PAST EXHIBITIONS
January 23 - March 6, 2024
Anne Mourier’s exhibition While we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other examined the Feminine as it is associated with practices, qualities, and visualities that Western societies tend to devalue and even suppress, and what the implications of that value system are more broadly. Mourier, whose work often centers domestic labor frequently associated with women and uses craft techniques long undervalued in Western art history, conceived of While we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other as a collaborative site of re-thinking and re-valuation of the Feminine in an associative field of artworks, performances, and texts.
November 6 - December 6, 2023
Making is Knowing, the 2023 UMA Architecture Student show featured works made by students in the 5-year B.Arch program at UMA over the past year. This annual exhibition highlights the creativity, versatility, dedication, and professionalism of UMA's Architecture students.
August 30 - October 18, 2023
Generations: University of Maine System Artists Choose Artists paired Art faculty from the University of Maine system campuses with stellar alums from their programs. Arranged to create a visual dialogue between the works of artist-faculty and artist-alums, Generations addressed not only the person-to-person ways Art faculty in different University of Maine system Universities teach art techniques and practices, but also the ways a studio education supports artists in stepping fully into their own distinct practices, materials, and concepts.
May 6 - August 11, 2023
Ouroboros and Ostinato featured student artists Tayla Knapp and Courtney Harmon. The exhibition explored the processes of the body and the mind in both psychological and physical processes of change. Knapp’s portion of the exhibition, Ouroboros, centered metamorphosis through fluent line that bridges anatomical studies with graphic storytelling, while Harmon’s Ostinato translated the creative influence of music on the mind and psyche into three-dimensional paintings that bridge musical and visual experience through form and metaphor.
Ouroboros and Ostinato’s subjects and forms reflected circular themes of music and the body. Knapp’s work addressed the outward surreal metamorphosis of the body through life to death, while Harmon’s opened onto the creative interior workings of the mind during embodied experiences of music. Knapp’s graphic and illustrative approach, and Harmon’s circular canvases and multimedia 3D sculptural elements played on the beauty in the sometimes macabre or imperfect cycles that, in the space of the gallery, opened onto the nearly limitless creative possibilities through which our bodies and minds might circulate.
March 26 - April 26, 2023
This much-anticipated annual juried exhibition included remarkable artworks created by UMA students in Art classes this academic year.
Annie Lee-Zimerle, an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Southern Maine and the Coordinator of the Kate Cheney Chappell ‘83 Center for Book Arts, selected awards for outstanding works.
January 23 - March 8, 2023
The Art of Assemblage: Myth, Mystery and Spirituality centered upon the artistic practice of assemblage - artworks made of found objects - and questions of spirituality. It included the work of four contemporary Maine artists: Abbie Read, David Matson, Sally Wagley, and Robert Katz. The artists employed diverse approaches to assemblage, and represent different spiritual traditions. The exhibition was organized by artist and UMA Professor of Art Robert Katz, and was on view from January 23 - March 8.
October 31 - December 8, 2022
The 2022 Architecture Student Exhibition in the Charles Danforth Gallery featured the design process of students enrolled in UMA's Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) program.
UMA’s B.Arch program offers the only professional architecture degree in Maine and the only public 5-year professional degree in northern New England.
September 1 - October 14, 2022
In her debut Maine exhibition Breaking Wave, New York City-based artist Amanda Valdez exhibited new works created especially for the geometric, multi-level space of the Charles Danforth Gallery at the University of Maine at Augusta.
The exhibition’s title referenced the ways Valdez's works create and then break down linear structures with organic shapes, and also the ways curvilinear shapes spring from the strictures of the grid. Hybridizing weaving, quilting, and drawing to create textile “paintings,” Valdez’s new works intertwine the linear structure of the grid, which mirrors and symbolizes (in weaving diagrams) the warp and weft of the loom or the squares of a quilt and the architecture of the Danforth Gallery, and the organic gestures of nature and of painting.
May 6 - May 26, 2022
Each year, the Senior Thesis Exhibition demonstrates the creative achievement of UMA’s most advanced Art majors. The 2022 edition, “Start to Finish,” not only exhibited the results of three artists’ year-long efforts in drawing, painting, digital design and collage, but also their creative processes.
