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288.5015 ext. 318
105 Eden Street, Bar Harbor - North Entrance
Use outside stairs or enter at McCormick Lecture Hall for elevator and inside stairway.
Summer hours:
Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 am to 4:00 pm
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Talit Kitan by Bob Gottlieb |
Winter hours:
Monday through Friday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm
College of the Atlantic's Ethel H. Blum gallery offers students at the college along with the larger community of downeast Maine, the opportunity of viewing a wide range of contemporary and classic art.
The gallery presents about 16 shows each year. Recent exhibits have included Paul Gauguin watercolors, found-art sculptures by Maine artist Wally Warren, drawings by Heidi Fasnacht, and the work of students and faculty.
Because the Blum Gallery is the only year-round gallery on Mount Desert Island, it serves a vast community of artists and art lovers. Come summer, visitors from around the world can be found at gallery exhibits. For them and for COA students, its purpose is to delight, inspire and challenge through the fundamental insights and wide-ranging connections that makes art an essential expression of human ecology.
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Located on the second floor of the Gates Community Center, the gallery was dedicated in 1993 to Ethel H. Blum (1900-1991), an accomplished watercolorist who exhibited widely in her lifetime and studied at the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Mrs. Blum was a longtime summer resident of Mount Desert Island and a great friend to College of the Atlantic.
Clyde Butcher: America's National Parks: A Monumental Vision
July 6 through July 31
 From the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to the Rocky Mountains, to the woodlands of the Chesapeake region and the wetlands of Florida, Clyde Butcher has been photographing America's most beautiful and complex ecosystems for over 30 years. In the tradition of Ansel Adams, artist and environmentalist Clyde Butcher creates large scale black and white contact prints of exquisite clarity and luminosity. He has said, "I want to show people that there is a unity between all undisturbed natural places, whether the peak of a renowned mountain range, or a stream-bed in an urban watershed. My hope is to educate and inspire . . . to let people know our land is a special place, and the way we take care of it determines the future qualify of life for our society."
Sam Van Aken: Eden
August 10 through September 6
Artist Sam Van Aken is creating an Eden in the Blum Gallery. This installation floats somewhere within the biblical parable of the lost paradise, a Do-It-Yourself garage project and a science fiction fantasy. Find living combinations of fruits and vegetables inside the gallery, and a farm stand outside. Sam Van Aken teaches at Syracuse University. He is the 2008 Maine Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellow of the Year.
Local alumni, and those from further away, have gathered together to mount an Earth Day alumni show as a tribute to longtime faculty member in art, JoAnne Carpenter, who retires this year. Among the artists are Lelania Avila '92, Alana Beard '03, Jennifer Beckman, Emily Bracale '90, Tawanda Chabikwa '07, Matt Drennan, Bianka Fuksman, Abby Goodyear '81, Noreen Hogan '91, Julianne Kearney '06, Jude Lamb '00, Ondine Owens, Dina Petrillo '89, Barbara Sassaman '78, David Vickery '89 and Sam Wustner '04.
A celebration of Kathryn Davis, the artist. A humanitarian, philanthropist, educator and COA benefactor, Davis has recently begun painting. Her vivid landscapes and still lifes reflect the joy with which she has approached her life. For more on the artist, read our press release, or view the film posted on her website: 100 Projects for Peace.
In the age before the introduction of photography, explorer-artists formed an essential part of exploratory expeditions. These traveling artists recorded new landscapes, documented new species and provided vicarious glimpses of newly "discovered" or colonized areas to the people of their home countries. On a Watson Fellowship, Drummond undertook her own "voyage of discovery," seeking out areas important to different expeditions and creating her own artwork in the same places. The show includes 27 paintings plus some sketch books.
Speaking of Cloth," an exhibit by Jeanne Seronde Perkins and Shira Singer of Bar Harbor and Leanne Nickon of Bass Harbor, showing individual and collaborative work, both wearable art and abstract wall hangings, all created on fabric with a variety of surface design techniques. Individually, the three professional artists, have been using color on cloth for upwards of 15 years, displaying their work at local galleries and craft shows. But it has only been in the past year that the three friends began meeting regularly to share techniques and try new materials. When the artists have returned to their studios after these sessions, they not only carried new ideas, but often challenges that blurred the lines between their accustomed styles. In one experiment, each left the session with a piece of fabric another artist had made and deemed a failure, altering it to give it new life. In another, they chose some common phrases relating to fabric as a theme, creating individual pieces exploring those themes.
