Biennial at CMCA showcases contemporary art with ties to Maine

CMCA’s 2025 Biennial will be on view from Oct. 4 through Jan. 11, continuing a tradition that dates back to 1978 and stands as the longest running survey of contemporary art by artists with ties to Maine. This edition features 29 artists selected from a pool of more than 450 applicants by jurors Keith Fox, Tom Keyes and William Hathaway.

Well over three quarters of the selected artists are full-time Maine residents living in communities from York to Bar Harbor to Orono. Others have longstanding seasonal ties to the state or have participated in residencies and fellowships at a number of its prestigious schools and artist-endowed foundations. While certain motifs and strategies recur across the jurors’ selections — seafaring and the horizon, uncanny interior scenes and landscapes, narratives of the vitality of marginalized communities and the dignity of labor and the state’s ongoing love affair with painting — the exhibition reflects an open-minded, non-thematic and intergenerational understanding of Maine’s role in contemporary art.

The artists included in the 2025 Biennial are Meg Alexander, Steve Bartlett, Jennifer Brou, Kristy Cavaretta, Thomas Connolly, Sarah Faragher, Gabriel Frey, Grace Hager, Sarah Haskell, Emma John, Mark Johnson, Alice Jones, Dustan Knight, Ben Levine, Kathryn Lynch, Janice L. Moore, James Mullen, Winslow Myers, Colin Page, Mallie Loring Pratt, Alison Rector, LJ Roberts, David Row, Carol Shutt, Gail Spaien, Sarah Szwajkos, Kathy Weinberg, Ellen Weitkamp and David Wilson.

“Serving as a juror for CMCA’s 2025 Biennial has been a deeply thought-provoking and rewarding experience,” said Tom Keyes. “The submissions reflected both a high level of technical skill and creativity, as well as an acute awareness of the unprecedented environmental and geopolitical times we currently seek to understand and navigate. The Maine landscape figures prominently in many of the artists’ entries. It serves as a setting, a character, a symbol of our collective resilience and even as indicator of our increasing vulnerability. We are reminded that while the Maine landscape might root us in the local, it calls on us to reflect and question all that is changing around us on a global level. Our selections offer a powerful insight into how these Maine artists are responding to these challenges through creativity with a nod toward urgency.”

“It was an honor to reconnect and acquaint myself with the thriving visual arts community in my home state of Maine,” said William Hathaway. “While I was already familiar with some of the incredible artists who applied, many were new to me, which inspired excitement about the present and the future of the arts in Maine.”

The jurors for the 2025 Biennial are Tom Keyes, Keith Fox and William Hathaway. Fox retired in December 2024 after eleven years as CEO of Phaidon Press and Artspace. Previously, he served as President of BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill Professional. He is the founding Chairman of the New York City AIDS Memorial and holds a BA in History from Brown University and an MBA from Columbia University. Keyes is a Principal and Portfolio Manager at Zweig-DiMenna, a New York City-based investment fund, where he has been part of the investment management team for over 20 years of his 30-year career on Wall Street. He is an avid collector of contemporary art and includes visual arts and animal welfare among his philanthropic interests. He holds a BSFS in International Political Science from Georgetown University and an MBA from the Graduate Business School at Columbia University.

Hathaway is a partner and sales director at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, where he has played a key role in the gallery’s success for nearly a decade. His previous experience includes roles at Gagosian Gallery, L.A. Louver and Blum and Poe. A native of Mount Desert Island in Maine, he maintains close ties to his home state and is committed to promoting Maine artists. This dedication led to Night Gallery’s partnership with DUNES Gallery in Portland. In August 2024, the two galleries presented “The Wrong Sea,” an exhibition at DUNES featuring historic and contemporary artists with ties to Maine that celebrated the state’s significant role in art history.

CMCA’s 2025 Biennial is supported by the Susanne Marcus Collins Foundation, CMCA’s Suzette McAvoy Exhibition Fund, the Roxanne Quimby Foundation and Andrea and Tyler Curtis-Southard / Edward Jones.

CMCA is located at 21 Winter St., Rockland. For more information, go to cmcanow.org.