For readers who have uncomplicated, loving relationships with their extended family coming to visit this Turkey Day, we say congratulations. For the rest of us who have a bit more fraught relationships with our close and/or extended families, here are some inoffensive and broad Shiny Objects. Hopefully an activity, live show or group outing will distract you from certain a family member’s off-kilter political leanings, backhanded compliments, and/or complaints about dates you brought home ten years ago. Head out and do something before the living room and dinner-time banter drives you to say or do something you’ll regret.

Things to do in Massachusetts 

It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection
Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square,
161 Essex Street
Salem
On view until November 26th
10AM – 5PM

Trick your Trump-supporting uncle into seeing this collection of classic horror and science fiction art. He’ll think he’s just seeing a bunch of rogue brutal works owned by the guitarist of Metallica, but you’ll know he’s actually “[exploring] the interplay of creativity, emotion and popular culture.”

SAINTS SLUTS SIRENS: Archetypes of the Feminine
UnchARTed Gallery
103 Market Street
Lowell
Friday November 24, Saturday November 25
11:30am to 1am

The lucky ones have at least one super cool, feminist relative right? They’re the one you can knowingly glance at across the table when someone’s husband says something awful. Peel away from the rest of the family and go see this exhibit with that special relative who sees your distaste with it all.

Things to do in Connecticut

Rags: An American Musical
The Goodspeed
6 Main Street
East Haddam
Friday, November 24 2PM & 8PM
Saturday, November 25 3PM & 8PM
Sunday, November 26 2PM 6:30PM

A good ol’ American musical about immigrants coming to the United States in the early 20th century. Certainly not an uncomplicated topic, but with a score by the songwriters of Annie and Wicked, everyone should be enamored for (at least) the duration of the performance.

Things to do in Vermont

Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium
1302 Main Street
St. Johnsbury
9AM – 5PM

With differing natural history exhibitions and contemporary programming in the varied locations across their Arts and Culture Campus, there’s something for everyone here. Study the museum map BEFORE you get stoned with your cousins and unsuccessfully attempt to locate the planetarium.

Things to do in Maine

19th Annual Animation Show of Shows
Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square
Friday, November 24, 2PM & 6PM
Saturday, November 25, 2PM
Sunday, November 26, 2PM
Portland, Maine

Animation is truly an incredible medium. Animated characters can reduce your Trump-supporting uncle to tears just as easily as it can provoke existential questions from your sibling getting his PhD in bioethics. In other words, animation is broad, entertaining and distracting, making it a perfect shared experience for any group.

Things to do in Rhode Island

Bowen’s Wharf Block Party
13 Bowen’s Wharf
Newport
Friday, November 24th
4:00-8pm (Parade starts at 6:15 PM)

It’s a harmless block party by the sea! Take the whole fam to watch the boat parade and while they’re distracted, sneak into one of the shops to do some pre-holiday shopping.

Things to do in New Hampshire

Art on The Hill Open Studios
Art on The Hill Kittery
78 Government Street
Kittery
Friday November 24 – Sunday November 26
10AM – 5PM

Here’s the plan: bring the whole family, separate from the group with your favs, leave the unwanted and unsavory relatives behind to fend for themselves. With three floors and dozens of studios to peruse, you should be able to disappear pretty easily.

The post Shiny Objects: November 24th-26th appeared first on Take Magazine.

This week’s Shiny Objects are a bit unexpected: Nan Goldin photographs in Maine, authentic Ethiopian cuisine in Vermont, and miles of outdoor sculptures in New Hampshire. It’s time to put on some pants, and go out to suss some fun before the seasonal depression sets in.

Massachusetts

Larkin Grimm
The Dreamaway Lodge
1342 County Road
Becket, Massachusetts
Sunday, November 12

Escape to the dreamiest spot in New England for food, stranger banter by the fire, and the “musical sculpture” of Larkin Grimm.