Works from August Heckscher's Press at High Loft, as well as three silkscreens by Richard Estes, lithographs from Ashley Bryan and monotypes by Susan Lerner. Writes curator Philip Heckscher of his father, "Heckscher's work at High Loft always drew from the deep reservoir of energy and creative production on the island. In the process it built networks and friendships among many people who had never before worked together, united by the archaic but deeply engaging process of building a book piece by piece - setting text in lead, letter by letter; locking text and illustrations into heavy forms spaced with pieces of wood; selecting fine handmade papers that brought out the quality of the text; running sheets by hand through one of the three High Loft presses, turning the cylinder and seeing appear as if by magic a completed page at the end of the run; cutting and sewing the sheets into their final form."
Through heightened color and a distillation of real-life imagery, JoAnne Carpenter transforms the real into the surreal, the natural into the iconic. Carpenter, who has taught art and art history at College of the Atlantic since 1973, uses classical technique, applying layer upon layer of thin, opaque paint to build richly realized, beautifully colored and deeply felt paintings.
From a formal perspective, Pullman's panoramic photos reveal the elegant
modular architecture of greenhouses. Their gridded structures allow us to see serial compositions which would not be revealed in an undivided space. Thematically, Pullman reflects her deep affinity for plants as they seek the light and respond to the ebb and flow of the seasons. She depicts the greenhouse as a temple of light, modulating the energy of the sun, a fragile, potent environment which mirrors our own condition of life on planet Earth.
Sculptor Barbara Andrus magically transforms the Blum Gallery in response to the evocative life of trees in winter. Their elegant white-clad presence is not frozen, but reaches upward toward the sky and down toward the chthonic dark earth, always moving in the dance of life.
Sewing Trees, detail of work in progress by Barbara Andrus
 This is the season of dark, a time when nature beds down beneath a blanket of snow, moss and leaves. Local artists are celebrating this time with several installations including a bed of birch moss and gilded leaves by Susan Lerner. Other artists include Kathleen Bowman, Melita Brecher, Marcy MacKinnon, Jeanne Perkins, Sydney Roberts, Shira Singer and Carol Schutt, who offers an altered, antiwar version of the popular children's book Goodnight Moon.
Chthonic Dreams by Susan Lerner
Artist, dancer and man of great heart, Tawanda Chabikwa's exhibit of mixed-media paintings and sculpture reflect a broad sense of the African diaspora and his own response to being between many worlds. A Zimbabwean, Chabikwa has spent the last six years away from home, studying first in China and now at College of the Atlantic. But his connection to his home remains strong. In 2004, he launched a nonprofit to fund tuition for AIDS orphans in his ancestral home. Already, ten orphans are in school thanks to this 20-year-old student. Proceeds from this show, and from the 7 p.m. dance concert that follows the opening on November 5, hopefully will fund more students.
"Not Her Alone," Mixed media by Tawanda Chabikwa.
Featuring the work of regional artists who explore our experience of the natural world by creating sculpture out of earth materials. These sculptures, including the fluke by Cabot Lyford, help create space to meditate on the spirit of sea, sky and garden. "People are a part of nature," says co-curator June LaCombe. "This exhibit is about how we bring nature into our lives to nurture us, how we are a part of the outside world." Adds gallery director Susan Lerner, "The sculpture invites us to explore our relationship with nature, to value it in new ways."
 Sometimes change is a matter of vision - which is why art is essential in our lives. When Peace Action Maine wanted to imagine a Maine economy not based on war, it asked artists for help.
The result is "War Flowers," artists' visions of alternatives to war. This touring exhibit comes to COA through Peace Action Maine and the Union of Maine Visual Artists. Organized by Natasha Mayers, artist-in-residence at Peace Action Maine, the exhibit includes work by Mayers, her son Noah Apple Mayers, Abby Shahn, Robert Shetterly, Katherine Porter, Kathy Bradford, Patricia Wheeler, Lori Austill, Rebecca McCall, Cathy Melio, Ken Bryant, Carolyn Cauldwell, Kenny Cole, Lynne Harwood, Pat Owen, Gary Pierre, Scott Small, Lesia Sochor, John Purrington, Julie Vohs and Matt Welch.
