Exhibitions Wed, 16 May 2012 20:58:48 -0400 1440 Exhibitions 60th Anniversary Honors Exhibition Artists' Reception Saturday, May 19, 3-5 pm
The opening exhibition of CMCA’s 60th anniversary year honors five artists whose work, throughout their careers, reflects CMCA’s mission of “advancing contemporary art in Maine.” The five honorees demonstrate through their art a willingness to continually challenge assumptions, to experiment, and to push past established boundaries—exemplifying a spirit of innovation and excellence that contributes to the expansion of contemporary art in Maine.

60th Anniversary Honors Artists
• John Bisbee (sculptor): Brunswick, Maine
• Katherine Bradford (painter): Brunswick, Maine, and New York City
• Frederick Lynch (painter): Saco, Maine
• Todd Watts (photographer): Blanchard, Maine
• Mark Wethli (painter): Brunswick, Maine

John Bisbee is known for his sculptural works created from nails in all sizes, ranging from small brads to large spikes. He is an art professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. Bisbee received his B.F.A. from Alfred University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Bisbee’s solo museum exhibitions include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and a mid-career retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine in 2008.

Bisbee is a recipient of a 2006 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. He has also received a Maine State Individual Artist Grant; the Rappaport Prize, administered by the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art Biennial Purchase Prize and William Thon Jurors' Prize.

Bisbee's work has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, Sculpture magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe.

Abstraction and humor play important roles in Katherine Bradford’s paintings, which incorporate both reality and poetic imagination. Bradford attended Bryn Mawr College and holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum (Maine), and the Farnsworth Museum (Maine). She lives in New York City and has a painting studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Bradford is on the graduate MFA faculty at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and teaches a course on non-traditional painting at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In 2009 she was a resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Her work is represented by the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York City and Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, Maine.

Bradford was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.

As an abstract painter, Maine artist Frederick Lynch uses a system of repeated geometries and mathematical divisions to create his art. His paintings evoke the type of order and chaos found in patterns of nature, such as branching, veining of leaves, and molecular systems.

Lynch has lived in Maine for more than 35 years. He presently resides in Saco and serves as a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of Southern Maine, where he has taught since 1981. He has exhibited widely throughout New England and beyond. In 2005, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland mounted a 20-year survey of his work.

Lynch’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Bates College Museum of Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

In an interview with photographer Todd Watts in Art New England (Jan/Feb 2011), Carl Little wrote that Watts "manipulate[s] imagery—be it surfaces of planets, the human body, or the Brooklyn Bridge—and play[s] with perception." Little added: “With a fascination for science and an eye toward humans’ fate, Watts provokes through alteration.”

Watts graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and was a photography instructor there and at Hunter College. A master printer, Watts produced all of Berenice Abbott's limited edition portfolios, and recently printed Bert Lincoln Call’s vintage images of the Maine woods.

Watts’s work is in many private and public collections across the US, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Museum of Art, Yale Art Gallery, and the Portland Museum of Art (Maine), as well as in public collections in Australia, France, Austria, and Canada. Gallery representation of his work includes Multi-Editions Press in Tampa, Florida, and Parasol Press in New York City.

Mark Wethli is a painter and public artist whose work investigates the interplay of light, color, geometry, and architecture. Wethli lives and works in Brunswick, Maine, where he is also the A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art at Bowdoin College. He received his B.F.A. and M.F.A from the University of Miami.

Wethli's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including solo museum exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. He has been a resident fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Millay Colony for the Arts, and he has received individual artist's grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, as well as two purchase awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

His work is in numerous private and museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Portland Museum of Art, and has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, Art New England, The Portland Phoenix, and The Boston Globe, among others.


Ranged Event
From: 5/19/2012
To: 7/9/2012

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