The practice of art is labor-intensive work entailing many hours of planning, investigation, practice, and much trial and error; this exhibition proudly presented these artists’ innovative work, and offered a glimpse into its creative genesis in the studio.
April 9 - April 29, 2022
This annual exhibition features the work of students who have taken art classes at UMA over the past year. The exhibition was juried by UMA Art faculty members, with awards chosen by a special Juror of Awards. This year's Juror of Awards was the artist and gallerist Tessa Greene O'Brien, who selected the student artists for awards this year based on their works in the show.
March 3 - April 4, 2022
Light Confirms My Reality was a community-based photo project and exhibition in collaboration with faculty and students at UMA and the Charles Danforth Gallery. The project was informed by a series of recent photographic projects by the Séan Alonzo Harris including Visual Tensions, I Am Not A Stranger and The Space Between. These projects are a proclamation of radical inclusivity, an invitation to see differently, and transform our images and perceptions of others. The photographic document serves to engage the critical issues of race and representation and to make visible the varied, full humanity and expansive beauty of black people.
January 20 - March 4, 2022
Ian Trask is a Brunswick, Maine-based artist whose practice often transforms the stuff of everyday life into poetic visual inquiries into the workaday materials and assumptions of daily life in America.
In "Point of View," Trask exhibited a selection of his "Strange Histories" 35 mm slide photocollages. The collages, made by stacking film slides to create uncanny combinations, are by turns poignant, funny, disorienting, and joyful.
Viewers wrote in response to a curated selection of Ian Trask's Strange Histories collages in the Danforth Gallery, either on notepads designed for that purpose in the physical space of the gallery, or through an online form, using the images in the gallery above as inspiration. These responsive writings from UMA's community near and far made exhibition viewers into narrators of newly invented, even strange, histories.
_tiff.png)
Nov. 10 - Dec. 17, 2021
Galen Cheney, a painter based in North Adams, Massachusetts, exhibited eleven monumental abstract paintings in the Charles Danforth Gallery at the University of Maine at Augusta. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College who earned her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Cheney’s process-driven paintings explore emotion, spirituality, and the flow of energy through an artistic process that harnesses the potential of both destruction and creation.
October 8 - November 3, 2021
Tenacity, the 2021 Architecture Student Show demonstrated the skill and grit of UMA's Architecture Students through the work they produced during the 2020-2021 school year.
August 30 - September 20, 2021
Professor Peter Precourt's exhibition of works created during his 2020-21 Trustee Professorship and Sabbatical, "Things Fall Apart” included fifteen large-scale Sumi-e in drawings. These works render the tumultuous emotional landscape of the Covid era through the extended metaphor of Yeats’ poem "The Second Coming" and through the iconography of carnival rides.
April 6 - May 6, 2021
The Outbreak Project at UMA was a collaboration with the Plunkett Poetry Festival, a much-anticipated annual event that interlinks UMA’s communities through the written word. Building on UMA’s 2020-2021 academic theme “outbreak,” considered not only in its epidemiological sense but also in relation to outbreaks of creativity and of activism, The Outbreak Project in the Danforth Gallery explored how ideas of outbreak in our time find expression in the visual arts.
March 3 - April 3, 2021
The Student Art Exhibition offers UMA students the opportunity and encouragement to exhibit their work in a professional setting, and to explore the work of their peers across courses and terms that they might not otherwise see. Most of all, the exhibition highlights and celebrates the work of UMA students completed during their coursework in the Art department. This year's students persevered to create and exhibit works that show their artistic excellence and resilience.
January 8 - February 26, 2021
This exhibition featured current work by UMA's Art & Architecture faculty. Working across a range of media and addressing a range of contemporary issues, these works demonstrated the artistic vision and versatility of UMA's dynamic faculty. Artists included Patricia Brace, Jere DeWaters, Bethany Engstrom, Amy Hinkley, Robert Katz, June Kellogg, Adam Antonio Montoya, Carter Skemp, and Eric Stark
December 7, 2020 - January 10, 2021
#MyDearMaine was an online exhibition curated via Instagram and Facebook by Danforth Gallery Intern Becky Pass. The exhibition invited artists to submit artworks related to Maine places beloved by their respective artists, who submitted their works along with statements about what they love about the places their works evoked. Nine artists exhibited their work via the Danforth Gallery's social media feeds over December and January: Patricia Brace, Brittany Turner, Mark Johnson, Marcia Stremlau, Shana Rowe Jackson, Keri Kimura, Renée Bouchard, Lydia Cassatt (whose photograph "The Dock" is reproduced above), and Jane McKenzie.
