Exhibitions & Events
General Information About The Art
Departments Exhibitions & Events
ART MATTERS
2008 Juried Student Art Exhibition

Department of Art
Lord Hall Galleries
University of Maine, Orono
Gallery hours: 9 to 4 weekdays
April 8 to May 2, 2008
Opening and Awards Ceremony: Friday, April 11, 2008, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Campus community, family, and friends welcome
The 2008 Juried Student Art Exhibition in the Department of Art at the University of Maine will be on view from Tuesday, April 8 to Friday, May 2 in the Lord Hall Galleries on the university campus. This splendid venue provides the opportunity for undergraduate students at all levels to exhibit their work. This year the annual juried exhibition presents over 100 works of art in a range of media. Two-dimensional work includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, collage, and design. Three-dimensional work in sculpture, design, and ceramics, as well as new media is also represented.
As in the past, approximately forty awards will be given in studio, art history and art education areas. These include scholarships, travel funds, and recognition, book, and exhibition awards to students who have excelled in their work.
The campus community, family, and friends are all welcome to attend the opening on Friday, April 11, 2008, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. At that time the annual student awards ceremony will also take place. The Student Art Exhibition opening is one of the liveliest events of the year.
Recent
past shows
JOHN
WHALLEY
February 8 - March 21, 2008

Artist Gallery Talk: February 14 5:30-6:30
Opening Reception: February 15 5:30-7
Lord Hall Galleries University of Maine
Orono, Maine
The Lord Hall Gallery on the Orono campus is open from
8-4, Monday - Friday
These events are sponsored by the Department of Art and a grant from
the Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series. All events are
free and open to the public.
Lord
Hall Galleries are handicapped accessible.
For information, contact the Department of Art at 207.581-3245
An
American realist, John Whalley, is best known for his skillfully detailed
and precise graphite drawings and still-life paintings. Whalley's
inspiration and subject matter are derived from his appreciation for
the hidden beauty he so decidedly sees in the worn, weathered and
often discarded objects that he finds near his home in Damariscotta,
Maine.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Whalley graduated
from the Rhode Island School of Design, and then traveled extensively.
In art and in life, this career artist has always sought to "discover
the beautiful in unlikely places." After spending many years
helping to establish an orphange in Sao Paolo Brazil where he and
others (including his two sons) helped nurture and teach art to abandoned
street children, who Whalley refers to as "discarded kids,"
the artist's work now incorporates 'forgotten tools,' finding the
hidden beauty in these mundane, often discarded objects.
Throughout the last thirty years Whalley's
drawings and paintings have been exhibited widely across the United
States, and his work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition
at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2001 entitled, John Whalley - American
Realist". He has also recently published a book on his own work
entitled, John Whalley, In New Light (available at the University
of Maine Bookstore, Borders, and through Whalley's website).
Whalley was recently featured on the television
show, "Bill Green's Maine"
More of Whalley's work can be viewed at www.johnwhalley.com.

