How Maine became one of America’s great artistic laboratories
When Faye Hirsch first visited the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in central Maine nearly three decades ago, she wasn’t allowed on the upper campus where artists lived, worked and shared ideas.
“I was visiting a friend who was teaching there, and outsiders simply weren’t permitted,” Hirsch recalled.
A curator and critic, Hirsch is a leading scholar of the Skowhegan School and co-author with Ingrid Schaffner of the forthcoming “In the Company of Artists: A History of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture,” the first history of the institution.
The restrictions aren’t about creating mystery, explained Ruth Estévez, the school’s co-director.
“It’s because artists already live in a world that demands constant visibility,” she said. “Here, we want artists to remain in a space of rehearsal without worrying that it will immediately transform into something public.”
That philosophy has guided Skowhegan, as it is familiarly known, since its founding in 1946. Created by artists making sense of the post-World War II world, the school gives artists dedicated time and space to learn, experiment and grow without working toward a finished product.
Since opening, the Madison-based school has welcomed nearly 6,000 artists. Alumni and faculty include artists many people now closely associate with Maine, including Bernard Langlais, David Driskell, Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, Ashley Bryan and Lois Dodd. Many arrived intending to spend only a summer here and instead developed lifelong relationships with the state.
Ashley Bryan (1923-2022), Dining Room, 1946, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. © 2026 Courtesy of The Ashley Bryan Center.
Lois Dodd (born 1927), The Painted Room, 1982, oil on linen, 60 x 50 inches. Farnsworth Art Museum, Gift of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York: Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Funds, 1991.7. © 2026 Lois Dodd, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.
Skowhegan is one of several institutions featured in “MAINE: A Force Within American Art (1890-2026),” the Farnsworth Art Museum’s landmark exhibition commemorating America’s 250th anniversary. Curated in partnership with Skowhegan, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Hudson Museum, Indigo Arts Alliance and Maine Media, the exhibition traces more than a century of artistic exchange that made Maine one of America’s most influential creative landscapes.
Visitors move chronologically through galleries exploring everything from the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show and the founding of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance to the artist colonies, residency programs and schools that transformed Maine into a creative destination and professional crossroads for artists from around the world.
Rather than celebrating famous individuals, the exhibition asks a broader question: What kinds of places and communities allow great art to happen?
For generations, Maine has offered artists something increasingly difficult to find: room to work independently without working alone. Painters, photographers and sculptors can retreat to forests, islands and small towns while remaining part of communities where creative risks can flourish and neighbors know one another. Throughout the exhibition, that balance between solitude and connection is highlighted.
Earlier this summer, the Farnsworth presented Skowhegan with its annual MAINE in America Award, recognizing the school’s lasting influence on American art.
“There is no other alternative art school that has influenced the development and lineage of both American art and Maine,” said Christopher Brownawell, executive director of the Farnsworth Art Museum.
Henry Varnum Poor (1887-1970), Portrait of Willard Cummings, undated, oil on board, 15 3/16 x 12 inches. Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Daphne and Will H. Cummings, 1991.039.
For Hirsch, the school’s emphasis on privacy is inseparable from its beginnings.
Co-founder Willard “Bill” Cummings served in the Army Art War unit during World War II. During those years, Hirsch said, he imagined a place where artists could recover personally and creatively, structured entirely differently from a traditional art school.
“He dreamed of creating a place where artists could escape, particularly after the hardship and trauma so many had experienced,” she said.
Instead of classrooms and rigid curricula, Cummings and his fellow founders, Sidney Simon, Henry Varnum Poor and Charles Cutler, envisioned a non-hierarchical community where artists would learn simply by living and working together. Cummings’s family farm became the site of what is now a 350-acre campus of forest, open land and lakeshore.
“They founded it for artists, by artists,” Hirsch said. “It wasn’t a collecting institution. It wasn’t an exhibition institution. It was a place rooted in the present.”
The exhibition’s installation on Skowhegan focuses on that formative first decade, when veterans of World War II worked alongside younger artists whose lives had followed very different paths.