October 14 - November 20, 2020
This year’s Architecture Student Show occupied both the physical space of the Charles Danforth Gallery in UMA’s Jewett Hall and an online virtual space from October 14 to November 20. This hybrid model gave viewers physical and virtual spaces in which to consider the built worlds UMA’s students envision.
The Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Maine at Augusta is Maine’s only professional architecture program and is the only NAAB accredited five-year professional architecture degree in northern New England. In addition to teaching core values of space, scale, light, and design with intention, the program is committed to the community the program brings together, and to teaching “architecture through engagement.” UMA’s Architecture program “educates and empowers students to explore, investigate, and analyze the built environment. Engagement brings students into active contact with each other, their coursework, and community partners across Maine.”
September 2 - October 2, 2020
One of the Merriam-Webster definitions of "phantasmagoria" is "a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined." The artists who graduated in May 2020 have adopted "Phantasmagoria" as the title for their long-awaited exhibition in the Danforth Gallery, suggesting the mercurial passage between the real and surreal that many of their works explore.
Seeing the work in person marked another passage, this time from virtual to real. Viewers who experienced these artists' Virtual Exhibition in May could stand before the soft fraying of the edges of Becky Pass's paintings, the crystalline details of Shana Rowe Jackson's skyscapes, and the feathery lucidity of Jenn Messier's drawings installed on the front of an overscale papier-mâché refrigerator. Viewers gazed up at Marcea Crawford's murals, which took their intended places on the sides of campus buildings.
After months in which nearly every aspect of our lives were transformed, the exhibition Phantasmagoria reminded us of another Merriam-Webster definition for the word: "a scene that constantly changes." In the spring, these works forged from the artists’ individual experiences, artistic training, and many hundreds of hours of work in the studio turned difficulty to art. Then, these artistic achievements in diverse media found their audiences through screens. Viewable in person, Phantasmagoria transformed these artists' visions from virtual to real.
May 9 - September 2, 2020
UMA'S senior class of 2020 met the challenges of the COVID-19 era with extraordinary resilience. The virtual exhibition of their completed thesis works anticipated an exhibition in the Charles Danforth Gallery that opened Sunday, September 6, 2020 at 3:00 p.m. A virtual selection of their completed works remains on view via the link above. The artists included were Marcea Crawford, Shana Rowe Jackson, Evan Martin, Jenn Messier, and Becky Pass.
February 27 - March 27, 2020
Terra Plume, Katie St. Clair’s exhibition of new paintings at the University of Maine at Augusta’s Charles Danforth Gallery, took viewers into one of nature’s most hidden realms: the secret underworld of mushrooms that connect forest root-systems.
St. Clair's new series of works, mostly painted in early 2020 when she was an artist-in-residence at the Penland School of Craft and shown for the first time in Terra Plume, explored the complexity between the mushroom’s seen and unseen structures. “When we think of mushrooms, we think of the cap as the mushroom, but that’s actually not the organism, which moves underground...this massive, unseen, almost magical thing that’s all around us, that exists without our knowing,” St. Clair explained.
The exhibition included nearly thirty new paintings.
February 2 - 23, 2020
Kennebec Valley Art Association’s (KVAA) 14th annual Higher Forms of Art exhibition of artwork by students from area high schools was presented in partnership with the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA) at the Danforth Gallery located at Jewett Hall, 46 University Drive in Augusta.
Higher Forms of Art was on view February 2 - 23, 2020. It was the 7th year KVAA and UMA partnered to present this exhibit.
Higher Forms of Art gives emerging artists the opportunity to show their art in a professional gallery space, and offers students the experience of organizing and installing a major art exhibition.
