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.
Harbor Square Gallery in Camden is showing new work by Thomas O’Donovan, the jeweler and artistic director who founded the gallery more than four decades ago. On view is “Revelation,” from his series The Offering, crafted in 18k gold and bronze with antique coconut heishi beads. Harbor Square Gallery is at 37 Bay View St., […]
The Deer Isle Artists Association gallery welcomes North Carolina-based painter Tony Griffin as artist-in-residence for April. Griffin’s work — deeply rooted in the tradition of the Renaissance masters — spans portraiture, figure painting and plein air landscape. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and has exhibited throughout North Carolina […]
Waterfall Arts in Belfast opens “Make Your Mark,” an immersive, community-driven exhibition transforming the Clifford Gallery into an interactive space inspired by street art, April 18 through May 29. An opening reception is April 18 from 1 to 3 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The exhibition features participatory installations including doodle […]
Local Color Gallery in Belfast welcomes fiber artist Sarah Leighton as guest artist April 21 through May 17. Leighton will speak about her work during Fourth Friday Gallery Night on April 25 from 4 to 7 p.m., with her talk beginning at 5 p.m. Leighton grew up in Midcoast Maine, where her French-Canadian grandmother — […]
The Union of Maine Visual Artists presents “Bodies in Motion,” an exhibition of work in various media at Zoot Coffee in Camden, running April 1 through 30. The show features 19 artists: Hillary Steinau, Cynthia Motian McGuirl, Jess Lauren Lipton, Charlie Newton, Maryjean Viano Crowe, Mackenzie Martin, Jorge Pena, Rachel Robbins, Shanna McNair, Kristi Marsh, […]
Three artists are currently featured at Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, spanning painting, assemblage and works on paper. Robert Hamilton (1917-2004) thought of his paintings as “a place for something to occur — little pictorial events, little plays.” In “Come Back Sweet Mama (Boy in Museum)” (1990), the avid recreational tennis player imagined a museum […]
Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset has shaped its 2026 exhibition season around the ways artists respond to the natural world and Maine’s place in the sustainable agriculture movement. The season opens with “Art to Table: Visual Sustenance,” a juried show examining individual and communal relationships to food through works that elevate ingredients, meals and rituals. […]
Meetinghouse Arts kicked off the season with a creative conversation featuring artist Charlie Hewitt on March 18, partnering with Freeport Community Services for the evening event. Hewitt is known for his Hopeful Project, a glowing installation originally commissioned by Speedwell in 2019 that has since spread to dozens of sites. The gallery also hosted a […]
George Marshall Store Gallery in York opened “Block Party!” on March 15, bringing together artists living, working or with ties to York, Kittery, Eliot, South Berwick, Ogunquit and Wells. The open-call exhibition featured a wide variety of mediums, experimental approaches and interpretations of local landmarks. The show included work by Karen Adrienne, Marena Bach, Todd […]
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