“We’re seeing things now, we’re telling powerful stories now, and you would benefit by engaging with them.”

—Mali Obomsawin, from a 2022 interview with Vermont Public Radio

New meaning and understanding emerge everywhere in Exploding Native Inevitable: An Exhibition of Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Land We Now Call America at the Bates College Museum of Art. Cocurated by the renowned multimedia artist Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Mills, Bates Museum’s director and chief curator, the collective vision of the exhibition is to engage and excite viewers through multiple access points and layered experiences of contemporary Indigenous music, film, performance, ceramics, sculpture, installation, fiber arts, painting, and drawing. Most of the exhibiting artists are under 40 years old, like the Native artists’ collective New Red Order, whose work The World’s Unfair in Queens, New York, last fall gained international attention. These young artists are emerging in the contemporary art conscience and conversation, and reaching beyond it, with their powerful, provocative work.

At the exhibition’s entrance is the six-minute video Wawasint8da (2022). It opens in a Catholic church, where the musician, composer, and bandleader Mali Obomsawin (who uses they/them pronouns) is at the altar, singing a Jesuit hymn that was translated from Latin into the Abenaki language by a colonizing seventeenth-century priest. Obomsawin sings and conducts the unseen horns and percussion at first with convincing reverence, then with increasingly painful, forced insistence. At the same time, Obomsawin is also in the pews, praying and singing, their gaze traveling tensely and uneasily over towering Christian iconography. After several minutes, the hymn loses form as it begins to compete for the central melody with an ancient Wabanaki mourning song, which Obomsawin learned from a Passamaquoddy citizen. Gradually and then all at once, the hymn, the drums and horns, and the ancient mourning song collide. The setting merges into a sacred Indigenous space and then weaves and spins between the two places as vocals and instrumentals disassemble and explode into a jazz improvisation. Obomsawin created the video in collaboration with Lokotah Sanborn, an artist and community organizer whose work is centered on empowering and advocating for the Wabanaki people. The clip is a mesmerizing, heartbreakingly gorgeous visual and sound journey.

The setting of Norman Akers’s stunning large-scale oil painting Watchful Eye (2023) is a landscape with evidence of human destruction and violent disregard, layered with translucent tree forms of some other time and space. Watchful Eye might represent the intersection or coexistence of physical place and mythological place—the latter of which the artist defines as “transcending physical place to describe the timeless spiritual or mythic origin, where stories begin, and civilizations emerge.” 

Artworks exuding a lightness of being and humor abound in Exploding Native Inevitable, like Elisa Harkins’s collaborative video Rodeo during Pandemic (2020) and works by Alison O. Bremner (the first Tlingit woman to carve and raise a totem pole) including a painted yellow cedar paddle titled Burt Reynolds (2017). Other traditional media such as ceramics and fiber arts also find fresh energy here, notably Raven Halfmoon’s wondrous hand-built Caddo female head titled Dush toh Dancing (2022) and Tyrell Tapaha’s handspun vegetal-dyed weavings, Áshkii Gáamalii: The Boy Who Lives in Two Worlds (2021) and Corrizo Mountain Dance (2021). The exhibition’s design provides contemplative spaces within the open, high-ceilinged space of the gallery—videos are subtitled, and accompanying speakers isolate sound to a pocket of space for one or two viewers. Post (2022–2023), an interactive installation by Sarah Rowe, provides a treehouse-like enclosure, an “inclusive and accessible space for dreaming and celebrating life” with beautiful painted interior and exterior walls animated with video projections. 

Brad Kahlhamer: Nomadic Studio, Maine Camp, a concurrent solo exhibition curated by Mills, highlights Kahlhamer’s long-term ongoing project of documenting, in Moleskine sketchbooks, observed and imagined worlds and journeys. Spreads from 35 sketchbooks are exhibited in the Bates Museum’s downstairs gallery along with the museum’s significant collection of Kahlhamer’s paintings and works on paper. Kahlhamer’s heritage is Native American, his adoptive parents are German American, and he says his foundational coming into being as a musician and visual artist happened in New York City. In the early years Kahlhamer worked as an illustrator at Topps Comics alongside Art Spiegelman, and he later encountered “America’s first graphic novels” in the form of the Native American ledger drawings on display at the Drawing Center. Mills, who has known Kahlhamer for over 20 years, observes that he “connects myths, marks, figures, fantastic creatures, Indigenous iconography, skulls, underground comix, cultural mash-ups, travel observations, and his take on the American landscape.”