.jpg)
November 20 - December 19, 2019
Bold, abstract, and colorful, the work of Wylie Garcia explores identity, gender, and emotional spaces. Garcia's work has appeared in both solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and she has held art residencies as far away as Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She previously showed her work in the group exhibit, "Unraveled: Contemporary New England Fiber Art," at the Old York Museum in York, Maine in 2014. Now, in Radical Softness, Garcia's first solo exhibition in Maine, the UMA Danforth Gallery showcases her sculptural dresses of rich satins and gauze, and her monumental paintings resembling textiles and tapestries.
October 10 - November 6, 2019
The Fall 2019 Student Architecture Show features the work of architecture students in the Bachelor of Architecture Program.
Student projects include design ideas across a broad spectrum of scales and contexts, as well as collaborative community projects, precedent studies, analysis of existing buildings, and thesis investigations. The exhibition is a chance for students from UMA’s Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) degree to showcase their studio, analysis, and technology work. The B.Arch program is the only five-year professional and fully accredited architecture degree program in Maine, and provides students with a path towards architectural licensure.
University of Maine MFA Exhibition
September 3 - October 2, 2019
“In the Studio As In Life” is an exhibition of current and recently graduated artists in the MFA Program in Intermedia at the University of Maine at Orono. Curated by Dr. Susan Smith, the exhibition spans media and themes to consider how individual artists’ interrogations link the studio’s explorations with contemporary life.
2019 UMA Thesis Art Student Exhibition
May 11- 31 , 2019
Graduating UMA art students shared their perspectives through art
The spring Art Thesis exhibition showcased each artists’ individuality with an array of concepts. The show explored the concept of personal narratives. The artworks included were painting, mixed media, fiber arts, graphic storytelling, graphic design, sculpture, upcycled media, wheatpaste murals, and photography. Each individual presented a body of work developed throughout the year as part of the thesis project.
The exhibiting artists were:
Kimberly Baker
Dianne Chicoine
Jenna Clifford
Marcea Crawford
Lisa Hodgkins
Jessica Morton
_edited.jpg)
March 29 - April 24, 2019
As the world shifts from gray winter to bright spring, the art students at the University of Maine at Augusta bring the Danforth Gallery to life with their creative endeavors. Open to both art and non-art majors, students submit work from various art classes throughout the year. The artwork spans a variety of media including, but not limited to, ceramics, design, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, mixed media, and sculpture.
Each submission is judged on technical execution and ideas reflecting a broad range of media and at all stages in academic development. Honorary Judge Andres A. Verzosa will select pieces for awards that are carefully crafted, thoughtfully developed and designed.
.jpg)
February 22 - March 20, 2019
Kennebec Valley Art Association’s (KVAA) 13th annual Higher Forms of Art exhibition of artwork by students from area high schools will be presented in partnership with the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA) at the Danforth Gallery located at Jewett Hall, 46 University Drive in Augusta. Higher Forms of Art is on view February 22 - March 20, 2019 and is the 6th year KVAA and UMA have partnered to present this exhibit.
Higher Forms of Art gives emerging artists the opportunity to show their art in a professional gallery space, and offers students the experience of organizing and installing a major art exhibition.
The Is of Lis
Maine artist Martha Miller collaborates with her daughter Lisbeth to make colorful, larger-than-life, mixed media paintings. Together, they tell the story of living with a traumatic brain injury.
November 13 - December 19, 2018
Artist Martha Miller from Woolwich, Maine, tells the story of her daughter, Lis, through colorful and unique multimedia paintings. Lisbeth suffered a traumatic brain injury at age six and never recovered, experiencing uncontrolled seizures, severe behavioral disturbances, verbal and memory deficits, and anxiety. Her life of love, hope, pain, desperation, anger, and beauty is depicted in Miller’s work. Miller paints pictures of her daughter at different stages – dreaming, coming out of a seizure, exploring – and incorporates the portraits with a wide variety of images, some of which are based on drawings produced by Lisbeth.
Lisbeth’s own creativity has remained strong throughout her life. The artwork that she produces after having a seizure are her attempts to communicate her experiences in that moment, even though she is not able to remember producing the work when no longer in postictal state. Miller brings these works into her own, thus collaborating with her daughter to produce the artwork.