Make Bread not Bombs, by Patricia Wheeler
Ernest McMullen doesn't merely paint Mount Desert Island, he seems to embody it on his canvases, bringing the massive rocks and dappled light of a summer's day right into the room, giving the viewer the sense of hovering over Otter Cliffs or treading carefully on the rocks at the edge of Ocean Drive. Art historian John Wilmerding, professor of American Art at Princeton University, a visiting curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a trustee of College of the Atlantic, is so impressed with McMullen's distinctive sensitivity to the landscape that he calls the artist the "Painter Laureate of Mount Desert Island" in his catalog essay accompanying the show.
Early maps, posters, broadsides, ledgers, letters, wooden signs, handblown glass bottles, oyster crocks and Soderholtz pots tell a special story of the life of villagers of Mount Desert Island of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Local historian Raymond Strout, who as a Bar Harbor schoolboy became fascinated with collecting "ordinary" objects from the past, reveals how eloquent simple objects and papers become over time.
Ten large bronze pieces by renowned environmental sculptor Steve Tobin are on extended loan on the grounds of College of the Atlantic. Among them is "Bonewall" about which critic Donald Kuspit writes, "Few are able to unite [the life instinct and the death instinct] the way Tobin does."
Speaking of his sculptures, Kuspit adds, "They embody the idea of the fundamental itself, of archetypal creative process, which gives birth to life that seems like a sacred art, and art that is as sacred as life."
Tobin was recently featured in the Smithsonian Magazine.
What is our response to the land we live on? How do we see a road, a home, a community, and ourselves within it? These basic questions were some of the ones examined by an intensive COA class focused on place-based art., "In and Out of Place: Visualizing Geographies" was the result of their term-long investigation into the art and geography of landscape, real and imagined, personal and collective.
By filming women within destruction, Women on War asks basic questions about life and about women. As co-curator Anne Zill
 says, war is about killing and so much more. Beyond the basic facts of survival come the issues of "wounds, hurt, fear, grief, loss, looting, and above all change: flattened buildings, butchered landscapes, fractured visions and crumpled futures for women, men and children." Among the photographers are Donna De Cesare, who photographs children of conflict in Central America, Ruth Fremson of the New York Times, Leslie Fratkin, creator of "Sarajevo Self Portrait: The View from Inside," and Maine artists Maggie Foskett of Camden, a fine arts photographer; Judith Ellis Glickman of Cape Elizabeth, known for her holocaust images; Barbara Goodbody of Cumberland Foreside, curator and photographer of "Echoes Across the Himalayas: Tibetan Children in Exile;" and Katarina Weslien, a mixed media artist living in Portland.
photo by Ruth Fremson of the New York Times
Maine's threatened and endangered wildlife never looked so colorful. Book artist Rebecca Goodale, has taken the serious theme of Maine's imperiled wildlife and presented them with dramatic flair in her handmade artist˙s books.
Goodale is a nationally-recognized book artist with more than 50 solo and group exhibitions to her credit. Bold designs and vibrant colors tend to characterize her books.
The year-long tour of "Threatened and Endangered" was organized by the Maine Women Writers Collection located at the University of New England's Westbrook College Campus in Portland, with the support of a New Century Arts and Humanities Grant from the Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Humanities Council.
Co-curated by Susan Grosjean and Susan Lerner
The tactile beauty of dyed wool, the majesty of fertility, the weathered board of the barn are all part of this exhibit highlighting the creativity of the farm. From images of Susan Grosjean's natural dyed fleece and handspun wool to sculptures made of recycled barn board and rusted farm equipment by Wally Warren and James Fangborn, the farm is the source of great inspiration here. Paper artist Richard Lee presents the installation, "Ladder to the Hayloft." Melita Westerlund and co-curator Lerner display a scarecrow fertility goddess of vegetable matter and chicken wire. Susan Merrill exhibits totemic mask and headpieces of handspun wool, Noreen Blailock offers felted books. Also showing are Joli Greene, Allison Martin '88, Dina Petrillo '89, Geri Valentine and more.
Yamojaskiss by Susan Merrill, above. Drying Yarn by Susan Grosjean, right.
 Reproductions by Guy Wolff, seldom-seen pieces by E.E. Soderholtz, & contemporary pieces by Lunaform of Sullivan, Maine.
