2025 CMCA Biennial Artists Exhibition - Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland

2025 CMCA Biennial Artists Exhibition

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland

October 4, 2025 - January 12, 2026

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) announces that 29 artists have been selected to participate in its 2025 Biennial. The exhibition will be installed across all 5,500 square feet of the museum’s galleries and be on view from October 4, 2025 to January 12, 2026. CMCA’s Biennial is the longest-running statewide juried exhibition in Maine and highlights the latest developments in contemporary art by Maine-based and connected artists. The 29 artists were selected from an applicant pool of over 450 artists by distinguished jurors Tom Keyes, Keith Fox, and William Hathaway. A free opening reception will take place on Saturday, October 4 from 3-5 pm.

2025 CMCA Biennial Artists: Meg Alexander, Steve Bartlett, Jennifer Brou, Kristy Cavaretta, Thomas Connolly, Sarah Faragher, Gabriel Frey, Grace Hager, Sarah Haskell, Emma John, Mark Johnson, Alice Jones, Dustan Knight, Ben Levine, Kathryn Lynch, Janice Moore, James Mullen, Winslow Myers, Colin Page, Mallie Pratt, Alison Rector, LJ Roberts, David Row, Carol Shutt, Gail Spaien, Sarah Szwajkos, Kathy Weinberg, Ellen Weitkamp, David Wilson

CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART

21 Winter Street, Rockland, Maine, 04841

www.cmcanow.org

Artist Donald Moffett @ CMCA Rockland, Maine - Center for Maine Contemporary Art - "Donald Moffett: Nature Cult, Seeded" Exhibition

DONALD MOFFETT 

NATURE CULT, SEEDED 

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland 

May 25 - September 8, 2024 

DONALD MOFFETT 

Lot 110123 (nature cult, houses), 2023 

Wood, acrylic, steel 

56 1⁄4 x 43 1⁄2 x 36 inches 

© Donald Moffett, courtesy CMCA 

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland, Maine, presents the exhibition DONALD MOFFETT: NATURE CULT, SEEDED. The show, curated by former CMCA director and chief curator Suzette McAvoy, is the artist’s first exhibition in Maine, where he is a seasonal resident of North Haven Island. 

Donald Moffett (b. 1955, San Antonio, TX) emerged as both an artist and activist in the late 1980s, participating in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), as a founding member of the collective Gran Fury, and as a founding partner of BUREAU, a trans-disciplinary studio. Taking abstraction and the monochrome as evolving unfinished languages, Moffett challenges the traditional flat frame of painting through non-traditional techniques and employs new forms that serve as carriers of both personal and political meaning. Currently, Moffett is pursuing NATURE CULT, a deep study and expanding practice of how art and the environmental crisis might collide. “The intensity of a cult is called for as we turn our attention to nature and its preservation,” says the artist.

NATURE CULT, SEEDED is the latest iteration in the ongoing series. The exhibition is centered on the large-scale sculptural installation, Lot 030323/24 (the golden bough), an assemblage of dead tree limbs painted gold and bolted together to form an undead yet ethereal totem to life. In a recent interview with fellow North Haven resident architect Toshiko Mori in Domus magazine, Moffett speaks of his interest in “the tree, the fundamental unit of a forest and the web of ecology that builds out from the tree. When you mess with the tree, a system can fall apart.”

Other works in the exhibition are new wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures incorporating the form of weathered birdhouses punctured and perforated and painted in intense hues. Also included is a selection of the artist’s emblematic shaped and carved panel paintings finished in luminous epoxy resin or given a lush pelt of extruded paint, referencing various organic and bodily forms. Throughout the exhibition, the haunting sound of the now-extinct male Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird can be heard calling for a mate that will never come. At once ominous and seductive, DONALD MOFFETT: NATURE CULT, SEEDED is a clarion call to the precariousness of our planet in crisis. “I don’t think there are issues more important than nature and its health,” says the artist.

DONALD MOFFETT 

Donald Moffett’s diverse and formally innovative practice includes painting, sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, prints, and video. His work is included in over thirty public collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. Moffett has had solo exhibitions across the United States and internationally, including a major survey exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, which traveled to the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA.

His work has been included in important group shows such as Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York, NY; America is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and ICA Collection: Expanding the Field of Painting at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA. In 2022, his work was featured in the exhibition DONALD MOFFETT + NATURE CULT + THE McNAY at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Moffett is a member of the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and New York, NY, and the National Leadership Council of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, TX. He is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY, and Aspen, CO, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA. Donald Moffett divides his time between Maine, Texas, and New York City.

