Zillman Art Museum (ZAM) announces Winter 2014 Exhibitions

The Zillman Art Museum - University of Maine, located at 40 Harlow Street in Bangor, ME, opens new exhibitions that will run through April 20, 2024 (second floor galleries)  and May 3, 2024 (main floor galleries). ZAM is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10 am - 5 pm and brings modern and contemporary art to the region, presenting approximately 21 original exhibitions each year. Admission to the Zillman Art Museum is free in 2024 thanks to the generosity of Birchbrook.

RICHARD WILSON: STORM OVER THE CITY
January 19 - May 3, 2024

Encompassing paintings, drawings, watercolor and prints, Richard Wilson’s exhibition Storm Over The City features selected
works from 1978 to the present. Wilson offers glimpses into the human condition, with all its inherent challenges, vices
and contradictions. There is a theatricality in the artist’s imagined environments—some are inhabited by a comedic cast of
characters—while in other works sexually charged figures unite en masse.

Dark humor permeates a number of Wilson’s meticulously rendered graphite drawings. The artist depicts anthropomorphic
creatures engaging in mischief and sometimes inflicting pain on the human subjects. For instance, in The Cauldron, a froglike
woman-creature has turned a man upside down in a painful wrestling hold while in Success, horned devils are forcing people
to tend a fire. In other works, like Dysfunctional Friends, Wilson’s subjects are consumed with their own self-inflicted buffoonery.
Despite the desperate conditions facing Wilson’s uncanny characters, the collective absurdity of the scenes elicit a humorous
response.

However, there is a sense of looming peril in Wilson’s recent paintings. Questions are posed such as: what is lurking beneath
the expanse of blue waters in which two tiny figures swim in opposite directions? At what point does the outdoor adventure
seeker realize that his canoe will soon crash over a rushing waterfall? These paintings convey the vulnerability of humans when facing the vastness, mystery and power of nature.

LINDA PACKARD: POEMS I MEANT TO WRITE
January 19 - May 3, 2024

Maine-based artist Linda Packard has created a new body of abstract paintings for the Zillman Art Museum’s exhibition Poems
I Meant to Write. The show features large-scale works that measure up to six feet—the artist’s largest paintings to date. While
the works are non-objective, Packard states that she “remains strongly informed by her many years as a plein air landscape
painter,” and that she, “continues to be drawn to the same organic shapes, rich textures, and earthy palette.”

Packard’s gestural movements around the canvases are intuitive, her brushstrokes varied and sensitive. The paintings highlight
the physical properties of oil paint as rich surfaces emerge through a series of layers and revision. The artist also uses pigment
sticks, charcoal, crayon pencils and graphite to diversify the texture and quality of her marks.

In line with the expressive spirit of earlier Abstract Expressionist painters, Packard’s works convey both energy and mood. By
combining well-defined marks that seem to hover atop other thin, veil-like passages, she has created implied environments that
give the illusion of deep space. Upstairs by the China Lamp, with its palette of crimson tones and glimmers of peachy-orange,
has a fiery intensity; while vivid blues combine with grayed undertones to evoke atmospheric associations in When Hope Was
Returned to Me.

This exhibition is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the
National Endowment for the Arts, and a grant from the City of Bangor Commission on Cultural Development.

SELECTIONS FROM THE MARIN FAMILY COLLECTION
January 19 - April 20, 2024
This exhibition was created in partnership with the University of Maine Machias

Since the early 1950s, the Marin family has served as champions of scores of artists, as well as numerous art museums in
Maine and throughout the United States. As evidenced in this exhibition, the collecting interest of the Marin family features a
diversity of art styles and media, and the family continues to share its collection with various arts institutions.

The Marin family’s generosity is reflected in their significant gifts to the Zillman Art Museum, ZAM’s Museum of Art Alliance,
and the University of Maine at Machias, a regional campus of the University of Maine. The expressive watercolor A Bit of Cape
Split, Maine, 1940 by John Marin was gifted by Norma and John C. Marin, Jr in 1957, and was an early gift to the Zillman Art
Museum-University of Maine. In 1971, these philanthropists and art collectors donated ten additional works to the University of
Maine Machias.