Co-curated by garden historian Susan Tamulevich and Susan Lerner, with assistance from Patrick Chasse.
Flower pots today are so taken for granted that little thought is given to how and why they evolved. But the story of the flower pot is that of the development of horticulture. To grow an exotic like an orange tree in Britain, to sprout rare seeds and to root the stems of living plants to produce offspring identical to the parent, gardeners needed a way to control the tender new plant's immediate environment.
Possibly the first exhibition to document the history of flower pots in the United States, this show features more than 50 works, from classic Tuscan terra cotta urns to the innovative designs of Eric E. Soderholtz, whose work was so instrumental in Beatrix Farrand's designs, to the contemporary iterations by Lunaform of Maine. Potter/historian Guy Wolff will give a lecture and demonstration as part of the exhibit.
Multi-media, multi-dimensional work of two sisters, one from Finland, one from Bar Harbor, both of whom relish in the experimental and the tactile. Writes Nan Lincoln of the Bar Harbor Times, these artists, "talk about the joy they get from working with new and unlikely materials, discovering how each responds to being manipulated in unexpected ways. Each of the works shown at the Blum has a strong, 'what if?' factor that just adds to the fun. . . . The answers they come up with to those 'what ifs' are an absolute delight for those of us who would never ever imagine the questions."
Children's art from MDI schools includes refreshing selections from students in kindergarten through eighth grades from the Acadia School, Conners-Emerson, Mount Desert, Pemetic and Tremont schools. The artists are students of art teachers Kim Kramp, Carol Shutt, Phil Sattler, Sandra Irwin and Emily Bracale. Artist Ian Sampson, first grader at Conners School, took a corrugated cardboard box, restructured it, cut out figures, collaged and colorfully painted the whole box to create "Rodeo-Southwest." Sampson said of his creation, "This box would have been recycled or taken to the dump. I changed it into art. I gave it a new beginning."
Five American artists from Asian, Middle Eastern and Western traditions express complex multi-cultural realities in painting and sculpture. Artists in the show are Eyal Danieli, who divides his time between New York and Israel; Chinese calligrapher Philip Heckscher, who teaches in San Francisco and China; Nina Kuo, painter and photographer who "juxtaposes imagery from late 20th century consumer culture with allusions to East Asian and Western artistic traditions;" Wasmaa Chorbachi who creates platters and tile murals carrying Arabic calligraphy and Bob Gottlieb whose Tallitot Katanot are a modern reflection on a traditional prayer vest.
A collection of 60 photographs of motherhood on the margins of our economy curated by author and historian Rickie Solinger, featuring the images of distinguished photographers including COA alumna Amy Toensig, along with Susan Meiselas, Margaret Morton, Eli Reed, Deb Willis, Stephen Shames, Mel Rosenthal, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Joseph Rodriguez, Regina Montfort, Roland Freemand, Corky Lee, Steven Rubin, Paula Lerner, Wanda Benvenutti, Betty Press, Clarissa Sligh, Donna Ferrato, and Lauri Lyons.
 Watercolors, woodcuts and sketches of Gauguin's Tahiti, on loan through an anonymous benefactor, along with excerpts from the journals of Gauguin (1848-1903). According to the Maine Times, "How appropriate to see inquiries about right living and artistic musings on the questions of where we are going raised during a Bar Harbor summer, in a setting where rusticators once sought simple living and where college students now explore issues of right living. Ultimately, this show of Gauguin's work reminds us of how much we are indebted to the artist for shaping our vision."
 Artists have been coming to Mount Desert Island to live in nature and paint the harmonious natural landscape here since the 1830s. Their paintings of the pristine island paradise served as a kind of advertisement, attracting visitors from the industrial cities of the northeast to this island where the mountains come down to the sea. Many wealthy residents of New York, Boston and Philadelphia traveled to Mount Desert Island, building lavish mansions and spending the summer enjoying each others' company on the island's rocky coast and atop its mountains. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, with its emphasis on landscape painting, continues to produce first-rate painters who bring contemporary perspectives to the sublime landscapes of Mount Desert.