Connecticut

Famous Dex
Toad’s Place
300 York St.
New Haven, Connecticut
Sunday, November 12th
9 pm

This is your chance to see the Chicago-born, trap sensation Famous Dex in person at one of New Haven’s most legendary and intimate venues.

Vermont

Authentic Ethiopian Night
ArtsRiot
400 Pine Street
Burlington, Vermont
Sunday, November 12th
4:30pm – 10pm

Join chefs Alganesh Michael and Mulu Twelde for a pop-up night of Ethiopian cuisine featuring a full menu and a “traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony where the coffee beans are roasted and brewed to order.”

Maine

Nan Goldin
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square
Portland, Maine
through December 31, 2017

You’ve probably seen the generation-defining photography of Nan Goldin in art history books, and libraries across the world. Come see one of the installations that started it all—The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—as it returns to New England for the first time in 30 years.

Rhode Island

Pushing Wood Book Signing
Civil Providence
86 Main Street
East Greenwich RI
Saturday, November 11th
1pm – 4pm

Take Magazine fav Ramiro Davaro-Comas will be hanging at Civil Providence ready to sign copies of his new book Pushing Wood. There’s also talk of free stickers, t-shirts and a Vans giveaway, so get there early.

New Hampshire

The Millbrook Gallery and Sculpture Garden
236 Hopkinton Road
Concord, New Hampshire
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm, and by appointment

Pretty soon it’ll be legitimately unpleasant to outside, so get to one of our favorite sculpture gardens in New England before it’s too late. Millbrook has several permanent exhibitions on view, but don’t miss their current indoor/outdoor Fall Art Exhibit.

The post Shiny Objects: November 10th-12th appeared first on Take Magazine.

“In the winter when all the trees are bare, you can see Canada from here,” says Anna Hepler as I stare out on a verdant canopy from the second story of her studio in Eastport, Maine. I can just make out the Atlantic shining through the leaves. Perched on a small island just south of the Canadian border, Eastport is the definition of remote. It’s here that one of Maine’s most acclaimed contemporary artists chose to make her home four years ago, seeking out the solitude and freedom that have fueled her creative activity ever since.

Perhaps best known for her massive inflatable sculptures made from recycled plastic that swell and crumple as if breathing, Hepler constructs pieces that are remarkably diverse yet cohesive. For decades, the same collections of imagery—crystalline lattice structures; biomorphic cellular forms; and concentric, tightly spiraling masses—have preoccupied her work in ceramics, crocheted wire, soft sculpture, collage, etching, and virtually any other medium pulled into her creative orbit.

Bloom, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

I first meet Hepler at the door of her Eastport studio, left open to the midsummer sea breeze. A 45-year-old with close-cropped silver hair, she bristles with energy. She takes a moment to wash the grit from her hands as I survey her workspace: a two-story, concrete-floored building Hepler and her husband refurbished several months ago. She retained her first studio in town—a raw industrial building tucked behind the storefronts along the city’s sleepy waterfront—as a secondary space, the staging ground for her museum-scale installations.

Books and tools line the walls of her studio, which is charged with the energy of constant activity and fresh ideas. An in-process wire sculpture sits on the floor, a portion of a monumental work that fills an entire gallery as part of the 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial. A side room reveals a miniature ceramics studio, where she creates dense clay objects in addition to functional pottery when the mood strikes her. The lofted second floor features flat files and a small printing press—“my little bindery,” as she refers to it fondly. Prototypes and works in progress lay scattered across the various stations, ready to be revisited at a moment’s notice.

Double Hung from Blind Spot, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

Despite the evidence of intense focus that suffuses Hepler’s workshop, to her it is a place of refuge. “I prefer to be here whenever I can,” she tells me. “I rebuilt this space very much with eyes off the street, not putting windows in the first floor, turning away and only giving myself a place to look out high overhead. It goes back to the small-town problem: you look out and think, ‘Oh, there goes Billy Boon; what are they doing over there?’ You know everybody, especially in the winter. Living here, the hardest thing is getting your head out from under all of that. I feel that I built the studio very consciously as a private, inward space.”

