University of New England Art Galleries
Portland and Biddeford Campuses
The University of New England will mount four exhibitions in two different locations in conjunction with the Maine Photo Project
Portland Campus UNE Art Gallery
A Gateless Garden: With Quotes by Maine Women Writers
January 20, 2015-April 12, 2015
A Gateless Garden features quotations from the published works of Maine women writers, dating from 1800 to 2014, collected and edited by Dr. Liza Bakewell, and paired with contemporary black and white photographs by Maine photographer Kerry Michaels. This exhibition explores the world from a woman’s point of view in words and images from a state of mind that is Maine. Buy the Gateless Garden book here!
A Tale of Three Cities: Period and Contemporary Photographs of Paris, New York and Portland
July 28-October 25, 2015
Photographs of New York and Paris have long been virtual icons through the work of artists such as Berenice Abbott. For Mainers, images also of Portland sometimes achieve that status. This exhibition, comprised entirely of work by photographers from Maine, celebrates these three great cities.
Portraits of the Artist – Actors, Dancers, Painters, Writers, Composers, and Musicians
November 5, 2015 – February 7, 2016
A cornucopia of visual delights by well known and unknown photographers of some of the great creative spirits of the last 100 years.
Biddeford Campus UNE Art Gallery in the Jack S. Ketchum Library
Focusing on Home and Beyond: The Photographs of Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, 1897-1937
April 30, 2015—August 19, 2015
Throughout the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons’ returned home to Kingfield, Maine, each summer to document the family homestead, rural life, traditional labor practices, and the many pleasures of summer. In 1897, Emmons wrote to her brother, “I think I have after many, many failures, begun to gage the camera a little nearer right. I can’t let it alone...." This exhibition features a variety of Emmons’ photographs of Maine (especially Kingfield)—both genre scenes and intimate family portraits—as well as images that depict rural Maine in transition. At a time when Maine’s natural resource industries were waning, people in rural Maine still struggled to make a living off of the land as they had for centuries. In addition to focusing on her native Maine, Chansonetta also traveled widely with her camera, and the exhibition highlights less-well-known photographs taken during trips she and her daughter, Dorothy, made to Nantucket, Europe (1924) and South Carolina (1897/1926). Taken together, the images in the exhibition highlight Chansonetta’s tremendous talent, as well as the development of her craft over the course of four decades of serious camera work. NOTE: This show will be mounted in the Art Gallery on UNE’s Biddeford Campus, located on the first floor of the Bush Center and Ketchum Library. Guest curator, Libby Bischof, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, University of Southern Maine.
Related events:
Opening reception for A Gateless Garden, January 20
A Gateless Garden artist talk and book-signing, February 26
A Gateless Garden lecture by Jennifer Tuttle, March 12
Opening Reception for A Tale of Three Cities, July 28
Opening Reception for Portraits of Artists, November 5