At First Light chronicles twenty-six extraordinary artists of the last two hundred years who have lived and worked in Maine. Published to coincide with the Maine’s bicentennial in 2020, the volume considers the significant contributions artists have made to a deeper and more profound understanding of Maine's history, its land and its peoples. Maine's unique and breathtaking landscape--from its rugged coastline, quaint harbors, majestic mountains, and verdant forests--continues to have a powerful effect on the artists who are drawn to its shores.
Written and expertly researched by some of the foremost scholars and curators in the field, each chapter focuses on a different artist, featuring the artists' artworks and anchored by breathtaking contemporary photography of their homes, studios, and surroundings. From picturesque bungalows to grander structures with beautiful vistas, the houses and studios featured are as diverse as the artists who have inhabited them. The artists featured include fan favorites to lesser known yet important figures from the eighteenth century to the present day, working in a range of media from painting to photography to sculpture, including: Jonathan Fisher, Winslow Homer, Frank Weston Benson, Charles Herbert Woodbury, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Marguerite and William Zorach, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Eliot Porter, Fairfield Porter, Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Ashley Bryan, Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, Bernard Langlais, Robert Indiana, David C. Driskell, Molly Neptune Parker, Richard Tuttle, and William Wegman.
Anne Collins Goodyear is codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Frank H. Goodyear III is codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Michael K. Komanecky is chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, in Rockland, Maine. Stuart Kestenbaum is the Poet Laureate of Maine. Walter Smalling is a photographer based in Washington, D.C.
This book accompanies the summer 2020 exhibition, At First Light: Two Centuries of Artists in Maine, on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art from June 27 through November 15, 2020.
Hardcover, 2020: 240 pages, fully illustrated; 9-3/8 x 11”.