“Lisbeth IS an artist,” Miller says, “and I believe that on a spiritual and psychic level, she and I are collaborating in this series, and that at that level she understands and has entrusted me to tell her story. She is also teaching me new and powerful ways to make images. I am learning from her seizure drawings which are a direct line to the subconscious. The paintings have become both portrait and self-portrait.”
This exhibition marks the first time that this ambitious series has been shown. The artwork literally excites and vibrate the gallery space with their awesome beauty and strength. UMA and the Danforth Gallery community are honored to bring this incredible display to light.
At the opening reception and dinner, there was a conversational panel on the topic of Art and Mental Illness featuring the Portland Arts Writer Bob Keyes, Martha Miller, Amy Stacey Curtis, and members of the UMA Mental Health and Human Services community. This event was a CAUSE Empty Bowl Event where guests were served soup and salad and took home a beautiful bowl handmade by our students Amy Bley and Justin Knaus-Tucker. All proceeds went to benefit NAMI Maine.
Eileen Gillespie, Rachel Zheng, Kristin Dillon, Heather Lyon + Frank Mauceri Five Maine artists working in painting, installation, photography, performance and computer programing – explore how their work addresses point of view.
October 4th-November 7th, 2018
The artwork provokes such questions as: does a work of art put the viewer in a unique place? Are you as an artist putting me in your shoes? Do you want me to see from a certain vantage point in order to gain perspective? Do you want to celebrate a space, person or an object differently?Eileen Gillespie’s painting has become inspired by a bird’s eye view while sitting in a plane. Rachel Zheng’s “site-specific, sculptural installation of monofilament interrupts a familiar space and draws attention to architectural specificities.” Frank Mauceri uses “the computer as a tool for stipulating procedures and constructing systems; making marks that refer to, and resist, the gestures of drawing.” Heather Lyon uses her body to probe a depth of emotion, “video and performance work to explore the ways in which we negotiate longing, loss, power, and desire within interpersonal relationships.” And Kristin Dillon explores the relationship between people and their most prized possessions, “expos[ing] truths about each person while generating more curiosity.”
from Art+Architecture who are retiring or recently retired
September 4 - 27, 2018
This exhibition is celebrating the work of Karen Adrienne, Jere DeWaters, Roger Richmond and Brooks Stoddard, who have each served the University of Maine at Augusta for decades. Although the products of their labor are quite varied: printmaking, photography, stained glass, 3-D slide shows and archaeological digs, their supreme dedication to their students is a common thread.Between them they have inspired thousands of students to see differently, craft impeccably, strive for excellence, make connections, care deeply and invest themselves wholly in their work and their communities. These four who were here from the early days have collectively made the University what it is today. Through their lives of dedication to teaching they have quite simply; made the world a better place.
A Soup and Salad Lunch to Support the Augusta Food Bank
August 9, 2018
UMA’s Danforth Gallery and the University of Maine at Augusta Student Life, in conjunction with UMA’s Augusta Community Garden and C.A.U.S.E. (Community of Artists for UMA Social Empowerment) are sponsoring Food for Thought: a soup and salad lunch to support the Augusta Food Bank. Participants in this student fundraising lunch will choose from an assortment of one-of-a-kind ceramic bowls handmade by UMA artist Amy Bley.
Once a bowl is selected the individual will use it to enjoy a gourmet lunch with other members of the UMA and greater Augusta community. When the lunch concludes, the proceeds go to the Augusta Food Bank and the bowl is participant’s to keep!“This event is all about community,” said Robert Rainey, UMA Associate Professor of Photography. “Organized by a community of UMA students and organizations to give back to the greater Augusta community in an event that celebrates community by partaking in a meal with others.”
In addition to the Food for Thought event, the UMA Augusta Community Garden is showcased on the far wall of the Danforth Gallery in an exhibit titled What Does Community Look Like? Anchored by the UMA Augusta Community Garden, ten UMA photography students explore the meaning of community and how it is expressed throughout the state of Maine. Crafting lenses of their own interpretations and diverse backgrounds, each student presents a study in photography of their chosen narrative at both the micro and macro levels. From farm to table, eating and community supported agriculture, to the inside of one’s own refrigerator and the compost heap, these students show that community exists on all kinds of levels.