Curated by Farrand expert and landscape historian at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Eleanor M. McPeck
Through a collection of rare, unpublished drawings, photographs, specimens and memorabilia, "The Reef Point Legacy" exhibit traces the development of Farrand's work on Mount Desert Island from 1897 to 1950. Farrand's achievement as the finest woman landscape architect of her generation is intimately related to her experience as a long-time resident of Reef Point on Mount Desert Island. She was 18 when she observed the laying out of her family's summer place at Reef Point in Bar Harbor. After her marriage to Max Farrand in 1913, Reef Point became her principal office and home and later the site of one of the most ambitious projects of her professional life. Conceived originally for both scholarly and experimental purposes, Farrand thought that Reef Point would provide a major center for the study of northeastern New England flora. Reef Point ultimately included a test garden of native plants, a rare collection of heaths and heathers, a perennial garden and a library.
Carved and painted wooden and canvas masks from the Makishi dancers, members of the Luvale tribe, now living in Victoria falls, Zimbabwe. Many of the exhibited masks are used in the circumcision ceremonies that mark a Luvale boy's passage into manhood. Says curator Muntanga, "during the ceremonies, the boys are told about the meaning of the masks, and the characters they represent. Toward the end of the ceremonies, the boys make their own masks and perform a ceremonial dance. This exhibition is a way to express myself through the rich culture of my homeland." The exhibit also serves as experience for Muntanga, who plans to return home to Zimbabwe to launch a cultural center for the tribal people of his homeland.
Wally Warren's found object sculptures turn broken machines and computer parts into glorious cityscapes. Writes Art New England: "Wally Warren is the ultimate sleight-of-hand artist, turning the discarded remnants of our lives into surprising, engaging sculptures in which the heel of a high-heeled shoe becomes the nose of a mask and cigarette lighters turn into skyscrapers. . . . While Warren offers a brooding environmental and social message, there's another thread running through his work, that of transformation. In Wally's World, waste turns into wonder."
Artists have had a timeless attraction to water's evocative properties. Water's expansiveness and formlessness, its capacity to change, modify and circulate, have inspired a surprising range of aesthetic responses in different media. Watermarks features the work of six contemporary artists who investigate and navigate water's prosaic and poetic dimensions. Curated by Patricia Phillips of SUNY-New Paltz, executive director of Art Journal, with Heide Fasnacht, Hope Sandrow, Karen Shaw, Arlene Shechet, Alan Wexler, and Frances Whitehead.
Each spring, the Blum Gallery is devoted to showing the work of our graduating seniors, many of whom create a visual component to complement their written project.
Oil paintings by Carrie Downing based on candid shots of her community of friends and family.
Ashley Bryan
Lois Dodd
Richard Estes
Yvonne Jacquette
Alan Magee
John Marin
William Thon
Amy Toensing
Jamie Wyeth
The Blum Gallery is at the heart of a campus teeming with art and art activities:
Through workshops with professionals like Clair Gerhard, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, students, community members and the wider Maine community, come to the college to study aspects of curating and exhibit preparation.
Students, faculty, community members and others have the opportunity to display their work and, on occasion, curate shows.
The Blum Artist Series brings visiting artists to campus, including Lily Yeh of the Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, Heike Strelow, German environmental art curator, eco artists Jackie Brookner of NYC and Susan Steinman of CA, Cuban artist David Mateo and Cuban art critic Arturo Montoto.
Collaborations with participants in environmental art efforts such as LandEscapes brings installations of floating sculptures and wild scarecrows to campus and the region.
The Blum Gallery also hosts poetry readings, book signings and other art events.
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Alumni Art Show: A Tribute to JoAnne Carpenter
In the age before the introduction of photography, explorer-artists formed an essential part of exploratory expeditions. These traveling artists recorded new landscapes, documented new species and provided vicarious glimpses of newly "discovered" or colonized areas to the people of their home countries. On a Watson Fellowship, Drummond undertook her own "voyage of discovery," seeking out areas important to different expeditions and creating her own artwork in the same places. The show includes 27 paintings plus some sketch books.
Prints and Letter Press Printing on Mount Desert Island
modular architecture of greenhouses. Their gridded structures allow us to see serial compositions which would not be revealed in an undivided space. Thematically, Pullman reflects her deep affinity for plants as they seek the light and respond to the ebb and flow of the seasons. She depicts the greenhouse as a temple of light, modulating the energy of the sun, a fragile, potent environment which mirrors our own condition of life on planet Earth. 
In and Out of Place: Visualizing Geographies
Threatened and Endangered: A Traveling Exhibition of Artist's Books by Rebecca Goodale
New Beginnings: The Art of Children
