The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA), located at 21 Winter Street in Rockland, invites the public to attend a Tuesday Talk with artist Ann Craven and Christopher B. Crosman, founding curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and former director, Farnsworth Art Museum, on Tuesday, August 27 at 5:30pm. The talk will address Craven’s work currently on view in the exhibition, “Birds We Know.” Crosman contributed an essay on Craven’s career to the forthcoming exhibition catalog to be published by CMCA and distributed by D.A.P. 

Ann Craven has been painting in Maine since the early 1990s. First in a borrowed barn near Slab City Road in Lincolnville, then from her own studio on a farm she purchased nearby. Lincolnville and the surrounding mid-coast region has harbored artists for decades, beginning in the 1960s when Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, and other New York-based artists began summering in the area. It was on Lincolnville beach that Craven painted her first “Moon” painting in 1995. The experience “gave me my subject matter,” she says. “I was literally chasing the moon.” In 2008, she moved to an historic house on the banks of the St. George River in Cushing. “Birds We Know” is the artist’s first exhibition in Maine and presents a twenty-year survey of her work.

 

Birds We Know installation view. Photo: Dave Clough

In the exhibition catalog, Crosman writes, “…Ann Craven’s birds, moons, trees, and her stripe and palette paintings all enforce the hard stop our mind and eye make before inexplicable paintings, paintings that affirm an inseparability of beauty, truth and virtue. This is painting at its most authentic and original, at its most memorable and tenderly remarkable.” 

Tuesday Talks are free to CMCA members, others with admission. Participants are encouraged to stay following the talk for refreshments and further discussion. For further information, please visit cmcanow.org.