Exploding Native Inevitable: An Exhibition of Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Land We Now Call America and Brad Kahlhamer: Nomadic Studio, Maine Camp will be on view through March 4, 2024, at the Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell Street, Lewiston.  

As winter sets in and the days grow darker, I am reminded of the time in ancient Greece when caves symbolized the entrance to the classical underworld. A person entered the cave to seek wisdom in the darkness not the light. A place where the opposites meet and where there is room to confront and make meaning of our anxieties.

—Alison Hildreth, from “Wisdom in the Darkness,” Maine Arts Journal

During her artist talk at New Era Gallery in August, Alison “Wooly” Hildreth recalled herself as a young reader, mapping Kenneth Grahame’s children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. She would visualize the book’s setting through the characters’ visits to each other’s homes and travels together, and soon her mind held a unique, navigable map of their world. This recollection is a wonderful illumination of Hildreth’s art and process. Maps and the exercise of mapping invite abstraction; there are so many locations between any two points, and the interest of a map is those in-betweens. The infinite possibilities of the in-betweens are the realm of curiosity and wonder, and this is where Hildreth’s work lives and is in constant motion, always one work suggesting another, always seemingly asking, “What’s next?”

Alison Hildreth: 50 Years is a multivenue retrospective featuring the artist’s past and ongoing work, including new paintings and drawings made last summer. It has been and is being presented by New Era Gallery on Vinalhaven (summer 2023), CMCA, Portland Public Library Downtown and Speedwell Contemporary, which initiated the restrospective and also produced a documentary film and catalog to accompany it. “Alison Hildreth is not one to jump into the spotlight, but she’s more than earned this spotlight,” says Speedwell’s curator, Phoebe Cole. “She’s made a lifelong commitment to her art practice by continuing to produce wondrous works, and she is beloved in this community.”

Maps, celestial bodies, and flying creatures abound in these three connected but distinct opportunities to experience Hildreth’s work. There is also the artist’s recurring, hopeful message that visiting the “dark places of our nature” is an affirming human act from which we emerge enlightened. As the days advance toward the winter solstice, CMCA’s exhibition Darkness Visible presents recent mixed-media aerial landscapes on Gampi paper and new large-scale oil paintings on canvas depicting celestial worlds. Hildreth has described her “cartographies,” with their intricate mark-making, as narrating the migrations of humans and other earthly creatures, while her fascination with the earth’s uniqueness in the known universe continues to feed her expression of outer space. In her words from a 2022 interview, “We’re living in a miracle all the time.”  

Portland Public Library Downtown is “reengaging visitors” with Hildreth’s “soaring” installation, The Feathered Hand, adds Rachael Harkness, the library’s gallery and special programs coordinator. The mobile, made in 2010 from glass, plastic puppets, lenses, metal wire, sand, insects, and carborundum (silicon carbide), is permanently installed in the library’s atrium and will be highlighted in a public event in November.

Hildreth studied art history and landscape architecture at Vassar College in the early 1950s and then landed in New York City to continue her studies at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Art. “What I really wanted to do was to do everything,” she said in a 2018 interview. “I wanted to know photography, printmaking, sculpture; I took everything I could.” In 1976 she earned a second degree at the Portland School of Art, where she also intersected with the Concept School of Visual Studies. This short-lived breakaway experiment influenced a generation of Maine artists, including Katherine Bradford, Noriko Sakanishi, Barbara Sullivan, Don Voisine, and many others. 

Speedwell’s exhibition, documentary, and catalog span Hildreth’s earliest work through her most recent creations—the output of her beloved Bakery (Portland) and Vinalhaven studios—and reflect an artistic practice that is both rigorous and meditative. In one way or another, all the work is infused with Hildreth’s reading of geography, cartography, astronomy, environmental studies, history, philosophy, and literature, and her love of walking and daydreaming. She’s translating her experience of the world, and that ongoing translation—her expression—is as generous as it is sublime.

List of Venues

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland

Alison Hildreth: Darkness Visible

Exhibition of new paintings and drawings on view through
January 7, 2024

Portland Public Library Downtown, Portland

Alison Hildreth: The Feathered Hand

Evening public event in November 2023 (contact library for details)

Speedwell Contemporary, Portland

Alison Hildreth: 50 Years

Retrospective exhibition on view through December 22