Experience “20 Walks” with Artist Lin Lisberger at USM’s Gorham Art Gallery

The University of Southern Maine Art Gallery in Gorham is now offering Artist Gallery Hours with exhibiting sculptor Lin Lisberger. Visitors are encouraged to stop by Thursdays from 12 to 4 p.m. through December 10 to meet the artist, ask questions, and gain deeper insight into her creative process and current exhibition, 20 Walks.

“My sculptures reinforce the beauty and spirituality of walking, and the places people walk,” Lisberger writes.

20 Walks explores the ways in which memory is tied to physical space through the somatic experience of walking. Lisberger investigates these connections through sculpture, working primarily in wood. The show leads viewers on a journey through the places she has walked, offering space to form personal connections and draw memories from the scenes she has created.

In her curatorial essay for 20 Walks, Kat Zagaria Buckley, Director of Art Exhibitions and Outreach, writes: “Walking carves places in our memories. Footfalls over decaying foliage, stumbles over rocks, sojourns to locales whose cultural understanding can only be arrived at through the body’s somatic memory: these constitute Lisberger’s domain.”

Lin Lisberger is a Portland-based sculptor with an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. She revealed her love for sculpture after an injury in her undergrad dance class led her to enroll in sculpture instead. After graduating, she went on to pursue an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in Sculpture. This early encounter may have helped shape Lisberger’s enduring, physical approach to her work.

For Lin Lisberger, carving wood becomes an act of remembering — a way to give form to place through sculpture.

“I walk for physical and social reasons. I walk for emotional reasons. I walk because I like how it feels to move through space, and I like the spaces that I move through,” Lisberger reflects.

20 Walks transforms everyday movement into an artistic meditation on connection, memory, and landscape.