Lord Hall Gallery

The University of Maine Intermedia MFA program is pleased to announce the 9th annual With Out Borders Festival and Thesis Exhibition titled "Making Matters," which begins August 10, 2012 and runs through September 28, 2012.  The opening reception is planned for September 7, 2012 from 5:00 - 7:30 pm at the Lord Hall Gallery.  This exhibition features the culmination of research and creative practices of ten graduating MFA students. For more information on the With Out Borders Festival or on the individual artists represented in this show please visit: http://www.withoutbordersfest.org/2012/.

The Masters of Fine Arts in Intermedia at the University of Maine provides substantial advanced study for individuals interested in interdisciplinary study in the arts. The program emphasizes intensive development of students’ creative and innovative abilities through a diverse engagement with multiple research processes, critical thinking skills and creative production tools and technologies.

Beginning in 2004, w/o borders festival has brought together graduate students and professional artists from around the world. This year, the festival is comprised solely of students – representing a wide range of media and material. The 2012 graduating class includes Carol Ayoob, Sarah Cotrell, Gabriella D’Italia, Resse Inman, Kat Johnson, Jessica Moulton, Heather Small, Dennis St. Pierre, and Pieter Tryzelaar.

For contemporary artists the question of the nature of experience, whether it is grounded in a concern for moral, ethical, social, aesthetic, or economic issues drives their engagement in a wide variety of media and topics. This exhibition includes intermedial work that engages with elements as diverse as food, economics, gender, technology, housing, philosophy, spirituality, identity, memory, and health. The choice of materials by these artists and performers suggest, and even calls for, a direct participation, seeking to engage the public in new ways to transform their perceptions and thoughts. The creative producers included in Making Matters come from a variety of backgrounds: community building, painting, fabric design, performance, culinary arts, graphic design, computer technology, acting,
book-making, and farming, but all engage a territory of fluid, process-based action and reflection and seek to establish a means of working and living that gives meaning to their lives and the lives of others. The aims of this work is to get us to think and act in the new spaces and roles in which we find ourselves in the changing world of the 21st century.

For more information of the Intermedia Program please visit:

www.intermediamfa.org

For more information on the With Out Borders Festival or on the individual artists represented in this show please visit:

http://www.withoutbordersfest.org/2012/.

For more information, please contact Kat Johnson kristin.l.johnson@umit.maine.edu.

May 24, 2012 - July 20, 2012

Art of the 80s, represents a wide spectrum of American art created in the 1980s. Featuring images on paper, the show includes works by Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Louisa Chase, Chuck Close, Sol Lewitt, Susan Rothenberg, Mimmo Paladino, Elizabeth Murray, Gregory Amenoff, Nancy Graves, Charles Garabedian, Judy Pfaff and Robert Rauschenberg. With works from the University of Maine Museum of Art collection, the exhibition was curated to coordinate with the upcoming Poetry of the 1980s conference to be held on the UM campus, June 27-July 1. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Department of Art, the University of Maine Museum of Art and the National Poetry Foundation.   

Drawing On, held, October 12 – November 18, 2011, an exhibition of drawings by eight Maine artists, presented work drawn directly on the walls of the Lord Hall Gallery. Working over the course of two weeks, the artists created an environment of unique but temporary drawings that focused on the immediacy of the drawing process as well as the impermanent nature of artistic forms. 

The artists in Drawing On included David Allen, Kathleen Florance, Susan Groce, Orson Horchler, Reese Inman, Nina Jerome, James Linehan, and Ed Nadeau.

This exhibition was part of Where to Draw the Line: The Maine Drawing Project, a statewide visual arts initiative, developed by the Maine Curators Group, which represents a unique collaboration between Maine’s arts organizations. During 2011, museums and galleries across the state offered exhibitions that focused on the process of drawing and how artists use it as a vehicle for creating diverse forms of visual expression.