Lewis Gallery at the Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland, Maine.

Opening Reception: First Friday Art Walk, March 7, 5-8pm.

Collage X 10, an exhibition at the Portland Public Library’s Lewis Gallery, features ten contemporary Maine artists. The exhibition is sponsored by CMCA and curated by CMCA curator emeritus Bruce Brown.

Participating artists are:

Daniel Anselmi (Belfast)

Gabriella D’Italia (Newburgh)

David Driskell (Falmouth)

Stew Henderson (Northport)

Charlie Hewitt (Portland)

Karen MacDonald (Stockton Springs)

Dan Mills (Lewiston)

Shannon Rankin (Rangeley)

Abbie Read (Appleton)

Noriko Sakanishi (Portland)

While suggestions of landscape and figuration can be found among the works in the exhibition, particularly in the collages of D’Italia, Driskell, and Hewitt, much of the work is essentially abstract in nature, with the artists less interested in the recognizable object than in referencing the essential vocabulary and tools of art itself—line, light and shadow, color, texture, volume, and space.

Collage, from the French coller, to glue, is a technique of art making that dates back to the invention of paper itself, circa 200 B.C.E. in China. Its current popularity as an art form, however, emerged only about a century ago, thanks largely to the French cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who introduced bits of newspaper and everyday ephemera into their paintings to allude to contemporary life. Today, collage is a broadly used term encompassing a great variety of mixed media works, with the common denominator usually being found paper, cut, torn, or repurposed in some way to create a new whole.

The exhibition continues through Saturday, March 29, and is open free of charge during the library’s regular hours: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday.

CMCA is grateful for the generous support of its major media sponsor, Maine Home + Design magazine.