The Center for Maine Contemporary Art will celebrate its 2025 Biennial in October, with a reception with the artists from 5-7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3.
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,” Keyes said in a prepared release. “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.”
