Alison Hildreth: Fifty Years; Late Summer: Alison Hildreth Prints and Drawings; Darkness Visible
Speedwell Projects, Portland, ME, speedwellprojects.com, Through December 22, 2023 • New Era Gallery, Vinalhaven, ME, neweragallery.com, Through October 11, 2023 • Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME, cmcanow.org, September 30, 2023–January 7, 2024
Since she started showing her work in the 1970s, Alison Hildreth has never ceased to add admirers to her ever-compelling work—and to play a key role in Maine’s art scene as artist and advocate. Practicing in a range of mediums, including oil, ink, and various printmaking methods, Hildreth creates a universe where bats fill the evening sky, maps lead to new ancient lands, and beekeepers enact mysteries.
This fall, all the stops are being pulled out to celebrate Hildreth and her contributions to the art world. Each of three Maine venues is showing different aspects of her oeuvre with some overlap.
Speedwell Projects in Portland, where the artist maintains a space in the Bakery Studios, offers a mini-retrospective, including two self-portraits from 1976. In one, the painter looks squarely at us with a serious expression; in the other, more abstract rendering, she stands at her easel painting. These paintings and some others in the show have never been exhibited before.
Another painting in the Speedwell show, Beekeepers, features a fantastic vision of what might be a cave where Brueghel-like beehives frame a puppet show run by eleven disembodied blue hands. Black shapes are suspended by thin strips of paper with words on them. The whole scene has a Dante-esque feel to it.
New Era Gallery on Vinalhaven, an island Hildreth has frequented for decades, will present a group of twenty or so prints and drawings.
Several pieces feature one of her signature subjects, the bat. In her hands, this nocturnal mammal emerges in mid-flight, its wings broad and arched in air—the essence of motion.
Other standouts in the New Era show are a lovely rendering of a dogwood blossom and two of Hildreth’s map works. Red Fort is an arrangement of coordinates and twisting arrowed lines superimposed on imaginary terrain while East features a molecular diagram set atop what look like plans for a fortress town and elaborate landscaped domains from an earlier century.
At the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Hildreth is showing two bodies of work from recent, ongoing series. One of them features large aerial views of the earth painted on gampi paper made from the inner bark of a Japanese shrub. Hildreth studied landscape architecture in college and has never escaped, she writes in a statement for the show, “the idea of some form of map making.”
The other series reflects Hildreth’s fascination with the images arriving from the James Webb space telescope, photographs, she writes, of a “universe that we are a part of, a small blue planet in a vast and gorgeous and dangerous place.” Her oil paintings conjure the tumultuous edges of outer space and reflect her interest in “the complexity of life on earth and the relationships we have with the ecology of the planet.”
Speedwell has recruited photographer and writer Smith Galtney to produce a documentary about Hildreth that will be shown during the exhibition. Additional special events are planned for the Portland Museum of Art and the Portland Public Library where Hildreth’s large-scale installation The Feathered Hand is on permanent display.
Suspended in the atrium The Feathered Hand is comprised of glass and plastic puppets, lenses, metal wire, sand, insects, and carborundum. The piece, which Hildreth says was inspired by her long-term interest in puppets, takes its name from a poem by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, “Chosen by the Stars,” which ends with the lines, “When he [the poet] has fallen all the way / he kicks with his legs / hangs for a moment / waving his feathered hand.”
“We believe that Alison Hildreth is a national treasure,” reads the Speedwell press release. On the basis of these three shows, that estimation rings true.
— Carl Little