Last Friday, April 11, the fine art community at the University of Maine and interested members of the student body and general public came together for a wonderful reception at the Lord Hall Gallery, during which department chair and Art History professor Dr. Justin Wolff recognized and awarded dozens of the most talented students in the program for their work this year.
The reception lasted from 5PM to 7PM, beginning with an hour in which guests of the well-attended function dined on canapés and toured the gallery at their leisure, taking in the art and speaking to the many artists that were in attendance. The all-important awards ceremony began at 6, starting, fittingly enough, with the “Smallest but Mightiest Award”, an accolade for students earlier in their studies; Ruby Day, Haley Kesterson, Lily McFlaherty, Bella Moore, Haley Metzger, John-Paul Gagnon, Valentine Paisley, Taylor Brunish, Clyde Nelson and Catherine Black were all recognised as promising freshmen in the arts department and rewarded with a $50 gift card. At the other end of the spectrum – in seniority, not artistic talent – was Sarah Renee-Ozlanski, who took home the 300-dollar Outstanding Graduating Senior award for a track record of excellent work, including “Homeport”, a piece showcased at the gallery consisting of a woodcut of a fishing boat overlaid on a nautical chart.
Subsequent awards included (but were not limited to, as the full award list would be unwieldy to provide here), the Nancy Kittredge Jellison Class of ‘61 Scholarship, in the amount of $1,523, which went to Nix Chase. The late Professor Emeritus of Art and former Department Chair Michael H. Lewis, a long-serving and highly influential figure whose absence is still acutely felt in the Department of Art seven years after his passing, set up an endowment fund upon his retirement, and the prestigious accolade in his honor, to the tune of $7,400, went this year to Piper Gallipeau, a multi-medium artist whose works include “Greenhouse”, a woodblock print of a messy, rustic kitchen reminiscent of an illustration in a nostalgic children’s book, “Variegation”, an artistic black-and-white closeup photo of a man holding a leaf, and my favorite, “Winter Walk”, a “peacefully gloomy” oil painting of a Maine street late at night blanketed in freshly fallen snow – a sight perhaps endearingly familiar (for the right reasons or otherwise) to any student who has partaken in Orono’s nightlife during the winter months.
After the granting of the individual scholarship awards made possible by the generosity of patrons, the smaller Highest Honors, then High Honors, and finally Honors awards were then handed out to several deserving recipients in the department. Other awarded artists whose work I took note of included Rosemary Lavin, whose oil painting “View from the Art Museum” depicts exactly what it says on the tin, at night, in a style somewhat reminiscent of early American colonial art, Laura Poveda Pastrana who features strong female characters in works such as “Las Berrocas”, a painting of two muscular women dressed in Mexican wrestling outfits, and Cooper Keene, in whose thought-provoking woodcuts such as “Or Be Hunted”, all is not right; in said piece, an anthropomorphic deer can be seen sitting next to a rifle leaned against a log cabin, and in the doorway a haunting glow shines beneath an indistinct object hanging from a noose that could be another animal’s head – or maybe not. Also impressive is his surrealist photoshop piece, “Future Reflections”.
No less worthy of mention are the artists whose names stuck in my mind primarily by virtue of me being impressed with their works as I toured the gallery, rather than from me hearing them announced during the awards ceremony – although several of them did receive awards as well, such as Ruby Day, one of the “Smallest but Mightiest” recipients whose virtuosity shined through in “Echoes of the Feathered Mind”, a beautiful, fantastical group portrait of two elves with a crow overhead. “Stirring Amalgam” by Clayton Slauenwhite is a whimsical clay bottle in the form of a six-legged animal with the face of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, but a shape and color pattern that almost makes it look like a Pokémon.
My favorite painting was probably “Maine” by Allison Bishop, a surrealist piece depicting a giant eye in the sky crying tears of blueberries over a craggy mountain range as a bluebird flies past, and which displays impressive technical and compositional skill alike. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak with the artist, whose other works displayed include a set of porcelain sculptures of produce and animals; she said that there was no deep message behind the choice of name for her first venture into surrealism after previously painting in a more realistic style, calling it “Maine” after completing it purely on the basis of it containing blueberries – as good a reason as any, we concluded. Also peculiarly named was “Last Boat to the Underworld” by Mads Owen, but alas, the artist had left before I got a chance to ask her what connection the seemingly straightforward bronze figurine of a snail had, if indeed any, to the Underworld.
Another attendee I spoke with, Roshanne, mentioned that this year’s exhibition was sparser than last year’s, due to the especially discerning standards of curator Amy Tingle. Pieces that weren’t admitted to the main gallery or couldn’t be completed in time weren’t left out of the event entirely, as the Salon des Indépendants, consisting of spaces on the second and third floors, hosted such works, but only for the duration of the reception – unfortunately so, as I also found them very impressive, especially “Grieving”, an oil painting of a blue Northern Cardinal, and “Lady in Hat Master Copy”, a Picassoesque technicolor painting of a woman in a fancy hat, both by Madison Clarke.
In conclusion, I greatly enjoyed the 2025 Student Art Exhibition in general and the Friday reception, and I encourage all readers to come and witness the talent of our homegrown student artists. The exhibit will remain open until the 2nd of May in the Lord Hall Gallery; admission is free to students and visitors alike.