Lisa Marin, granddaughter of famed painter John Marin, is the current steward of Marin’s body of work and the Marin
Foundation. Over the years of her involvement with the Zillman Art Museum she has given a fine selection of important works on
paper by John Marin, as well as works by other important contemporary artists such as Neil Welliver, Hunt Slonem, and R. B.
Kitaj.

In 2025, ZAM will mount a solo-exhibition of John Marin’s works, a second programmatic installment featuring gifts of art from
the Marin Family.

THOUGHT MADE VISIBLE: SELECTIONS FROM THE ZILLMAN ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
January 19 - May 3, 2024

Conceptual and Minimalist art movements emerged from the abstract art of the 1940s and 1950s. In turn, additional subgenres
have evolved from these conceptual and minimal principles such as Hard-Edge Painting and Op Art. Thought Made
Visible highlights selected pieces from the Zillman Art Museum’s permanent collection that share an ideology of working with
a thought or concept visually to ultimately create an artwork. Sol LeWitt, regarded by many art historians as the founder of
Conceptual and Minimal art, believed that the idea of the art was of greater importance than the execution of the final aesthetic
product. He believed that even a thought could be a work of art. LeWitt investigated line and shape through the application
of variation and repetition as seen in Lines from Sides, Corners and Center and Arcs from Four Corners. His contemporary,
Robert Mangold, explored similar ideas with a focus on symmetry and geometry. In his four untitled woodcuts included in the
exhibition, Mangold depicts a sequence of double trapezoids that contain other geometric shapes and lines.

Other artists associated with Hard-Edge Painting include Joseph Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella. For over twenty
years Albers was consumed with exploring the format of concentric squares. His series Homage to the Square includes over
a thousand paintings and prints of squares with differing color combinations. One could argue that Albers’ interest in the
chromatic interactions of the squares and the resulting optical effects influenced the creation of Op Art. In Optical Art (Op Art)
images create visual movement, vibration, warping and even hidden images through the construction of lines and shapes.
Bridget Riley is a principal figure of the Op Art movement and the set of screen prints on view here highlight her use of lines to
create undulating motion.

New generations of contemporary artists such as Anna Hepler continue to explore these themes. Hepler works with shapes
and forms that are informed by geometry and space. Her sculpture’s Center and Fold, as well as the lithograph Whorl, are
reduced to fundamental shapes with details that can be explored by patient observation.

The artists in this exhibition share the presentation of an idea being translated into a visual vocabulary, rather than the basic
elements of visual design. The artworks offer the viewer an opportunity for contemplation.

FROST & BLOOM: WORKS FROM THE ZILLMAN ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
January 19 - May 3, 2024

Frost and Bloom brings together works of art from the Zillman’s permanent collection that evoke feelings of winter and spring
and how these seasons influence human experience. Images of landscapes document nature’s annual changes and are
complimented by abstract pieces that represent how the environment may impact one emotionally and psychologically.

Works depicting winter dominate this exhibit, representing the season in Maine that may feel like it lingers too long. In these
works, color is reduced to stark white and black or the cool of monochromatic blues, with a few warm pops of red and yellow.
In Maine Winter with Tree, artist Bernard Langlais uses these brighter hues to illustrate the inviting comfort of interior spaces. At
the same time, the claustrophobia and restlessness resulting from months spent confined indoors can be felt from the surreal
imagery of Roz Leibowitz’s Midnight Dream. Winter is also a season for reflection, nostalgia, and patience—emotions conveyed
in the quietness of Michael Alpert’s Branch Mills Church and Beth Van Hoesen’s Postcards.

Moving between galleries, notice the soft difference between Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s two prints Nut Trees. One in blue and
the other in red, each hints at how the lengthening daylight hours begin the process of seasonal change. Spring’s emergence
is expressed here with an exuberant burst of color, used playfully in Matt Phillip’s Ravel. As life returns to the landscape, lush
greens and peach tones fill Prospect Park Series by Joseph DiGiorgio. Romare Howard Beardon’s In the Garden is an invitation
to celebrate the outdoors and is a hopeful reminder that spring will blossom again.

Curated by Sarah Renée Ozlanski, 2023-24 Curatorial Intern