Professor Eric Stark is an artist and architect who has taught at UMA for 20 years, building UMA’s Architecture program into a five-year accredited degree that graduates design professionals each year who shape the physical and conceptual landscape of Maine and beyond.

In the past decade, Professor Stark has become a highly skilled and sought-after basket weaver, bringing his profound understanding of design and structure together with practicing a craft that marries tradition, function, history, concept, aesthetic, and ecology.

Teaching and learning are at the core of Professor Stark’s life and work as a design professional. During his 2024-25 sabbatical, he demonstrated his love of teaching by becoming a student, studying his chosen artistic medium, basket weaving, under a remarkable community of fellow maker-teachers who this exhibition highlights.

Eric Stark: A Sabbatical Year Through Weaving is organized around creative processes of teaching and learning and Professor Stark’s original sculptural baskets. Three sections: Learning from Others; Learning from Making; and Learning from Materials offer insight into the ways Professor Stark’s practice of weaving evolved over his sabbatical through the revolutionary intellectual and creative practice of learning.