“The relationships were naturally complex from the start,” Hirsch said.
Even before the Civil Rights Act, Skowhegan welcomed artists from diverse backgrounds and established a relationship with Howard University, where painter David Driskell studied before coming to Maine. It also remains one of the few schools that still teaches buon fresco, the centuries-old practice of painting on wet plaster. Hirsch will discuss that tradition and the preserved “Founder’s Fresco” during an Aug. 10 lecture at the Farnsworth.
Co-director Katie Sonnenborn said the MAINE in America Award comes at an important time for the school, as Skowhegan is making more of its history and philosophy accessible to the public.
The school recently launched The Library, a digital platform featuring archival material, commissioned essays and conversations inspired by each summer session. Researchers can request access to a broader selection of archival materials at Skowhegan NYC near Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, while public programs in both Maine and New York remain free to attend.
“We believe spaces like Skowhegan are urgently needed for artists today, and we feel we have something valuable to share,” Sonnenborn said.
Photo provided by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture
She described the exhibition as “a portal to a specific moment,” capturing the founding generation and their deep connection to Maine. Looking at the school’s past alongside its present reveals an institution that has always remained “future focused,” and deeply invested in supporting the next generation of artists.
Speaking from the school’s campus near the end of July, with only two weeks remaining in the summer session, Estévez described the growing urgency that settles over artists as they realize their time together is almost over.
“Once you’re here, there’s tremendous joy and freedom, but it’s also difficult and complex,” she said. Artists arrive expecting to make work, but often discover they’re dealing with themselves instead.
“For the first time, they have everything they need: time, space, support,” Estévez said, highlighting the modern facilities that support practices far beyond painting and sculpture. “Suddenly they’re confronted with the question: ‘How do I actually make my work?’”
Living alongside nearly 100 other artists requires openness, compromise and vulnerability, she said, but that’s precisely what makes the experience transformative. The landscape is also part of that transformation, though not always in the romanticized way many visitors imagine.
“Sometimes it’s hot. Sometimes it’s humid,” Estévez said with a laugh. Some participants arrive from cities, and take a longer adjustment period. Over time, the surroundings will shape both how artists think and how they make work.
Photo provided by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture
Students commit to remaining on campus for the full session, emergencies aside. There is no expectation that artists complete finished work, and while social media is not prohibited, participants are encouraged to unplug. Artists often feel relieved to set that pressure aside.
“The moment you post something online, you’re turning your process into content for other people,” Estévez said. Further releasing them from the pressure of expectation, the School also waits until the session ends before publicly listing participants names.
Now in her third year as co-director, while remaining a practicing artist, writer and curator, Estévez compared Skowhegan to a busy kitchen during a gathering. It’s a place where people experiment, make mistakes and occasionally invite others in to help mix the ingredients before anyone sees the finished meal.
“The world already has plenty of living rooms,” she said. “It’s okay for there to be a kitchen.”
Visitors to “MAINE: A Force Within American Art (1890-2026)” still won’t be able to step onto Skowhegan’s upper campus, but they will come very close. Through archival photographs, artworks, documents and stories, the exhibition offers a special look inside one of the institutions that helped make Maine one of the country’s most influential places for artists, and maintains space for what future generations might build here next.
“MAINE: A Force Within American Art” — know before you go
On view through January 3, 2027 at the Farnsworth Art Museum, 16 Museum Street, Rockland
Free for Rockland residents and children under 16
Gallery walks with staff and guest curators on September 24, October 29 and November 19.
The Annual Stephen May and Kathryn B. Wilson Lecture by Faye Hirsch on the “Founder’s Fresco” at Skowhegan: from Archive to Sap House and Back Again on August 10
Three-day workshop “Plein Air Footsteps – Painting Lois Dodd’s Landscapes with Elizabeth O’Reilly” on September 14, 15 and 16.
Screening of the documentary “Artists in Residence,” which features Lois Dodd, on September 16
Find more events and other information at farnsworthmuseum.org
Copy the Story Link
Tagged: Farnsworth Art Museum, sponsored