This sense of interiority is a defining characteristic of Hepler’s work. Her creative world is a private universe, a place where recurring shapes and images—her “elemental forms,” as she calls them—seem to evolve and curl into themselves in a state of continual reinvention. For years she has explored this family of forms and motifs, flattening, stretching, and reconfiguring them in the pursuit of some basic core truth.

In Blind Spot, her recent solo exhibition at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, Hepler filled the gallery with a constellation of objects and images: large-scale woodblock prints and etchings, a selection of sculptures in wood, matte black ceramics, airy wire sculptures, stitched textiles, and crocheted plastic forms that, for all their difference of scale and media, seem to carry the same essential genetic makeup. Faint allusions to organic life, paired with an intense visual restraint, permeate everything she makes.

Prints and sculpture from Blind Spot exhibit at University of Maine Museum of Art, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

The explosion of output found in Blind Spot began with a simple collage. Animal camouflage collected from an issue of National Geographic, cut and layered into biomorphic abstractions, led to abstract prints and sculptures that explore shimmering permutations of creaturely, enigmatic forms, all pattern and volume. The most fascinating work from the series is a sculpture made from wood panels—the original woodblocks from which the prints were made—hinged together into a three-dimensional object, hanging in space like a sort of surreal animal pelt.

Alphabet installation from BlindSpot exhibit at University of Maine Museum of Art, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

Blind Spot revealed not only Hepler’s ingenuity across media, but also her prolific rate of output. “You can get a lot done here in the winter,” she says. “There’s not much else to do, as you can imagine.” Before her move to Eastport, Hepler was a professor of art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where she became a well-known and much-beloved fixture in Maine’s widely dispersed but tight-knit art community.

The decision to give up teaching and the promise of a stable career to devote herself more fully to her craft was difficult, but necessary. “I miss the relationships,” she says, “but I do not miss the teaching at all. Every time I’m put into that position, even as a visiting artist, I feel almost immediately awkward. It seems like such a false pretense for me to have knowledge and to be dispensing it, because the whole thing we do as creative people is try what is unfamiliar and take risks. So the notion of being an authority in your field—and professionalizing the output—I feel like it’s corrupting.”

Hepler is unapologetic about her intuitive approach to her work, and to art in general. Well spoken, incisive, and confident, she nonetheless looks at art making with an air of uncertainty, a kind of risk taking that simply wasn’t tenable within the humdrum of academia. “The institution asks you—needs you—to act with authority in relation to your students,” she says. “So all of the vulnerabilities that are so much the climate of making your best work are held at bay.”

It’s the search for that atmosphere of creative honesty that finally led Hepler and her family to settle in Eastport, following brief stints in places as farflung as California, Rome, Washington State, and South Korea. “When I was living in Korea, everything I made was hot pink,” she confesses with a laugh. “Things get more structural and black and white in New England. I don’t know what happens.” Her husband, Jon Calame, is a freelance nonfiction writer, and their two children, whom they homeschool, have been raised in an environment of flexibility and independence.

For Hepler and her family, the relative isolation of Eastport is both a blessing and a challenge. As we scan her personal library discussing influences, she hugs a favorite hardbound volume to her chest as a sort of thrilled shiver moves through her. “Thank god for publishing! You just can’t see stuff like this up here.” Trips to larger cities like Boston and New York provide a necessary injection of cultural inspiration and are planned months in advance. “My parents-in-law have a place in New York City, and we go there every year,” she says. “For those brief moments when we get into a big city, we’re all just so thirsty for it after being up here. We’re so fresh to any new experience. It’s exciting.”

