In the compartmentalized world of the second-grader, a teacher only exists in school or on the school playground. Discovering Miss Davis in the Shaw’s produce aisle is enough to shake a 7-year-old’s world to its foundation.

Even college students sometimes put people in boxes.

“Often students don’t know what the people who teach them do,” University of Maine Museum of Art Director Wally Mason said.

The annual art faculty exhibition at the Orono museum is one way for students to find out what their teachers do between classes. Opened this week on two floors in Carnegie Hall, the 1997 show is also an opportunity for the public to marvel at works of beauty and mull over more intellectual art.

The dominance of landscapes and nature-inspired subjects among the paintings, drawings, collage and sculpture is perhaps a factor of the rich geographic setting the contributors have in common. Mason’s decision to include descriptions written by the artists gives viewers an immediate point of access.

Nina Jerome, whose vibrant oil seascapes layer thick, curved dabs of color, writes of working exclusively with the light of early morning. In the large triptych “The Beach, 6:00 a.m., Aug. 11, 1996,” fragments of pale, cool color tossed like confetti effectively summon dawn’s thin-air feeling in blue, gold and lavender.

Jerome’s lush canvases contrast starkly with Vincent Hartgen’s ink drawings on the second floor. Deceptively simple and highly detailed, the black-on-white works from the past two years depict the surprisingly active surface of a winter lake and the fringed black slit of an ice cave.

A third Hartgen drawing of a mossy branch serves as a humorous reminder of the potential power of title. Once the name of the work is known — “One Audubon Bird Needed” — it becomes a drawing about the bird’s absence.

The black, white and gray forest of Siri Beckman’s 1991 handmade book “Small Victory” is at once delicate and unyielding. Trees at the center of the page are largest, seemingly inches away, putting the reader deep in the snowy woods where the artist searched for her injured dog.

Downstairs, another gorgeously illustrated Beckman book, “In Away,” begs to be pulled from its glass case and thumbed through page by page.

Nearby, photographs by Alan Stubbs capture the undulations of rock formations, and a cherry sculpture by Ann Alexander suggests bursting spring buds. David Decker, James Linehan, Leonard Gadzekpo, Michael Grillo and Owen Smith complete the show with drawings, paintings and mixed media exhibits that reconsider the definition of art.

Dramatic turpentine washes by Michael H. Lewis are the most forceful landscapes in the museum. Pale ridges of city anchor “Peace Be Within Thee (Jerusalem) #2”; in the tangerine, beige and dark blue mass of sky, the eye’s desire to impose depth fights the fine textured scratchwork on the surface.

The 1996 paintings “continue my use of landscape as a starting point for stretching assumptions about what is real,” Lewis writes.

While Lewis’ riverside hills and sea cliffs locate the viewer in a “real” landscape, Ashlee Basinger explores an indefinite realm of “bizarre and fantastic creature-like” motifs. Her 1992 mixed media work, “Tooth,” makes the viewer vaguely uneasy, unsure as he is of just what he is seeing.

Wandering drips of paint run from one square of paper to another; shapes in putty-gray or washed-out red suggest fingers gripping or roots protruding, some ominous inner machinery. The effect is messy, wild, and above all, alive.

Another of the show’s liveliest works is “Grace Runs the Voodoo Down” by museum Director Mason. A university newcomer, he enriches the exhibition by bringing a painting to the party — telling us, in the process, a bit more about himself.

His work is served well by its written explanation, without which it might be dismissed by some as modern mumbo-jumbo. It is, in fact, a colorful family “snapshot” and a “love note” to his 3-year-old daughter, a tribute to a toddler learning how to talk.

Fluid and active, the style is reminiscent of a child’s drawing, but complete in a way that child’s drawings rarely are. Its joyful, inexact chaos suggests a 3-year-old’s energy and a world of constant discovery: the subject’s amazement at the world, matched by the painter’s own wonder at his subject.

The University of Maine’s art faculty exhibition will be open to the public from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday through Feb. 15. An opening reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday at the Museum of Art in Carnegie Hall.