Fiore at 100: Maine Observed
Maine Art Gallery, Wiscasset, ME • maineartgallerywiscasset.org • Through August 24, 2025
While at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, as student and then teacher, painter Joseph Fiore (1925–2008) worked with, and alongside, the likes of Josef Albers, Willem De Kooning and Ilya Bolotowsky. As art scholar Mary Emma Harris has noted, there was an expectation at the college to be abstract, a directive Fiore respected but also rebelled against over a creative lifetime.
Curated by watercolorist David Dewey, a former Fiore student, this exhibition highlights the painter’s transition from abstraction to representation—and back again, often overlapping. Arriving in Maine with his family in 1959, the painter shifted to a realist mode. As it has for so many artists before and after him, the landscape cast an irresistible spell.
Fiore wasted little time responding to the tidal reaches and rock-bound edge of the Gulf of Maine, setting up his easel in front of various coastal prospects. He also looked inland, to orchards, hay fields and a view of distant Mount Katahdin. As art historian Susan Danly observed in the monograph Nature Observed: The Landscapes of Joseph Fiore, “The big theatre of nature rather than the indoor drama of the art world held Fiore’s attention and affection.”
Later in life, Fiore embraced his earlier abstract leanings. “Conflating time, observation, and memory,” states arts writer Suzette McAvoy in the exhibition catalogue, “these late works, like the sonorous Sounds of the Mountain, 1985, and Megunticook, 1987, reflect on the symbiotic relationship between the earth and humankind.” The latter painting offers four landscapes in one, riffing on the mid-coast Maine lake and mountain in different seasons.
“It is like a journey laid out in visual shorthand,” Danly has written.
Fiore was an active member of the nonprofit Maine Art Gallery in the 1960s and ‘70s. In celebration of the hundredth year of his birth, the gallery is partnering with Maine Farmland Trust, which was gifted a significant portion of his estate in honor of its work to preserve Maine farms. Fiore at 100: Maine Observed is an overdue—and most welcome—survey, making a powerful case for revisiting and admiring anew this artist’s remarkable work.
— Carl Little