Center for Maine Contemporary Announces Additional Details for Upcoming 2025 Biennial

Rockland, ME, September 5, 2025 – The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) is proud to announce additional details of its upcoming 2025 Biennial, including a reception with the artists on Friday, October 3, 2025 from 5 – 7 p.m.

Dating back to 1978, CMCA’s Biennial is the longest running survey of contemporary art by artists with ties to Maine. This edition features 29 artists selected from a pool of over 450 applicants by jurors Keith Fox, Tom Keyes, and William Hathaway. Well over three quarters of the artists are full-time Maine residents living in communities from York to Bar Harbor to Orono; others have longstanding seasonal ties to the state or have participated in residencies and fellowships at a number of its prestigious schools and artist-endowed foundations. Though certain motifs and strategies recur across the jurors’ selections—seafaring and the horizon, uncanny interior scenes and landscapes, narratives of the vitality of marginalized communities and the dignity of labor, and the state’s ongoing love affair with painting—their choices reflect an open-minded, non-thematic, and intergenerational understanding of Maine’s role in contemporary art.

Serving as a juror for CMCA's 2025 Biennial has been a deeply thought-provoking and rewarding experience. The submissions reflected both a high level of technical skill and creativity, as well as an acute awareness of the unprecedented environmental and geopolitical times we currently seek to understand and navigate. The Maine landscape figures prominently in many of the artists’ entries. It serves as a setting, a character, a symbol of our collective resilience, and even as indicator of our increasing vulnerability. We are reminded that while the Maine landscape might root us in the local, it calls on us to reflect and question all that is changing around us on a global level. Our selections offer a powerful insight into how these Maine artists are responding to these challenges through creativity with a nod toward urgency. – Tom Keyes

It was an honor to reconnect and acquaint myself with the thriving visual arts community in my home state of Maine. While I was already familiar with some of the incredible artists who applied, many were new to me, which inspired excitement about the present and the future of the arts in Maine. – William Hathaway

CMCA’s 2025 Biennial is supported by generous donors to CMCA’s Suzette McAvoy Exhibition Fund and Andrea and Tyler Curtis-Southard / Edward Jones.