ANNEX ARTS is a non-profit artist residency program located on the Blue Hill Peninsula in Castine, Maine. We provide creative workspaces for artists and writers so that they can benefit from unfettered time and the opportunity to draw inspiration from our stunning village and coastal region. Annex Arts’ programming promotes the arts as a means to address the economic, cultural, and spiritual well-being of our community.
DREW KLASSEN / JUNE 15 – JUNE 27, 2019
Ottawa, Ontario,Visual Arts
Drew Klassen, painter and educator, was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1964, and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He attended Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While teaching English in Japan, Klassen established a strong studio practice and began to exhibit regularly upon his return to Canada in 1998. His work is held in numerous private and institutional collections in Canada and abroad. In 2010 he received one of five Established Artist Recognition Awards presented annually by the government of Nova Scotia.
SHELLEY MANSEL / JUNE 15 – JUNE 22, 2019
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Visual Arts
A landscape and figurative painter, Shelley Mansel attended UCFV in British Columbia and received a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She has shown in solo, two-person, and group exhibitions internationally with works reviewed in magazines including House & Home and featured on HGTV. Her paintings are held in private collections in Canada, Germany, France, and the US, and in permanent public collections at St. Mary’s University Halifax and UBC Vancouver. She has received two Nova Scotia Creation Grants, a Presentation Grant, and has served on the selection committee for the Nova Scotia Culture Division’s Grants to Individuals Program.
KRISTY CUNNANE / JUNE 24 – JUNE 30, 2019
Ellsworth, Maine, Visual Arts
Kristy Cunnane is an artist and educator who loves to cook and lives in the woods of rural Maine on a long old road called Happytown. Cunnane specializes in graphic and text-laden images that often mix humanity with the splendor of the natural world in witty and wonderful ways. In addition to spending much of her time teaching at a small Waldorf school in Blue Hill, Maine, where her days are full of lively children, she works as an illustrator, printmaker, and book artist and is a force behind “Table for Change,” an art and food dining experience which directs its proceeds towards specific charitable causes.
Where do ideas for creating fictional characters come from? How are these ideas developed so that characters are both believable and complex? In this half-day course, writer Elizabeth Poliner leads a lively exploration of these questions through discussion and the use of in-class exercises. After developing characters through various techniques, participants will learn how an understanding of character can generate a story’s plot. By the end, participants may have enough material at hand to go home and write a great story!
ELIZABETH POLINER / JUNE 5 – JULY 5, 2019
Hollins, Virginia, Literary Arts
Elizabeth Poliner is the author of As Close to Us as Breathing (winner of the 2017 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction and an Amazon Best Book of 2016); Mutual Life & Casualty, a novel-in-stories; What You Know in Your Hands, a poetry collection; and Sudden Fog, a poetry chapbook. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared widely in literary journals including the Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Colorado Review. She teaches creative writing in the MFA and undergraduate programs at Hollins University where she is an associate professor and current director of the Jackson Center for Creative Writing.
Friday, July 5, 5-7pm: Opening Meet-the-Artists Reception— meet Annex Arts’Artists-in-Residence, Moira Holohan & Xavi Comas, visiting from Miami, FL and Barcelona. Find out what this interdisciplinary artist and geophysicist duo will be doing while in residence. 8 Water St. Castine, Me. www.annexarts.org, Free and Open to the public.
MOIRA HOLOHAN / JULY 1 – JULY 21, 2019
Miami, Florida, Visual Arts
A multidisciplinary artist, Moira Holohan merges two sets of temporal art practices: slow and meditative with fast and urgent. The laborious process of weaving and hand-marked flip book animation are paired with the immediacy of performance and video montage. Holohan explores the process as both signifier and instrument, while contemplating questions of meaning, purpose, and value. In collaboration with Dr. Xavier Comas, Holohan’s recent work employs geophysical profiles collected with a ground-penetrating radar. She received her BA at Bard College and her MFA at Hunter College and has exhibited widely.