Unhinged:
A Plague on both your Houses 3, ceramic by Constant Albertson,
Associate Professor of Art, University of Maine.
WHAT’S
UP . . .
A Department of Art Exhibition
WHERE: Lord Hall Gallery
University of Maine (on the Orono campus)
WHEN: October- 5–November 21, 2007
OPENING: Friday, October 12, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
The Department of Art at the University of Maine
(on the Orono campus) presents WHAT’S UP. . . an exhibition
of work by faculty and staff in the Lord Hall Gallery. This year’s
work includes ceramics, drawings, installations, mixed media, paintings,
photographs, prints, and sculptures. The exhibition presents an overview
of the creative accomplishments of studio, art education, and art
history faculty and staff.
Jefferson Goolsby, Laurie Hicks, and Nina Jerome will each give a
brief talk about their current work. Goolsby produces experimental
video and sound works that are processed for playback in a variety
of forms, from interactive installation to screen-based playback.
Laurie Hicks, who has traveled extensively in the past year, says,
“my photographs are part of an ongoing project that documents
the particulars or details of specific places. They are in essence
‘tourist photographs’ that focus our attention on how
visual details are critical to our memories of the places we visit
or pass through as tourists.”
Nina Jerome’s new paintings, a series about Borestone Mountain
near Monson, Maine, "explore panorama with shift in point of
view, as well as personal ideas about depicting landscape structure."
The opening will be held on Friday, October 12 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.
The campus community and public are invited. Exhibition dates are
October 5 to November 19. Gallery hours are 9 to 4pm weekdays in Lord
Hall on the Orono campus. On the Saturday of Homecoming Weekend, October
13, the gallery will also be open from 10 am to 3 pm.
A Semblance of Resemblance:
art
and the nature of the image
June 18th - August 3, 2007 - Gallery hours 9-4 M-F
Semblance of Resemblance brings together the
work of three Maine artists, Andy Hurtt, Owen Smith and Alan Stubbs
in a provocative new show that leads the viewer to come away with
more questions than answers. But this is just the intent of the artists
in the show. Questions such as, what is art?, how is art made?, what
is art made from?, why is art important and how does it relate to
other parts of life?, what is meaning and how is it "made"?,
how do we understand what the artist is saying?, and what is the role
of the viewer in the interpretation of the artwork?

What
is interesting about the selection of these three artists is that
even though they ask many of the same questions they are in no way
uniform in their approach or interests. Andy Hurtt has included some
20 digital photographic prints that are from a series in which he
seeks to explore the basis of images and how we create or assign meaning.
These large colorful images are layered with semi-translucent words
playing with the nature of the visual and the verbal as they "hide"
and "reveal" the potential meanings of what we see. Alan
Stubbs, a perceptual psychologist by training, has 10 photographic
images that play with our senses. Our disquieted familiarly acts to
draw the viewer in, wondering what it is that we are looking at, something
that we recognize, but can't really make out. The images seem abstract,
but simultaneously photographically real and we are left to question
what it is that we are perceiving. The third artist in the exhibition,
Owen Smith, is represented by a wide variety of media types - painting,
sculpture, digital print, video and net art. Although his work seems
at first to be so widely varied in media it might be hard to understand,
what is key is that it is ultimately not the media that is central
but how the media is used to ask questions about art and art making.
Ultimately the art is united by it's ideas and the questions it asks
rather than by the media in which it is made. So the specific media
utilized in the work is not just a given based on the artist's habitual
choice of materials, but is central to the meaning Smith is exploring
and thus varies as he considers different ideas or topics.

The wide variety of work in the show offers
multiple investigations initiated by the artists but left for us to
ponder. A rich feast for the eye and mind, and a trip well worth taking
to the Lord Hall Gallery on the University of Maine Campus.
The
exhibition is open Monday through Friday 9-4 through August 3, 2007.

Past Exhibitions & Events
General Information About The Art Departments
Exhibitions & Events
In addition to the wide range of
exhibitions in which individual faculty and students participate each
year, the Department of Art sponsors several annual exhibitions in
cooperation with the University of Maine Museum of Art.
Faculty: On an annual basis,
Department of Art faculty participate in The Annual Faculty Exhibition.
The work reflects the
most current concerns of faculty and represents the clearly diverse
forms of creative activity in which they engage. The exhibitions
are
held in the Carnegie Hall galleries of the University of Maine Museum of
Art.
Students: A major event in the
Department of Art, the Annual Student Juried Exhibition provides an
opportunity for students to show the work that has evolved out of their
learning experiences. The exhibition is central to the sense of
community for which the Department is known. Usually held in
April, the Student Exhibition is highly competitive, with 75 - 90 works
selected from the several hundred which are submitted. Those not
selected are often displayed by the Student Art League in a Salon des
Refuses, in the student area of Carnegie Hall. These experiences
are critical to students. They have an opportunity to
experience, in a controlled situation, the process of being a practicing
artist: submitting their work for exhibition, having the work juried and
either accepted or rejected and participating in an opening
reception. In addition, student artwork is exhibited around
campus, in places such as the Graphics, Hole-in-the-Wall and Hauck
Galleries, the Memorial Union Coffee Shop and throughout the local
community in restaurants and stores.