Kristen Levesque
Director of Marketing and Public Relations
Seven Congress Square
Portland, Maine 04101
(207) 775-6148 ext. 3223
klevesque@portlandmuseum.org
Release: March 7, 2008
Urban Seen: Images of City Life at the Portland Museum of Art
(Portland, Maine) Cities nurture and provoke creative response. The dense visual experience provided by urban life has long been an inspiration for painters, printmakers, and photographers. This spring, the Portland Museum of Art presents an exhibition that explores artistic responses to the serendipities of city life in Portland and other metropolitan environments from the mid-19th century to the present day. Drawn predominantly from the Museum’s permanent collection, Urban Seen features more than 25 paintings, prints, pastels, and photographs that document, interpret, and idealize monuments, buildings, streetscapes, and neighborhoods—visions that capture the scale of life in the American city. Urban Seen is on view March 22 through August 17, 2008.
Geometry and perspective organize the exhibition. The play of light upon urban shapes proved to be irresistible to Modernist painters and photographers. Stephen Etnier’s view of a train at the former Union Station and Robert Solotaire’s View from the 11th Floor are at once brilliant narratives—visual stories about Portland—and pure geometric compositions. Throughout the exhibition artists look up, down, and around to capture the view. Nineteenth-century lithographers often employed a bird’s eye view to capture the grid-like patterns of streets laid out on the contours of the land. Contemporary artists push this vantage point to the extreme. The silkscreens of Riisaburo Kimura portray the city as if from a satellite; space-age imagery when produced in the late 1960s, but common today in this age of the internet. Yvonne Jacquette and Scott Peterman portray New York at night to remind us that the city can be busy and active, quiet and majestic all at the same time.
Artists represented in Urban Seen include Phil Barter, Roger Deering, John Dowell, Stephen Etnier, William Wallace Gilchrist, Julee Holcombe, Yvonne Jacquette, Susan Leites, Scott Peterman, Italo Scanga, Robert Solotaire, Lois Leonard Stock, and others.
Museum Information
The Portland Museum of Art is located at Seven Congress Square in downtown Portland. The Museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday. Memorial Day through Columbus Day, the Museum is open on Mondays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Museum admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and students with I.D., $4 for youth ages 6 to 17, and children under 6 are free. The Museum is free on Friday evenings from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Museum Cafe and Store. For more information, call (207) 775-6148. Web site www.portlandmuseum.org.