The Art Gallery is pleased to welcome two new works for presentation in the Crewe Center for the Arts.
Split IV by Bob Crewe will hang in the new Great Hall Gallery in the Crewe Center for the Arts. This piece is comprised of two half-circles that hang with a small space between them. The halves don’t quite touch, and their tension allows the mind’s eye to fill in the circle, as if it were complete.
In the context of the Crewe Center, the halves are likened to diverse artistic disciplines — art and music, theater and book arts — and how we come together in the Center to form something greater than the sum of our individual parts. The piece raises considerations of how the arts influence each other, and how the boundaries we put between them are arbitrary, imaginary, and permeable; how we only need to change our perspective slightly to see the connective tissue that forms culture’s capillary capacity.
Split IV is loaned to the University courtesy of The Crewe Foundation.
The University of Southern Art Gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of Out in May Back by October (2023) by artist Summer J. Hart.
Out in May Back by October features a portrait in greyscale of the artist’s paternal grandparents rendered through pulped and beaded paper. The paper used in this piece is recycled, abandoned newsprint sourced from the ruins of the East Millinocket paper mill. Furthering a connection with Maine’s paper industry is the subject of the artist’s grandparents, who met on the Listuguj (then Restigouche) Mi’kmaq First Nation Reserve during a recruitment drive by the Great Northern Paper Company. To create the piece, Hart employed a loom beading technique taught to her by a Native aunt when she was a child.
The University Art Gallery acquired this piece to include in our new Crewe Center for the Arts. As a building focused on the exchange between the arts and Maine communities, the Crewe Center provides a home that underlines the cross-pollination of techniques and concepts that comprise this piece. The Center houses both the Great Hall Gallery and the Kate Cheney Chappell Center for Book Arts. A poet and artist, Hart’s practice holds particular relevance for our new space. Her work is rooted in an interrogation of paper as a material through careful sourcing that builds conceptual relevance. Hart furthers the conceptual saliency of Out in May by employing an artistic technique that amplifies the material’s inherent qualities through pulping and reforming and references a lineage of familial and indigenous practices. The artist’s careful consideration of message forwarding through medium, technique, and subject is emblematic of book art’s continued relevancy in contemporary art. It embodies the interdisciplinary exchange of art within the Crewe Center for the Arts.
Rigor of craft, concept, lineage, and place meld together in Hart’s work. Out in May, Back by October‘s acquisition serves as a beacon of the University of Southern Maine’s priorities for all who enter the Crewe Center, embodying interdisciplinary exchange and the networks of heritage — regional, familial, industrial, ecological, and artistic — that hold us.
Funds provided by the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery, Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, Office of the Provost, The College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, The Office of Student Engagement & Belonging, the Maine Community Foundation, and contributions from Libby Bischoff and Adam Tuchinsky.