CMCA - Center for Maine Contemporary Art

21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841

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Let the World In Exhibition @ CMCA, Rockland, Maine - Center for Maine Contemporary Art - Curated by Tessa Greene O’Brien

Let the World In

CMCA, Rockland, Maine

Through May 5, 2024

Diana Cherbuliez 

Homemaker (6), 2017 

Worn-out Carhartt work pants, thread 

8 ½ x 12 ⅜ inch

© Diana Cherbuliez, Courtesy of the CMCA

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents Let the World In, an exhibition featuring seven artists who collectively explore the themes of openness, observation, and material integration. Guest curated by Maine artist Tessa Greene O’Brien, the exhibition is on view at CMCA through May 5, 2024.

The exhibition title, Let the World In, not only captures the essence of the exhibition but also pays homage to the eponymous National Gallery of Art exhibition in Washington, D.C., featuring Robert Rauschenberg's groundbreaking prints from the 1960s. At that time, Rauschenberg challenged the prevailing abstract expressionism by incorporating recognizable imagery and everyday materials into his art, a sentiment echoed in the diverse works on display at CMCA.

Through a variety of artistic approaches, the featured artists—Sachiko Akiyama, Wilder Alison, Leon Benn, Jordan Carey, Diana Cherbuliez, Carol Eisenberg, and Hong Hong—invite viewers to explore their interconnected existences and the interdependence of humanity. Rather than conforming to strict artistic categories, these creators break free from traditional boundaries to produce work that is both tactile and alluring.

Guest curator Tessa Greene O’Brien emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the artists' work, noting, “Awareness of social unrest carries through the work of these artists, whose work is imbued with their lived experiences & identities. Let the World In serves as a plea and a rallying call, a reminder that all of our existences are intertwined. We are interdependent as a species, and no human is an island.”

 

About the Artists:

Wilder Alison: Harmonic abstract paintings using cut, sewn & dyed wool, embedding queer theory into the act of dividing and combining.

Sachiko Akiyama: Utilizes wood, resin, and paper mache to present personal and symbolic subject matter, creating mysterious and familiar arrangements.

Leon Benn: Observes and paints surroundings, psychedelically reinterpreting them in reverberating color.

Jordan Carey: Stretches tissue paper over hand-built wooden kite forms, creating painterly depictions of the Bermudian landscape.

Diana Cherbuliez: Translates photographs of her home's construction into embroidered and appliquéd quilt squares, using well-worn Carhartts.

Carol Eisenberg: Creates fantastical color field imagery by digitally layering and manipulating photographic fragments of leaves and flowers.

Hong Hong: Initiates paper pulp paintings in giant outdoor baths, allowing dust, leaves, and airborne sediments to integrate into the finished works.

CMCA - CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART

21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841

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Ann Craven @ CMCA, Rockland - Birds We Know

Ann Craven: Birds We Know
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland
June 29 - October 13, 2019

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents a major exhibition of artist ANN CRAVEN’s paintings. The exhibition, Ann Craven: Birds We Know, is the first show of the noted artist’s work in Maine, where she has been a seasonal resident and has been painting for more than 25 years.

Ann Craven is widely known for her lushly colored, mesmerizing portraits of the moon, birds, flowers, and other images, which she revisits in serial fashion, as well as her painted bands of color, which document her process. Ann Craven says, ”My paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment, and chance, and contain a variable that’s constant and ever-changing—the moment just past.”  

Birds We Know presents a comprehensive selection of the artist’s work, and is accompanied by an illustrated, hardcover catalog with an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, founding curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and former director, Farnsworth Art Museum.

In the essay, Crosman states, “...Ann Craven’s birds, moons, trees, and her stripe and palette paintings all enforce the hard stop our mind and eye make before inexplicable paintings, paintings that affirm an inseparability of beauty, truth and virtue. This is painting at its most authentic and original, at its most memorable and tenderly remarkable.”

Ann Craven began painting in Maine in the early 1990s. First in a borrowed barn near Slab City Road in the mid-coast village of Lincolnville, then from her own barn that she converted to a studio on a farm she purchased nearby. Lincolnville and the surrounding region has harbored artists for decades, beginning in the 1950s when Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd and other New York-based artists started summering in the area. It was on Lincolnville beach, a small strip of sand anchored by The Lobster Pound restaurant, that Craven painted her first “Moon” painting in 1995. The experience, she says, “gave me my subject matter, I was literally chasing the moon.”

