The Workshop

In the early 20th century, a group of artists called the Surrealists made visual art, literature, and theater inspired by humor, dreams, and randomness. Surrealist imagery combines and alters everyday objects in such a way that they become fantastic or unfamiliar. Surrealist artists played games alone and together to generate ideas for their artworks. Join us in letting your mind wander and embracing play to access your creativity!

Skitpeq (“on the surface of water”) by Wolastoqew visual artist, Emma Hassencahl-Perley) is a love letter to the water, salmon, people, and all living things sustained by the Wolastoq and Tobique rivers that surround Hassencahl-Perley’s homeland.

This summer kicks off a multiphase project to reinterpret the Winslow Homer Studio and its tours, reenergizing the program for new visitors and giving longtime members a great reason to come back. 

We transformed one of our most iconic landscape paintings, Winslow Homer’s Weatherbeaten, into a coloring book page, and asked visitors to test out the implications of color for themselves. Adults and children alike created almost 2,000 versions of this painting. 

Visitors to The Workshop took an everyday occurrence—a coffee spill—and transformed it into a cat, a map, an abstract drawing, an interstellar scene, or whatever else their imagination inspired. 

Inspired by Christopher Patch’s Migration—on view in the Modern Menagerie installation—visitors created a flock of flying bird sculptures.

Over the course of two months, visitors illustrated hundreds of pages from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, almost completing the entire epic. 

Hundreds of visitors selected a small detail from one of the painting which intrigued them and copied it onto a paper tile.

Visitors spun a wheel for a challenge to create sculpture inspired by a select idea using hand-crafted, magnetic wooden blocks.