UM museum mounts three new exhibits during winter

BANGOR – Three new exhibitions will be presented by The University of Maine Museum of Art during the winter season.

Maine artist Michael Alpert’s photographs portray the often harsh, unadorned beauty of the state in “Michael Alpert: Recent Photographs.”

Reminding us of distant summer days, “Five Landscape Paintings” brings welcome warmth to winter’s cold with an exhibition of large, summer landscape paintings by five artists: Neil Welliver, Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, April Gornik and Vaino Kola.

Portland artist and curator Lauren Fensterstock features conceptual sculptures, which uniquely twist nature with the man-made.

The work will be on display Jan. 20-April 8.

. “Michael Alpert: Recent Photographs” are black and white images which record an unvarnished Maine. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum, “Pictures must not be too picturesque” has resonance in these spare, detailed photographs which are rendered with unsentimental precision.

Taken during the past two years, Alpert’s photographs depict places people drive by daily, often without consideration. Frequently, Michael Alpert has been there as well, recording the built Maine environment for our closer inspection. His timeless images are less concerned with the natural beauty of the landscape but concentrate instead on the houses, barns, factories and monuments – portraying these signposts of our history with an awful, quiet beauty.

Alpert is a Bangor resident. His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in 2004, which also published a book of his photographs, “A Maine Portfolio.”

. “Five Landscape Paintings” will bring warmth to winter’s cold days by presenting large landscape paintings of summer. In these paintings, each of the five artists – Neil Welliver, Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, April Gornik and Vaino Kola – and Neil Welliver, is engaged in recording the landscape in a singular way.

Neil Welliver, 1929-2005, a Pennsylvania native, graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art, now part of the University of the Arts, and later received a master’s degree from Yale University, where he studied with the noted abstract artist Josef Albers. From 1956 to 1966 Welliver taught at Yale, and from 1966 to 1989 at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art despite having moved to Lincolnville in 1970.

Lois Dodd was born in Montclair, N.J., in 1927. In 1952 she was one of five artists to establish the Tanager Gallery, where she exhibited until 1962. From 1971 to 1992 she taught at Brooklyn College and has, since 1980, served on the board of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Rackstraw Downes, a native of Kent, England, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art at Yale University. He spent 12 years as a professor of painting at University of Pennsylvania, and in 1999 was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

April Gornik, born in Cleveland in 1953, is a painter and printmaker in New York. She has shown extensively, in one-person and group shows, in the United States and abroad. Her work is owned by many museums including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Vaino Kola was born in Finland in 1937. He received a bachelor’s degree from MA College of Art and a master’s degree from Yale University. His work has been shown extensively in the United States and in Europe. He retired from Wheaton College in 1994, professor of art, emeritus. In 1995 he became a year-round resident of Deer Isle.

. Lauren Fensterstock of Portland trained as a painter and jewelry maker at Parsons School of Design, New York City, and further refined her talents in graduate school at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her recent work embraces a perceived conflict, twisting nature with the man-made, the uncommon with common objects.

For additional information, call Kathryn Jovanelli, 561-3350. Museum of Art hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Admission is $3 per person.