Dowling Walsh Gallery presents new work by Bo Bartlett, Jenny Brillhart, and James Allister Sprang in July

Dowling Walsh Gallery will open three new solo exhibitions of work by artists Bo Bartlett, Jenny Brillhart and James Allister Sprang on July 5 with a public reception from 4 to 7 p.m. during Rockland’s First Friday Art Walk.

Now in its 17th year, Dowling Walsh Gallery specializes in art by leading and emerging artists, especially those with connections to Maine.

Bo Bartlett: Saudade (July 5 to 27)

Artist Bo Bartlett is highly regarded as a painter of contemporary realism. He paints grand human narratives and quiet private moments. His art is an act of discovery, a testament to living close to nature, and a record of the unsettled present. “The purpose of art is to wake us up,” he says. In the exhibition, Saudade, a Portuguese word meaning a melancholy yearning, several paintings and pastel drawings depict figures poised on the edge between land and water, a liminal space of repose and unease, reflecting the uncertain nature of our time. Cinematic in scope and grounded in the figurative tradition, Bartlett’s paintings speak to his training as a filmmaker and to the work of his mentor, Andrew Wyeth, as well as his artistic forebears, the American realist painters Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singleton Copley, and Benjamin West.

Bartlett received his Certificate of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a Certificate of Filmmaking from New York University. In 2023, he received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Art from the New York Academy of Art and an honorary Certificate from the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at MOCA Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL; Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT; The Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT; The Florence Academy of Art, Jersey City, NJ; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; and the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL. Additionally, it has been included in numerous group exhibitions at museums throughout the United States and in Linz, Austria. Bartlett’s work is in the collections of the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; La Salle University Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA, among others. He lives and works in Columbus, GA, and Wheaton Island.

Jenny Brillhart: Memoir 15 (July 5 to 27)

Jenny Brillhart finds subjects for her exquisitely rendered paintings in unexpected and often overlooked places, materials and scenes plucked from everyday life that arrest her attention. Photographed and assembled in collages or made into three-dimensional arrangements in the studio, the commonplace become subjects for her spare, elegant compositions. Painted in mostly muted tones with considered notes of color, light and shadows play a dominant role, lending an atmosphere of stillness and calm to her work. The influence of Shaker design and craftsmanship runs deep, as do the Precisionist paintings of Charles Scheeler. Her masterly mark-making defines shape, space, and gravity.

Brillhart received her BFA from Smith College, Northampton, MA, and MFA in painting from The New York Academy of Art, with additional studies at The Art Students League, New York, NY. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kuckei + Kuckei Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL; and numerous other solo and group exhibitions throughout Maine, Florida, Germany, and Spain. In 2019, Brillhart’s work was included in the New England Biennial Exhibition at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, and in 2017, in the two-person exhibition Temporality: Jenny Brillhart & Sara Stites at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. She lives and works in Blue Hill.

James Allister Sprang: Each of Us Are Several (July 5 to Aug. 24)

James Allister Sprang is a multidisciplinary artist who creates immersive audiovisual installations and complex woven two-dimensional works. “I make sensory poems for the spirit,” he says. Similarly to how he weaves genre and instrumentation together when composing and producing musical scores, he weaves prints and watercolor into dimensional, textural works of abstraction that celebrate the sensory experience of Black life. His first exhibition with Dowling Walsh Gallery, Each of Us Are Several is a multimedia installation that includes sound, elements of text, and wall-based work. In its varied forms, Sprang’s work fosters connections between the tangible and intangible nature of being human in this ever-spinning world, between past and present, the known and the unknowable.

Sprang was born in Miami, FL, and received his BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, NY, and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. He is a 2022 Knight Foundation Art + Tech Fellow, a 2023 Pew Fellow, and a 2024 YoungArts Fellow. He has been an artist-in-residence at The Kitchen, New York, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine, Philadelphia, PA; Baryshnikov Arts Center Space, New York, NY; and the Fountainhead, Miami, FL. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the ICA at Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Knockdown Center, New York, NY; and The Cooper Union, New York, NY, as well as in group exhibitions throughout the United States, including at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL, and David Nolan Gallery, New York, NY. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and Art Papers, among others. He lives and works in Portland.

Dowling Walsh Gallery is at 365 Main St. in Rockland. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment on Sundays and Mondays. Visit www.dowlingwalsh.com, or call 207-596-0084 for more information.