. I was transfixed! 

Will Barnet

Rob Weir