2018 Portland Museum of Art Biennial
When Jessica May joined the Portland Museum of Art in 2013 as its first full-time curator of contemporary art, the biennial became her responsibility. As sole juror of the 2013 show, May chose 28 artists from around 900 submissions. In 2015 the museum shifted from open call to a curated format, with Alison Ferris, then curator of the Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, selecting the work. Despite some controversy, Ferris nailed the assignment, assembling a ground-breaking cross-section of Maine art.
The museum went the same route for the 2018 edition, hiring Nat May (no relation to Jessica May), former executive director of Space Gallery in Portland, to do the honors. It was an inspired choice: May is one of the most knowledgeable surveyors of Maine’s art scene. He recruited PMA director Mark Bessire, artist and Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance co-founder Theresa Secord and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture co-director Sarah Workneh to help him choose and set one significant criterion: artists would have no previous connection to the museum.
The final roster is an impressive mix of 25 artists working in a range of mediums. One might start with photographer Rosamond Purcell. Known for her haunting images of everything from natural history specimens to the innards of an Owl’s Head junkyard, for the PMA Biennial, Purcell presents No Parachutes to Save Them, an assemblage of collages, photographs and personal objects that pay tribute to soldiers in World War I.
Another brilliant photographer, Séan Alonzo Harris is showing several black-and-white digital archive prints from his Kennedy Park series. Harris captures the energy and beauty of a shirtless black man playing basketball in this section of Portland that is the most diverse neighborhood in Maine.
Painter David Driskell, the distinguished documenter of African-American art, has a connection to Maine dating back to when he attended the Skowhegan School in the late 1940s. Four of his signature collage and encaustic pieces are on view, including an homage to jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.
Like the 2015 edition, this biennial features several Native American artists. The late Passamaquoddy artist David Moses Bridges (1962-2017) collaborated with Steve Cayard to produce a graceful 14-foot-long canoe made from white cedar, rock maple and red spruce. Maliseet Fred Tomah’s classic brown ash Katahdin Arctic Butterfly Basket, an example of which is owned by the Smithsonian, honors an endangered butterfly found only on the state’s tallest mountain.
Descended from both indigenous (Ojibwe-Lakota) and colonial Americans, Gina Adams, a 2002 Maine College of Art graduate, started making broken treaty quilts in 2014. She sews excerpts from American Indian treaties onto antique quilts using calico letters and cotton thread, the words and the sentences nearly illegible like the accords themselves. During the show, Adams will read from the treaties while wrapped in the corresponding quilt.
Nancy Andrews’ 36-minute video On a Phantom Limb, 2009, which is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, reflects the artist’s near-death experience and following delirium. Andrews, who teaches at College of the Atlantic, works in montage; here, her sources include World War II-era archival footage of a workshop for prosthetic limbs.
Other highlights of the biennial include Daniel Minter’s installation A Distant Holla, which was first displayed last year in Portland’s Abyssinian Meeting House; a group of DM Witman’s salted paper photographs of climate change-impacted mountain tops taken from satellite images; ceramic pieces by Tim Christensen and Jonathan Mess; Angela Dufresne’s oil portrait of artist Elizabeth Tubergen wearing an “Eat Pussy for Mental Health” t-shirt; four charcoal drawings by Shaun Leonardo based on video clips of the Tamir Rice and Laquan McDonald killings; and Elizabeth Atterbury’s installation Calligraphy, a collection of objects that reference the artist’s motherhood and Chinese heritage.
The PMA Biennial is supported by a bequest from the painter William Thon and his wife Helen, who lived in Port Clyde. The fruit of their legacy is especially diverse and provocative this time around.
Images: Left: Séan Alonzo Harris, Kennedy Park Series, Plate #334, 2017, black and white digital archive print, 35 ½ x 23 ½”. © Séan Alonzo Harris. Top Center: DM Witman, Melt N45 W68-1, 2015, unfixed salted paper photograph from satellite image, 11 1/5 x 21 ½”. © DM Witman. Bottom Center: David Moses Bridges and Steve Cayard, Canoe, 2013, white cedar, rock maple and red spruce, 11 ½” x 14′. © David Moses Bridges and Steve Cayard. Courtesy of Abbe Museum. Right: Angela Dufresne, Elizabeth Tubergen – Eat Pussy for Mental Health, 2017, oil on canvas, 93 x 54″. Courtesy of the artist. © Angela Dufresne. Photo by Luc Demers.