The State of Maine Biennial
The 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial opens on Thursday, Oct. 8, and it promises to be an outstanding show.
According to all accounts, the exhibition’s curator, Alison Ferris, has exquisite taste in art and a great familiarity with the contemporary Maine art scene. She has said she wanted to do two things with this Biennial: showcase the best new work from throughout the state, and have as many mediums represented as possible. Sounds good, and her heart seems to be in the right place otherwise, as well. She went out of her way to select artists who had not had their work in previous Biennials; only three of the 32 artists she chose had been selected before. And she included Maine Indian basket-makers in the Biennial for the first time, having selected the work of two Passamaquoddy Indians: twenty-six-year-old George Neptune, and Jeremy Frey.
So it should be an excellent Biennial. I’ve got no doubt that Ms. Ferris has a thoughtfully conceived and well executed cross-cultural, multi-generational celebration of contemporary Maine art in store for us.
There, having made nice, I can now get to my main object, which is to trash the way the Biennial is being organized by the museum. I don’t want my unleashings to reflect on Ms. Ferris and the great job I’m sure she’s done with this. There’s no need to make her a target. All she did was take a dream assignment and run with it.
The real target here is Mr. Mark Bessire, the museum’s smug-as-a-bug director.
One of his early priorities was to clear the Biennial of the riff raff by having it be a curated, rather than juried, show. None of the egalitarian nonsense about a statewide open competition for him. Credentialed, connected artists only, thank you. Well, with a few “discoveries” thrown in here and there, having passed muster with a credentialed, connected artist. Like maybe someone from the PMA who heard about them from a credentialed, connected artist friend. C’mon, how are you going to reject someone’s work after a friend recommended them and you’ve traveled to up to Rockport and sipped wine with them in their studio?
Apropos his decision to have the Biennial curated rather than juried, Mr. Bessire was quoted in the Maine Sunday Telegram saying, “The strength of Maine art demands a better show.”
A curated show is necessarily of better quality than a juried show?
The 2013 Biennial was curated by someone working at Mr. Bessire’s behest, and it is widely said to have been be the weakest, most pointless and downright aggravating excuse for an art show ever mounted here or anywhere else. Well, widely said by me, anyway. Maybe there were others who thought otherwise.
Do consider this, though: The piece that was given the most prominent placement in the 2013 exhibition, and pictured on a banner hanging across the entryway, was a collaborative work by two artists who collected Post-it notes they spotted as they went about their daily activities, then pasted them along the length of a long canvas.
Weigh that kind of thing, please, and all the air-headed phoniness it represents, against the integrity and hard work of countless artists who toil in their cold and drafty studios all across the state, valiantly pouring their souls onto empty canvases, just looking for a fair chance at acceptance. Oh, the pain of it all.
You know what, though? Ain’t nothin’ gonna change.
Mark Bessire doesn’t give a tinker’s damn what any of us think about how he put this Biennial together. There was a glowing front-page story in the Maine Sunday Telegram about him fairly recently, and the museum’s board seems supremely happy with him in every respect, especially since he’s got the place on a roll financially. Landing the Robert Indiana sculpture out front was certainly a big coup. That, along with some of Bessire’s other accomplishments — like the superb restoration of the Winslow Homer studio — have increased the national and international stature of the museum significantly. So, complaints coming from the Maine art community about how he’s gutted the Biennial hardly even register with him. Of that we can be sure.
What’s got to happen here, art folks, is that somehow or other a statewide juried art competition has to be organized independent of the Portland Museum of Art. The museum’s Biennial will continue to be some curator’s personal project, and thereby limited in scope, as well as quality. Surely, surely there must be other viable venues, and people willing to make it happen. Let the Portland Museum of Art have their Biennial. Anybody interested in stepping up and organizing The State of Maine Biennial?
Maybe the Maine Arts Commission should sponsor it? The prospect of having this new biennial exhibited in a different part of the state each time sounds appealing. Or maybe some non-profit arts foundation looking to do something really big will step up and take it on.
Either way, bye, bye, Portland Museum of Art.
