FARMINGTON – The University of Maine at Farmington New Commons Project, in partnership with the Emery Community Arts Center, is inviting artists to submit their work for consideration for a fall exhibit entitled, “Reimagining the Real.” This thematic exhibition will be the opening event for the New Commons Project’s exploration of “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth this September and will mark the opening of Emery’s tenth anniversary season, as well as its reopening to the public.
For more information about the open call, or to submit your artwork, please follow this link to the Call for Entry Submission Form: https://forms.gle/TBfdXYPKgp3a4zhR9. Submissions are due July 18, 2021.
Reimagining the Real presents an opportunity to exhibit an expanded survey of contemporary artworks that engage the legacy of realism in the 21st century, continuing, complicating or contesting this tradition.
Curators Ann Bartges, UMF assistant professor of Visual Arts and Emery director, and Kristen Case, UMF professor of English, hope the show will spark conversations about what realistic means as well as how aesthetic conventions and representations of “the real” affect our ways of perceiving the internal and external realities in which we live.
The exhibition will be on view from September 2- October 21, 2021 in Emery Community Art Center’s Flex Space Gallery, University of Maine at Farmington.
Please contact Ann Bartges: emerycommunityartscenter@gmail.com with questions about this call.
More Information on Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”
Christina’s World, painted in 1948, depicts Christina Olson, a friend and frequent subject of the painter, crawling toward her farmhouse home in Cushing, Maine. (Christina Olson was disabled, but refused to use a wheelchair.) The painting, nominated by Mike Wilson of Rockland, has long been considered a staple of mid-20th-century realism. Wyeth himself contested this categorization, however, pointing to the intensely inward and psychological aspects of his paintings.