XAVIER COMAS / JULY 1 – JULY 21, 2019
Miami, Florida, Interdisciplinary
Born in Barcelona, Spain, Xavier Comas earned a fine arts degree in graphic design and photography from the Superior Faculty of Fine Arts of Barcelona University and his doctorate in Environmental Sciences from Rutgers University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Florida Atlantic University. Comas’ timely collaboration with Moira Holohan seeks unique fusions of art and science. His graphic designs, blogs, and photo essays have exhibited and been published in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, and The Netherlands.
ª Friday, July 12, 5-7 pm: Meet the Residents Reception— Annex Arts’ Artists-in-Residence, Painter, Sara MacCullouch from Nova Scotia. 8 Water St. Castine, Me. www.annexarts.org, Free and Open to the public.
ª Tuesday, July 9, 5-7pm: Opening Reception for Exhibition by Dez Ryan Odegaard at the Gallery B Project Space at 9 Main Street, Castine, www.gallerybgallery.com, Free and Open to the public. Exhibition runs from July 9 – July 17
SARA MACCULLOCH / JULY 10 – 19TH, 2019
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Visual Arts
Sara MacCulloch recently completed her MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and has been painting for over twenty years. Her work centers on sense of place, memory, and the ephemerality of a moment. Her subjects are mostly of landscapes that have had an impact on her from childhood, and more recently of places where she has spent time with her daughter. She has shown extensively in Halifax, Toronto, and New York and has works in collections in the U.S. and abroad.
Join award-winning painter Terri Brooks for “Figures in Pastels,” a workshop designed for experienced pastel artists. Working from a live, costumed model, participants will refine their ability to capture the human form using layered pastel techniques. The class will focus on essential life-drawing skills, using light and shadow to define facial structure and form through […]
The Deer Isle Artists Association announces the March Artist-in-Residence Program on March 4 with artist David McBeth. McBeth is a potter, working primarily with porcelain that is high-fired and ready for the dining table. Additionally, he is a knitter, whose preferred material is wool yarn. A true renaissance man, lately McBeth is also a writer, […]
Established in 2010, The Maine Museum of Photographic Arts is the only museum in Maine dedicated exclusively to photography. Dear Friends of the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, What a transformative year 2024 has been for MMPA. As we reflect on the past twelve months, we’re struck by the extraordinary level of artistry, scholarship and […]
The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents its winter season with the unveiling of two new thought-provoking exhibitions and held an opening reception on Feb. 1. New exhibitions that opened Feb. 1: “The Sun, Trying to Disappear” is a show that speaks of entanglement. The images in this exhibition flutter between icons and mistrusted […]
Crescendo is about reaching new heights, riding the waves of life, climbing peaks, looking up to the zenith, witnessing the culmination of a project, peering over the crest, feeling the surge of emotions. 2025 is a 9 year in numerology, marked by a crescendo of power and experience, acclimation and completion, and new beginnings. Artists […]
Joseph Fiore (1925-2008) was a widely respected artist and active member of the Maine Art Gallery during the 1960s and ‘70s. In celebration of the 100th year of his birth, the gallery is partnering with Maine Farmland Trust (MFT) on an exclusive and overdue major retrospective, “Fiore at 100: Maine Observed.” The show runs June […]
The Midcoast Downeast Chapter of the Union of Maine Visual Artists, in collaboration with Waterfall Arts and Dark Sky Maine presented “Dark Skies: Artwork Honoring Dark Nights in Maine,” which ran from Jan. 17 to Feb. 28 at Waterfall Arts in Belfast. Not only did the exhibit gather a sizable crowd of over 280 people […]
In March the Roux & Cyr International Fine Art Gallery will host its first abstract contemporary artist as its featured artist of the month. Jeanne Maguire, a Maine-based abstract artist, will be the First Friday artist on March 7. Maguire’s show is titled “Feminine Archetypes” and her work is vibrant and expressive, capturing the emotion […]
Youth Art Month is right around the corner. Show your support and celebrate the young artists in this year’s youth show, “Healing Through Color,” on view March 6 to 9. Students from all instructional levels will be featured in the show, which emphasizes the importance of visual arts, creative expression, and access to the arts […]
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