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.
Please join the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts on Friday, July 24, from 5-8 pm for an elegant evening of art and ideas. We are hosting a panel discussion with artists in the LOOKING AT YOU exhibition: featuring Jack Montgomery, Barbara Peacock, Richard Wexler, Jan Pieter van Voorst van Beest, Bret Woodard , Arlene Collins […]
Summer is the perfect time to pull out the paints and pencils, and even tissue and glue for experimentation or to develop one’s creative talents. Upcoming classes at the Maine Art Gallery offer three opportunities to expand your abilities. In “Charcoal and Line: Drawing the Landscape,” both intermediate beginners and those with more advanced […]
The Colby College Museum of Art is pleased to announce the gift of Henri Matisse’s Océanie, le ciel, a monumental screenprint on linen conceived in 1946 and printed in 1948. The significant acquisition reinforces Colby’s position as a leading academic art museum and adds to Maine’s growing profile as a major destination for American and […]
Richard Estes (born 1932) is best known for his complex photo-realistic images of urban shop windows and their mind-eye confounding reflections. However, his work also attests to a well-traveled eye for distant places, including Mount Desert Island and Lake Champlain. While helping Alice Walton select artworks destined for the permanent collection of Crystal Bridges […]
Waterfall Arts in Belfast invites the community to explore creativity, craftsmanship and collective imagination through PLAY, a season of workshops, exhibitions and special events featuring nationally recognized artists Valeska Populoh and Mark Matthews. From illuminated lantern parades to crafted glass spheres, the visiting artists bring decades of experience and a shared belief that art has […]
The Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland has named Rori Smith as its new director of education. Smith brings nearly two decades of experience as an educator, scholar and artist, having worked with institutions including the Penn Museum, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the National Museum of the American Indian and […]
Kittery Art Association presents “Lucid Coastline” through Aug. 2 at its gallery in Kittery. The exhibition explores the many ways artists interpret the shifting moods of the coast. From abstraction to realism, each work reveals a personal dialogue with nature’s edge — the lucid space between the tangible and the transcendent. An opening reception was […]
Jean Kigel Studio + Gallery in Waldoboro is currently featuring “Patchwork,” an oil painting by Jean Kigel. A few years ago, Kigel was one of 11 artists chosen to spend a day painting on Allen Island, six miles off Port Clyde. “I had passed this bleak island many times en route to Monhegan and had […]
The Union of Maine Visual Artists will present “Dreaming at Dawn,” an exhibition inspired by daybreak in Maine, from Aug. 1 to Sept. 30 at Bangor Public Library. The exhibition features 68 pieces by 51 artists from across the state, with work installed in the library’s Cyr, Stairwell and Lecture Hall galleries. Interpretations of the […]
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