For Ann Craven, painting serial versions of the moon on site was a way to conflate the momentary with the constant. The moon became for her a symbol of time and memory, themes that remain the primary focus of her work. The paintings of birds soon followed, inspired by color-plates found in her Italian grandmother’s vintage ornithology books. Like the moon the birds serve as a touchstone for memory, each repetition of the image a revisiting of a moment, a recalling of loved ones.

In 2008, Ann Craven moved from Lincolnville to an historic house on the banks of the St. George River in Cushing. The property had an old garden shed that became her new studio and, importantly, a majestic purple beech tree hugging the shore. This 100-plus-year-old tree is Craven’s newest motif. “It reminded me of the moon,” she says, “because it was round and because of all the life it had seen. Families coming and going, life lived. Like the moon it’s a constant that ebbs and flows, but the opposite of the moon in that it changes with the day and becomes a silhouette against the sunset.”

Ann Craven is a diarist, each of her paintings is inscribed with the date and time of its making, and she meticulously inventories and records each year’s work. Recently she began exhibiting her extensive series of Untitled (Palettes), ranging from 1999 to present. Painting wet on wet in oils, she mixes her colors on light-duty pre-stretched canvases. “The Palettes are my indexed color inventory,” she says. “They are a way for me to hold on to what I just painted—a moon or flower or bird.”

In addition to numerous group exhibitions worldwide, Ann Craven had her first retrospective, titled TIME, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France, in 2014. Other recent major solo exhibitions include Promise (Birds for Chicago), Shane Campbell, Chicago, 2019; Sunset Moon, Karma, NY, 2018; Snowbirds, Nina Johnson, Miami, 2018; Animals 1999-2017, Southard Reid, London, 2017; Hello, Hello, Hello, Maccarone, NY, 2016, and Ann Craven, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, 2014.

Her work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art News, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The New Yorker, Frieze, among others. Ann Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and private collections worldwide.

Ann Craven: Birds We Know is made possible at CMCA with support from Max Mara, and individual donors.

CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART - CMCA
21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841
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Dan Mills @ CMCA, Rockland - Human Topographies

Dan Mills | Human Topographies 
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland
June 29 - October 13, 2019

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents a large-scale exhibition of artist DAN MILLS' work. The exhibition, Dan Mills | Human Topographies, is the first solo show of the artist’s work in Maine since he moved to the state in 2010. 

Dan Mills makes work that is full of observations about historic and current events. He conducts extensive research on topics such as current wars and conflicts, colonialism, and life expectancy by state, and creates paintings and works on paper that visualize data and information on these subjects.

Dan Mills frequently uses maps as the space to explore his ideas. He began incorporating maps into his work in the early 1990s while researching the quincentennial of what is euphemistically referred to as The First Encounter. Since then, he has explored history and colonization in paintings and collages on large roll-down school maps and in an atlas of future states, the loss of history through erasure and over-painting on maps, visualized data about current wars and conflicts in world maps, and data about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on U.S. maps.

Dan Mills has exhibited widely, with solo shows in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and at academic museums and galleries throughout the U.S. His work has been included in many group exhibitions including “Crooked Data: (Mis)Information in Contemporary Art”, University of Richmond Museums (2017); “Ideologue”, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2016); and “Dissident Futures”, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2013-14). His upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston (2020), and Museum of Art at University of New Hampshire (2020).

Dan Mills has been a frequent speaker, panelist, or interviewee at institutions including the Chicago Cultural Center, Maine Public (NPR), Public Radio International, The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University. His work has been featured in numerous publications including Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Los Angeles Times, and New Art Examiner. His book, The US Future States Atlas, was published by Perceval Press, Santa Monica, in 2009. Mills’ work is in many collections including the British Library, UCLA, Library of Congress, John T. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Union College.

Dan Mills earned a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and MFA from Northern Illinois University. He has studios in a mill building in southern Maine, and on outer Cape Cod. Dan Mills and his wife, artist Gail Skudera, live in Lewiston, where he directs the Bates College Museum of Art.

Dan Mills | Human Topographies is made possible at CMCA with support from the Becton Family Foundation. 

CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART - CMCA
21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841
cmcanow.org