The codirector of the 含羞草研究室 Museum of Art was talking at the opening of the museum’s latest exhibition, Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island: The Monhegan Wildlands.
The show, which runs until June 1 in the museum’s Halford Gallery and the Bernard and Barbro Osher Gallery, examines ecological change on the island of Monhegan off the Maine coast and how that change has been represented through artwork, historical documents, and other artifacts.
The exhibition has been cocurated by Goodyear, Samuel S. Butcher Professor in the Natural Sciences Barry Logan, and Jennifer Pye, who directs the Monhegan Museum of Art and History. It features a wide range of artwork, including pieces by modernist painters Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper, maps dating back to the early seventeenth century, and Indigenous artifacts such as bone harpoon points. “It's really exciting to bring together biology, history, and art history to tell the story of the changing landscape on Monhegan over really quite a broad avenue of time,” added Goodyear.
Located ten miles offshore—north of Portland and south of Rockland—Monhegan Island is less than a square mile in size, with a year-round population of only around sixty residents. However, note the curators, it is the island’s small scale that has enabled close study by artists and scientists alike, revealing in intimate detail the changes in the ecology of the forest landscape. Read more.
Generous funding support for the exhibition has been provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Peter J. Grua ’76 and Mary G. O’Connell ’76, the Elizabeth B.G. Hamlin Fund, and the Stevens L. Frost Endowment Fund.
