Four artists explore memory and environment in ‘Trace’ exhibition at MMPA

In Portland’s Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, four remarkable artists are inviting viewers to explore the delicate imprints we leave on our world and those the world leaves on us.

Artist talks for the exhibition were held April 25 with photographers and mixed-media artists Sarah Hood Salomon, Drew Harty, Joan Fitzsimmons and Sara Stites.

The show remains on view through May 31.

DREW HARTY

For Drew Harty, photography represents more than artistic expression; it offered a transformative pathway to understanding the world. “Photography became a means to look at and think about the world that was meaningful,” Harty reflects with disarming candor about his educational journey. After struggling academically, he discovered in photography an intuitive language that “fueled my curiosity, sparked an interest in reading, in the work of other photographers, and the broader arts.”

This revelation informs Harty’s multifaceted career spanning fine art, freelance photography, and independent filmmaking. His professional work explores cultural identity, architecture, and creative influence, while his personal projects range from lifelong investigations to spontaneous visual documentations during outdoor excursions.

SARA STITES

The paintings and photographs of Sara Stites invite viewers into a realm where personal history converses with contemporary reality. A native New Yorker whose formative years in Puerto Rico shaped her artistic sensibilities, Stites creates work that examines “power politics” through an intimate lens.

Her current series represents a fascinating dialectic between spontaneity and structure. “The projected drawings originate as organic, uninhibited marker ‘scribbles’ in my notebooks—forms that emerge instinctively, often inspired by nature,” she explains. These intuitive markings become integrated with more deliberate elements against backgrounds derived from her studio walls—themselves a documentation of collected natural specimens. The result is a palimpsest of personal archive and artistic intervention, preserving transient moments through multiple transformative processes.

JOAN FITZSIMMONS

With more than four decades of artistic practice, Joan Fitzsimmons demonstrates the profound potential in reimagining the mundane. Her series “Small & Large Thoughts” began with an unexpected observation — an emptied yogurt bowl resembling a painter’s palette — before expanding into a meditation on decay, memory, and reclamation.

“Re-examining heirlooms of home is a process of reclamation; recycling objects and collecting memories, claiming their very simplicity as material for art-making,” Fitzsimmons notes. Her work spans intimate inkjet prints to large-scale gelatin silver collages, all constructed from the incidental materials and observations of daily life.

SARAH HOOD SALOMON

Perhaps the most overtly environmental voice in the exhibition belongs to Sarah Hood Salomon, whose emotionally resonant photography directly confronts the devastating impact of development on natural landscapes.

Salomon’s exhibition pieces feature trees from properties slated for development—many already lost to human expansion. What distinguishes her approach is direct artistic intervention: she physically scratches away the ink from portions of her photographs, creating a visual parallel to environmental destruction. “The original images have been permanently altered and can’t be reconstructed, just as landscapes revised by humans can’t be reassembled,” she explains with poignant clarity. “Only the echoes remain.”

The Maine Museum of Photographic Arts is at 15 Middle St., A3, Portland. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and by appointment on Wednesdays. See www.mainemuseumofphotographicarts.org for more information.