Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Artists
Maine Jewish Museum • Portland, ME • mainejewishmuseum.org • May 7–June 27, 2021
Now in its 75th year, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is renowned for its contributions to American art. The seasonal Maine art residency’s alumni and faculty represent a who’s who of major artists: Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Levine, Berenice Abbott, Susan Shatter, to name a few.
For this show, Farmington, Maine-based artist Juliet Karelsen, a 1996 Skowhegan alum, has assembled 14 artists connected to the school as student and/or teacher, all sharing a Jewish heritage. Their work, diverse in subject and medium, provides an engaging aesthetic excursion.
Social realist Ben Shahn (1898–1969), who taught at Skowhegan seven times between 1954 and 1965, is represented by a hand-colored serigraph Supermarket (1957), a rendering of seven shopping carts with stained glass-like sides. His daughter Abby Shahn, who attended the school in 1959 and 1961, contributes Speak No Evil, a pottery piece by Albert Pfarr covered with her bright and bold abstract markings.
Natasha Mayers, recipient of the school’s William and Marguerite Zorach scholarship in 1976, is represented by a half dozen paintings that reflect her social/political activism, as well as her singular sense of place and object. The painter is the subject of a new documentary, Natasha Mayers: An Un-Still Life.
Hang-Ups (2018), a large acrylic on canvas painting by Talia Levitt, class of 2019, presents a clothesline hung with various pieces of clothing—a bra, patterned pants—and a child’s bedsheet that features rainbows and cute horses, the arrangement disrupted by a series of red rectangles that run across the surface. It’s a tour de force of pattern and color.
Karelsen’s Pedestal of Poppies (Favorite Flowers Bees Like to Pollinate) (2019) made from tissue paper, embroidery floss, pipe cleaners, felt, wool fibers, wood, mirrors, LED lights, and glass, is a stunning 3D kaleidoscopic view of flowers and leaves. The piece is meant to “call attention to the beauty of the environment, its need for preservation and protection, and its highly debated future.”
Other featured artists include Alex Bradley Cohen, Lauren Cohen, Rachel Frank, Neil Goldberg, Shadi Harouni, Naomi Safran-Hon, Alex Katz, Gina Siepel, Gail Spaien, and Julianne Swartz. It’s a Skowhegan showcase of the first order.
—Carl Little