These rare excursions help feed the long, quiet periods of activity on the island. “Leaving is an important part of being here,” she says. “We all need chances to escape wherever we are.” While the stability, calm, and near anonymity afforded by a life away from the center nourishes her creativity, Hepler is by no means a recluse. On the heels of her massive installation in the Portland biennial, she is planning solo shows in Virginia and Colorado, followed by a residency and an exhibition at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, the summer of 2016. The school made an indelible mark on art history in the 1970s as a remote but highly influential bastion for conceptual art. It’s that same spirit of seclusion and experimentation that Hepler hopes to tap into during her time there. In many ways, it’s what she first sought in coming north to Eastport.

“Moving up here was in large part a way to know myself, away from all my insecurities,” she says. “I’m the type of person to be concerned about what other people think. But if I can live up here and be alone, away from those voices, I have a better chance at listening to myself. That’s all we can do in our lives anyway, is listen to ourselves.

“We’re all alone with our work, and I think that the more honest we can be with ourselves, the better the quality of what we make. It’s all part of some larger project to answer the question: What would I make alone on a desert island? Not that that’s a realistic context.” She pauses for a moment, mulling over her own quandary. “But I am on an island,” she adds finally, smiling to herself. “I’m getting there.”

Anna Hepler–artist
Eastport, Maine
Website
Instagram

Top image, Anna Hepler, photo by Allison Osberg

The post Artist at the Edge of the World appeared first on Take Magazine.

The text on the side of the new gorgeous glass wall of the Colby College Museum of Art reads, “The museum is a school: The artist learns to communicate; the public learns to make connections.” Tucked in tiny Waterville, Maine, these words embody the museum’s mission: To teach not just the students on campus, but also to foster the broader connections between people in the community and around the world.

We sat down with Sharon Corwin, museum director, to learn more about how Colby’s museum is pushing the boundaries of the contemporary American art scene in Maine thanks in large part to a recent donation of the enviable art collection of Peter and Paula Lunder. Appraised at more than $100 million, the collection, which represents a lifetime of collecting, includes everything from Winslow Home and Georgia O’Keeffe to James McNeill Whistler. Lunder, the former president of the Dexter Shoe Company, is a Colby College alumnus.

Tell us about the new gift and what it means for the Colby Museum.

SC: This year, the Lunders made another extraordinary gift—now the collection is almost just over 1,500 works of art. And their commitment expanded beyond the works of art through the Lunder Institute for American Art, which is launching this coming year. Artists, curators, creators, and scholars will come to Colby to work with the collection in the museum, to engage with our faculty and students on Colby’s campus, and to really create opportunities for art dialogue, art creation, and art scholarship.

How does this fit in with the arts scene in Maine?

SC: Maine is such a special place for the arts. Historically, it’s been a place artists have been coming to for centuries, from Winslow Homer to Marsden Hartley and Alex Katz. One of the great things about Maine as a destination and as an arts center is the way in which there are these different entities that really complement each other well. You’ve got the Farnsworth Art Museum on the coast, the Colby College Museum of Art here in Waterville, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, which is a much more encyclopedic museum, and you’ve got the Portland Museum of Art with their beautiful galleries. I think our galleries and our focus on contemporary American Art really allows us to do world-class programs in those areas that complement the rest of the programs happening in the state.

Gordon Gallery, Colby College Museum of Art

In what ways does the Colby Museum work to foster connections with the Maine community through art?

SC: When we opened up [the Lunder] wing in 2013, our attendance went from 20,000 annually to 50,000 annually. We’re free and open to the public so that anyone can come into our galleries and have a world class experience with some great art, and it’s a really exciting thing to be able to offer. The arts and cultural opportunities will play a really big role in this next chapter of Waterville’s history, which I think will be such a vibrant one.

With contemporary art, we’re constantly pushing the boundaries of what “art” means. Why is that important, and how does the museum help define contemporary American art?

