Art Class: Exhibit of Student Work from the Portland Public High Schools
March 31 – April 21
*See details below to purchase artwork

In the Lewis Gallery

Art Class features artwork from all four Portland public high schools: Portland High School, Deering High School, Casco Bay High School, and Portland Arts and Technology High School. All art students attending one of these schools were encouraged to submit work to be displayed in the show with the optional theme of “identity”. Portland Public Library is honored to be hosting this exhibition which gives students the rare opportunity to publicly display their artwork in their own community, we hope that it will encourage students to continue pursuing and creating art beyond the classroom.

Since 2009, Painting for a Purpose has supported youth-led service learning projects in the Portland Public Schools. Check out paintingforapurpose.net for more information.

*If you would like to purchase a piece of student work that is for sale, please contact Gallery and Special Programs Coordinator, Rachael Harkness at harkness@portlib.org with the title and/or a photo of the piece.

A Blue: Daniel Minter and the Layered Narrative of Illustration
In the Lewis Gallery
November 4 – December 30, 2022

A Blue: Daniel Minter and the Layered Narrative of Illustration explores the children’s book artistry of Coretta Scott King and Caldecott Honor winner Daniel Minter. Using a visual vocabulary, Minter not only communicates the arc of the story, but expresses narratives within each layered illustration. Each image invites readers to explore the depth of the Black experience. Referencing the water, the crossing, the land, and desolation, Minter also tells readers how a people retained, remade, reimagined, and reclaimed themselves through their valorization to family, work, and love.

Minter’s fine art has been featured in numerous institutions and galleries including the Portland Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, The Charles H. Wright Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Bates College, University of Southern Maine, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The David C. Driskell Center, Bowdoin College, the Farnsworth Museum, Hood Museum of Art and the Northwest African American Art Museum. A travel grant from the National Endowment for the Arts enabled him to live and work in Salvador, Bahia Brazil where he established relationships that have continued to nurture his life and work in important ways. Minter is a graduate of the Art Institute of Atlanta and holds an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from The Maine College of Art.

The award-winning illustrator of over a dozen children’s books, Minter considers picture books a place and medium to hold crucial conversations with children. Featured in this exhibit are illustrations from his books Blue: A History of the Color As Deep As the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, So Tall Within: Sojourner Truth’s Long Walk to Freedom, Going Down Home with Daddy which won a 2020 Caldecott Honor, The Women Who Caught the Babies, Step Right Up: How Doc and Jim Key Taught the World Kindness, Ellen’s Broom which won a Coretta Scott King Illustration Honor, and Seven Spools of Thread: A Kwanzaa Story which won a Best Book Award from the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio. Also included in the exhibit are the pieces he created for U.S. Postal Service Kwanzaa stamps in 2004 and 2011.

In Maine, Daniel Minter’s work moves beyond the canvas and the children’s book page. As founding director of Maine Freedom Trails, he has brought the history of the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement to the streets of Portland in a series of markers. For the past 15 years Minter has used his art and voice to raise awareness of the 1912 forced removal of an interracial community on Maine’s Malaga Island. His formative work emerges from Minter’s active engagement with the island, its descendants, archeologists, anthropologists, and scholars. This dedication to righting history was pivotal in having the island designated a public preserve. In 2019, Minter co-founded Indigo Arts Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to cultivating the artistic development of people of African descent. Indigo Arts Alliance and Minter are founders of the Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival, an annual event celebrating children’s books and creators that tell the stories of the African Diaspora.

This exhibit was curated by Kirsten Cappy of I’m Your Neighbor Books and is made possible by the generous support of Camden National Bank and Greenhut Galleries.  Daniel Minter is represented exclusively in Maine by Greenhut Galleries in Portland.

Inside Vision: An Outside Exhibition of Inside Art Curated by Jan Collins, Olivia Hochstadt, and Sophie Craven
Lewis Gallery
October 3–22, 2022

Inside Vision: An Outside Exhibition of Inside Art features visual art, writing, and music by individuals incarcerated at MaineState Prison and Maine correctional facilities. Residents of Maine’s prisons express their lived experience, their hopes, and their dreams in the art they create. Their artwork defies stereotypes and emphasizes that we are all more than the worst acts
that we have committed. Through their art, those living inside convey the message that, “We are whole people with loves and losses, skills, talents, ideas, and gifts . . . and a longing to be free.” Inside Vision is a joint effort between the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition and the Maine Department of Corrections.

Supported by the Cottonwood Foundation and the American Rescue Plan Maine
Project Grant provided by SPACE Gallery

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HOLE HISTORY SHOW III:
Origins of The American-Style Donut
Lewis Gallery
August 5-September 21, 2022

“What love and loathing we have for doughnuts and their holes. And what better place to delve into this ambiguity than the home territory of the putative inventor of the doughnut hole.”
-Food Historian Sandy Oliver, excerpt from Love, Loathing and Doughnuts, 2018

Hole History Show III: Origins of the American-Style Donut began in 2014, as a personal inquiry into ways that artist-curator Alexis Iammarino’s work as a community artist could more assertively combine her interests in interdisciplinary, collaborative, and critical research models and, in an idiomatic fashion, from the field of public history.

The project has its own origins to stories Iammarino heard in Maine’s Midcoast, claiming that the hole-in-the-donut was singularly invented by a 19th-century sea captain, Hanson Crockett Gregory from Rockport, Maine.

This curatorial project offers a conceptual terrain and an inclusive venue for discourse between the dynamics of belief and fact, as well as the implication and significance of “American” as an adjective. In Hole History Show III, Iammarino remains curious about the power of art and aesthetics to intellectualize, editorialize, and inspire resistance to or an embracing of any story.

Living through such a time of national division and American partisan politics, how is it that individuals respond to “our times” and the culture of fake news or false, misleading, or bombastic claims (of all kinds) to prompt their own cultural and societal critique of how knowledge hierarchies operate in relational spaces between faith and fact; representation and abstraction; linear and circuitous; real and fake.

“The past has not been erased, its erasure has not been forgotten, the lie has not become truth. But the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.”

– Jill Lepore, “After the Fact,” In the history of truth, a new chapter begins. The New Yorker, March 14, 2016

Works by Sam Onche, Mayele Alognon, Eamon White

Celebrate the works of three artists in the Lewis Gallery for the month of July. Opening June 28. First Friday Art Walk July 1, 5:00-8:00 pm.