On Monhegan Island, artists create a record of ecological change

In 1955 Rockwell Kent made an oil painting from young spruce on the island of Monhegan. They are jagged things and reach their youthful limbs into the salty air and stand thin, but proudly over the ocean.

In 2015, Barry Logan saw a picture of this painting for the first time. Logan is a biology professor on Bowdoin College, where his research focuses on how plants deal with environmental advressors. For more than two decades, he has been investigating how a parasitic plant called Dwarf Mistletee influences the spruce trees on Monhegan.

“His trees were probably 15 or 20 years old when he painted them,” said Logan. “That would make her 70 or 80 years old, right when I was on the island. That could be the trees whose death I document. “

This finding planted the seed for an exhibition in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, which is traveling to the Monhegan Museum of Art and History this summer.

Artists visited 10 miles off the coast of Maine for a long time. Over time, you have created a kind of ecological recording of your subject. The show entitled “Art, Ecology and the Resilience of an Island of Maine” uses its work to tell a story about the way the landscape has changed and how it has remained the same.

The exhibition found an overlap of science and art by her three curators: Logan worked with Frank Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Jennifer Pye, director and chief curator of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History. They all selected the works contained in the exhibition and wrote essays for the catalog in which students from several disciplines and islanders were included.

“Barry is the scientist, Frank is the art historian and I am the Monhegan historian,” said Pye.

“Barry's trees”

In the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, three panorama photos hang on the same wall.

The earliest picture was taken by an unknown photographer in 1908. The second comes from a Mainer named Lorimer Brackett from 1930. The third, from 2023, comes from the New York photographer Accra Shepp.

The three artists were all on the nearby island of Manana to conquer a comprehensive view of Monhegan. The pictures are all familiar. There is the lighthouse on the hill in which the Monhegan Museum is now housed. But everyone is different. In the picture from 1908, the landscape is dominated by grassy fields that are cleared by trees in the last century to make room. Until 1930, the young people stood white spruce on the pastures on which the sheep once grazed. In 2023, trees covered the island.

“There have been a number of human decisions in the past two centuries that radically changed the country on this island, and as a visitor it was not aware that so much had changed over time,” said Goodyear. “When I came back to look at the pictures of Rockwell Kent or George Bellows or Edward Hopper, I realized that the island that they met was very different from the island that I had met 130 years later.”

Logan visited Monhegan for the first time more than 20 years ago to investigate how dwarf minister kills white spruce trees. However, he had the permission of private landowners on the mainland to carry out research on their real estate, but tried to find a place that could be guaranteed for a long time. So Logan took the ferry to Monhegan, where there are three quarters of the island.

Ted Edison, son of the inventor Thomas Edison, visited Monhegan in 1908 as a child. In 1952 he returned to the island after years and noticed how the post -war boom in tourism had increased development and construction. Edison started buying dozens of little tracts, which he remained unaffected and open to the public. Finally he worked with the residents to form a country trust who is still known as Monhegan Associates. Today, this non -profit organization manages almost 400 hectares of Wildland and nine miles hiking trails.

“It is quite a triumph out there,” said Logan. “This exhibition has the opportunity to bring this to people. It is an effort that is largely managed to this day, but even from its origins of members of the Monhegan community, be it all year round over Monhegan's island's or people who have a connection to the seasonal community. But it was individual and community actions that made it possible, and it feels like it was really important lessons. “

Capture Monhegan

In 1916 Edward Hopper began to paint “Monhegan Landscape”. There is a brown and false tree in the middle of the scene.

“I've seen this painting many times over the years,” said Pye. “You look at who influenced him or what his color palette is or where he was. And all the time in the middle there is a sick white spruce with a dwarf mistletoe infection that I would never have recognized. “

Art in the exhibition offers references to the ecological conditions for Monhegan over time. In 1885 the residents were who cleared the large country swaths because of their pasture fun. But the herds fluctuate until the turn of the century when the farmers in New England had difficulty competing with other regions. Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott, one of the first artists who bought a house on the island, paints and photographed some of the remaining sheep

The trees returned with the sheep. In 1907 Rockwell Kent started a painting called “Sun, Manana”. In 1950 he returned to his house in Monhegan after a long time and added the spray of spruce trees along the screen. They had become his view in the years in between.

In 1954, the island demanded that the state to “enjoy tourists and give the locals a game for shooting”. Six deer came and multiplied quickly. For years, Geraldine Tam documented the island flora in watercolor and ink, including a detailed Ladyslipper, which is part of the exhibition. In 1969 she wrote to Ted Edison to tell him that the deer had destroyed the local flowers. The state removed the deer on Monhegan in 1997 and caused fire trees to thrive – a further change in the island -Baldachin.

“It is simply an astonishing thing to testify to witness and see that the artists have also captured,” said Logan. “I would say that there is still a lot to be grasped out of there. The invitation to the artists is to go out and to represent what they now see there as a forest that is dynamic and very different from the forests of the past decades. “

A unique place

The gallery on Bowdoin College is definitely killed. Technically speaking, it is underground. But close your eyes and you could forget for a minute.

The exhibition includes a 21-minute compilation of audio clips from the island, which was gathered by students to transport visitors to the middle of the golf of Maine. The first stopover in the gallery door is also a one-minute video that the visitors in Monhegan introduces, which was also recorded and edited by a student.

“One of the things I find singular in this place is the combination of natural and artificial sound on the island,” said Logan. “They have bird life from dawns to twilight, the waves and the wind, but also the buoysts and the diesel engines, the water to the water tower and the ferries and their horns and the crunch of people's footsteps. It is a very auditorial place and we have worked very hard to bring this to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where we are in two underground, windowless exhibition galleries in Brunswick. “

These elements help to establish the island in the gallery in Brunswick as the Iceland Museum does not have to do.

“If you are physically here on the island, if you have done this trip, we don't have to put the background in the same way,” said Pye.

The exhibition will vary in each of its two locations: Bowdoin College has a larger gallery and more art. The Monhegan Museum shows no work by living artists. Monhegan will also include works that could be of particular importance for long -standing islanders – for example a painting by Joanne Scott, who was a former President of the Monhegan Associates. The Iceland Museum also offers guided hiking tours this summer, both in the gallery and on the way.

“I don't think it is a coincidence that Monhegan became the island of the artists who pulled so many,” said Pye.

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When you go

WHAT: “Art, ecology and the resilience of an island of Maine: The Monhegan Wildlands”

WHERE: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 9400 College Station, Brunswick

WHEN: Until June 21st

HOURS: Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Thursday to 8:30 p.m.) and Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

HOW MUCH: Entry to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is free

INFO: Bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3275

Next: The exhibition will take place from July 1 to September 30th in the Monhegan Museum of Art and History. Information about the exhibition in Monhegan can be found at Monheganmuseum.org or by phone at 207-596-7003.

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