When the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison opened its doors in 1946, the founders contacted schools around the country to recruit the best young art students to this unique new summer residency. The Cooper Union in New York City sent the Harlem-born son of Antiguan immigrants, Ashley Bryan, a young Black artist. He was newly home after three years of service overseas in the segregated 502nd Port Battalion—an experience powerfully illuminated in his illustrated autobiography Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace (Atheneum, 2019). That first summer in Maine must have been a time of transition, and relative peace, for Bryan. 

This July 13—known as Ashley Bryan Day since Governor Mills’s 2020 proclamation—the world-renowned artist, poet, storyteller, musician, and creator of children’s picture books would have celebrated his 100th birthday. In his honor, museums, galleries, and public spaces all over Maine are presenting his original artworks, as well as interactive media inspired by his vision.

One weekend during his Skowhegan residency, Ashley Bryan hiked Cadillac Mountain and saw the Cranberry Isles. Almost 40 years later, with many Maine summer retreats, a teaching career, and nationwide book tours mostly behind him, Little Cranberry became his full-time home. Bryan devoted the rest of his long life to art making—painting large, exuberant oil canvases in his neighbor’s flower gardens and inventing a stained-glass process using pulped paper and sea glass collected from local  beaches. He returned to the puppets he’d first brought to life as a young man, fashioning new characters from fabric and “things cast off” and creating stories for them based on African folklore. He made music and art with children at the island school named for him and invited into his home studio pretty much anyone who ventured out by mailboat from the mainland. 

The Storyteller Pavilion was established on Little Cranberry by the Ashley Bryan Center in 2016 to celebrate the artist. A chapel-like gallery on a dirt road marked with a painted wooden sign, the Pavilion houses a selection of puppets and paintings spanning his career, including four abstract expressionist canvases (Skowhegan Spruce 1, 2, 3, 4) from his 1946 residency; a quilt by Katharine Fenton-Hathaway and Judith Ivan celebrating his Newbery Honor book Freedom over Me; and a quartet of sea glass panels depicting biblical characters with medieval motifs. More narrative sea glass panels glow in the warm wood interior of the Islesford Congregational Church, just a short walk from the Pavilion.

A magical portal to Bryan’s work is open for children and their adult guests at the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine. Beautiful Blackbird! is an interactive, multimedia installation; its centerpiece is a giant projection screen animated with bird friends from the pages of his classic picture book Beautiful Blackbird (Atheneum, 2003). Bryan believed in creating experience and meaning through the ear, not just the eye, so he felt that performance is an essential story component. The Exhibit is a place for “flip-flop-flapping” your wings, and “stirring, whirring the air” as you dance with a bird on the screen who dances with you and moves as you move. Visitors can create Bryan-inspired art in the Makerspace and sit down for a musical, movement-filled recording of the artist reading Blackbird for an audience of children. On one large wall, the Artist Gallery features children’s picture book spreads by 14 creators who “emulate the joy Ashley emphasized in his books,” including Pat Cummings, Ken Daley, Ekua Holmes, Daniel Minter, and Oge Mora. The Artist Gallery is curated by Marcia Minter, who also produced the exhibition in collaboration with Daniel Minter, Indigo Arts Alliance, the Ashley Bryan Center, Chris Sullivan Creative Consulting, and Bryan himself.

Throughout his career, Bryan’s Christian faith inspired stories and songs that he interpreted artistically for audiences of all ages. In 1956 he won a national juried competition sponsored by the Skowhegan School founders and faculty to create a permanent fresco painting for the South Solon Meeting House. His dynamic figurative work occupies the long, curved wall behind the nave and depicts the Parable of the Sower. The nondenominational Meeting House in Solon was built in 1842 for “religious and community activities,” and most of the available wall space is decorated with vibrant religious and spiritual imagery rendered in fresco—an ancient process of embedding the wet-plaster wall surface with pigment. A state treasure off the beaten path, the Meeting House is open year-round for self-guided visits.

An exhibition at the Clark Point Gallery in Southwest Harbor features original collage illustrations from Bryan’s last picture book, Blooming Beneath the Sun: Poems by Christina Rossetti (Simon and Schuster, 2019). Bryan developed a technique for cutting colorful paper compositions with his mother’s dressmaker’s scissors when he was in his 70s. As Carl Little writes in the accompanying catalog, “the collages in the show, among his last works of art, redouble our awe and admiration.” 

Calling it “the hardest project I’ve ever done in my life,” Bryan’s illustrated book Freedom over Me began with the artist acquiring, from a Maine estate auction, papers advertising the sale of ten enslaved adults and one child. The brutal fact of this meager record—the inhumanity of it—captured the artist’s imagination for many years as he considered his response. In Freedom over Me, he lovingly invents a visual narrative for each enslaved person, granting them a “voice and agency for their dreams” (as curator Jennifer Gross says), a gesture of utter faith in art as a healing force. 

The spirit and vision of this quiet, monumental book project are at the core of Ashley Bryan/Paula Wilson: Take the World into Your Arms, an exhibition guest-curated by Jennifer Gross for the new Colby College Museum Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center in Waterville. Gross, an independent curator, scholar, and longtime friend of Bryan’s, recognizes in Bryan and Paula Wilson a shared “commitment to humanity and a belief that art can truly be transformative in the world.” Generationally distinct in expressing their identity as Black artists, the pairing invites a fresh view of Bryan’s work, especially with the inclusion of several rare self-portrait drawings by Bryan. For both artists, the creative act is always, in some sense, community building with a spiritual foundation; Wilson’s nature-based spirituality is a contemporary counterpart to Bryan’s, which draws from his Christian faith. The exhibition’s selection of Bryan’s Islesford garden paintings, early figurative oils, puppets, sea glass panels, and book art inspire a variety of exciting visual conversations with Wilson’s large mixed-media installations, paintings, hand-printed and painted clothing, and handmade books. A celebration of the intimacy of the book form and the range of possibilities in collage, Take the World into Your Arms is also a powerful expression of Bryan’s and Wilson’s devotion to “materiality and material process,” which, through invention, reuse, and experimentation “keep you growing as an artist and push you forward,” reveals Gross.

Ashley Bryan said, “If you are doing something creative and constructive, never let anything or anybody stop you.” He carried his art supplies in a gas mask during his WWII service because he believed the act of drawing preserved his humanity. Engaging with Bryan’s work affirms this humanity; the world is a better place with Bryan’s work in it. Happy travels!

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Itinerary for your tour of Ashley Bryan’s work in Maine in 2023:

Statewide
Works by Bryan are in the permanent collection of the following: Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Bates College, College of the Atlantic, and Redeemer Lutheran Church in Bangor.

Assorted works celebrated during the Fourth Annual Beautiful Blackbird Children’s Book Festival presented by Indigo Arts Alliance
September 23–24

Storyteller Pavilion
Little Cranberry Island
(Islesford), ME
Open to the public June through September and by appointment

Islesford Congregational Church
Little Cranberry Island
(Islesford), ME
Public space

Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine
250 Thompson’s Point Road, Portland, ME
Beautiful Blackbird! Interactive Exhibit
Wednesday to Sunday, 9am-4pm

South Solon Meeting House
1 South Solon Road, Solon, ME
Public space

Clark Point Gallery
46 Clark Point Road, Southwest Harbor, ME
Blooming Beneath the Sun collage illustration exhibition 
July 1 to September 2, Tuesday to Saturday, noon-5pm

Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art
Paul J. Schupf Art Center
93 Main Street, Waterville, ME
Ashley Bryan/Paula Wilson: Take The World Into Your Arms 
February 17 to July 31, 11am-7pm