If you were to pick nine contemporary artists to represent the visual arts world in Maine, who would you pick? Where would they live? What would the art they make look like? How would you tell the story of the art being made here in Maine?
That was the challenge University of Maine Museum of Art curator George Kinghorn accepted. However, instead of nine Maine artists, it was nine artists from our Canadian neighbor to the east: New Brunswick. The fruits of his labor can be seen in UMMA’s new show, “Contemporary Currents: Nine New Brunswick Artists,” a captivating cross-section of work representing many different mediums, approaches and regions of the province.
“These artists represent a diversity of creative processes, and this show also mirrors the pluralist nature of art across the globe,” said Kinghorn, who has been collaborating for the past 18 months on the exhibition with the New Brunswick Ministry of Tourism, Heritage and Culture. “You really get a glimpse into what high quality contemporary artists are living and working in New Brunswick.”
Selecting nine artists who reflect the diversity of an entire province’s arts scene is no small task, though in the UMMA show’s case, the process began with the vast collections of the New Brunswick Art Bank, a provincial program that since 1968 has every two years purchased art directly from New Brunswick artists. The collection numbers in the hundreds, all pieces of which are regularly rotated in and out of display in public buildings and galleries across the province.
All of the artists featured in UMMA’s exhibit — Erik Edson, Darren Emenau, Mathieu Leger, Neil Rough, Stephen Scott, Anne-Marie Sirois, Dan Steeves, Anna Torma and Istvan Zsako — have works from the art bank in the show. They range from the luminous but often unsettling photographs by Rough to the darkly humorous wall installations by Leger, composed of etched silver platters, with paintings, ceramics, fabric art, assemblages and other mediums also represented. Some are more generally representational, such as Steeves’ evocative intaglio etchings of household items and semi-rural scenes, and others are highly conceptual, like Sirois’ utilization of old irons, transforming them from domestic appliances into comical, occasionally menacing sculptural objects.
Despite these artists’ reputations in Canada and internationally, very few of the individuals represented in “Contemporary Currents” have ever displayed their work in Maine. Though the New Brunswick border is less than 100 miles from Bangor and the cities of Fredericton and St. John are both only three hours’ drive from the city, it has only been in the past few years that more avenues have opened up for artists on both sides of the border to collaborate and work in each other’s countries, thanks to a Special Cultural Task Force formed in 2010 to facilitate collaborations between Maine and Canadian artists and organizations.
“I’ve only started becoming aware of the arts scene in Maine over the past year,” Stephen Scott, a Fredericton artist who has five of his intimate, expressive portrait paintings on display at UMMA, said. “I think the only reason there isn’t more cross-pollination is political. … There’s a huge amount of barriers to being able to do things across the border.”
Anna Torma, a Hungarian-Canadian artist living and working in Baie Verte, in western New Brunswick, is acclaimed internationally for her playful, fantastically colorful fabric art, utilizing embroidery to create large, abstract wall hangings. Three works from her “Transverbal” series are on display at UMMA. And yet, Maine has never really been on her radar until now.
“I show pretty much everywhere else — Europe, Chicago, New York — but never in Maine. This is a big discovery for us. It’s a really wonderful thing to have happen,” Torma said. “Unless you have a dealer or gallery representation, it’s hard to do shows like this. But here, [the New Brunswick Arts Bank] stepped in, like a good dealer, to make this happen.”
While there are important cultural differences between New Brunswick and Maine — there are many more French speakers in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, for instance — there are similarities, too. Both places are geographically isolated from major urban areas, where artists tend to cluster, and are largely rural in nature.
“We are separated, not only from major U.S. cities but also from Montreal and Toronto and the rest of Canada. Maine is as well,” Scott said. “I think you’ll find that our region, the Maritimes, is a distinct little region on its own. Isolation can lead to that.”
The UMMA show is the latest in a series of collaborations between Ames’ department and various cultural institutions and organizations in Maine, as part of the Special Cultural Task Force. Previous creative collaborations include exhibits at the Tides Institute in Eastport and the 2012 establishment of the New Brunswick International Sculpture Symposium and Sculpture St. John, both modeled closely on Maine’s successful Schoodic International Sculpture Symposium.
“As far as I know, this is the first time that works from the arts bank have been displayed in Maine — certainly on this scale,” John B. Ames, New Brunswick’s Minister of Tourism, Heritage and Culture, said. “It’s always a benefit when our two jurisdictions can collaborate, and moving forward I look forward to new partnerships.”
“This exhibit is an example of partnership and collaboration at its finest, because we really shared the work on this project,” Kinghorn said. “This is a model for what we hope would be many more future collaborations between Maine institutions and New Brunswick institutions.”
“Contemporary Currents: Nine New Brunswick Artists” will be on display through Dec. 31 in the main gallery at the University of Maine Museum of Art, 40 Harlow St. Also on display in the Zillman Gallery are works by Maine painter Philip Frey. UMMA is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays, and free to the public.