SC: One of the key things I hope we’re able to do here within a liberal arts context is ask these fundamental questions like: What is art? I think especially as a college art museum to be able to ask those kinds of questions, to be able to challenge assumptions, is a great place for us to be.

I think the ability to bring artists to Colby and to the museum through the Lunder Institute and have them ask some of the most pressing questions, not just in the art world but in the world today around civic engagement [will help push the boundaries]. There will be opportunities for the artists to be in dialogue with each other, with scholars, and with students and faculty in a way that can generate responses to some of these core questions and issues.

How do you see the museum changing and growing in the next few years?

SC: I think we’re going to continue to have one of the greatest collections in the world. The Lunder Institute for American Art is going to be offering opportunities for artists and scholars to do really groundbreaking projects here, at the museum, on campus, and in Waterville. I think our connection to the academic program will continue to grow and strengthen, and I hope that our connection to the civic life of our town continues to grow and strengthen and that we can make an impact on the lives not just of Colby students but our visitors, our residents of Maine in really profound ways.

Sharon Corwin–director, Colby Museum of Art
Waterville, Maine
Website
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Instagram
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The post Bringing Cutting Edge Art to Rural Maine appeared first on Take Magazine.

Maine artist Stacy Howe is an artistic alchemist. Her drawings meld Surrealistic and Victorian themes, from dreams and dark humor to elements from the natural world and other seemingly random ideas. She calls her largely black and white works “sanguinary assemblages on paper.” No matter how they’re described, they’re compelling and, perhaps, a little menacing.

“I’m inspired by many things,” Howe says. “I’m very interested in nature, our fear of nature, as well as Victorian material culture. I love the Gothic tropes, moody atmosphere and psychology of the era.”

Howe builds three-dimensional models constructed of paper and objects she wants to draw. She then cuts and layers the images to create a finished piece. Her works can combine pencil, charcoal, pen and ink as well as acrylic, iodine, and even blood. “I draw very non-traditionally,” she says. “I’m more like a draftsman. I’m very organized, I make cut-outs and rearrange them. They reflect my own personal lexicon.”

Howe’s lexicon is diverse; history and New England’s natural world figure prominently in her work. Raised in Northborough, Massachusetts, Howe once explored local woods and apple orchards as a child; she now prefers living on the coast, in Portland, Maine. “The ocean is so much part of life here,” she says. “I could never be landlocked.” She studied history before receiving a bachelor’s degree in studio art from University of Massachusetts, Boston (and later a master’s degree in studio art from Maine College of Art). Historic research—eclectic subjects range from London’s Great Smog in 1952 to Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919—is an important part of her process; she’s especially fascinated with Surrealistic themes like death, horror, and the occult. “I have many similarities with them in my subject and practice,” she says.

Stacy Howe, FUSELAGE OF ANTIQUES AND MEMORABILIA 2015, ink, charcoal, graphite, acrylic on paper, 48” X 60”

A fan of Law and Order reruns, Howe employs the same clinically detached observation of death and horror in her work as a television cop. Her fantastical images unexpectedly pair these themes with beautiful or fanciful images like jewels, animals or flowers. “I’ll create a dead body with occult objects arranged around it in a matter-of-fact way,” she says. Her work has evolved according to what she interprets as horror. “I like the idea that horror can be the anticipation of something happening,” she says. “I like creating that bridge for the viewer so they can anticipate and bring their own ideas to what’s happening.”

Howe’s work has been featured in numerous group and individual shows around Maine, including the Portland Museum of Art‘s 2015 Biennal. Her work is included in the ArtPM Challenge exhibition at the Buoy Gallery in Kittery, Maine, through April 30; and in Bared, an exhibition at the Ground Floor Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee, starting in August 2017.

Stacy Howe — artist from Portland, Maine
Website

Top Image: Piñata Seal 2014, ink, acrylic, charcoal, pencil, 22” X 38”

The post The Artistic Alchemy of Stacy Howe appeared first on Take Magazine.