Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s newest exhibition, Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island, revolves around a botanical troublemaker known as dwarf mistletoe. The parasitic plant’s destructive impact on Monhegan’s white spruce trees has been a focus of Bowdoin College biologist Barry A. Logan’s research since the early 2000s, when he first began visiting the island. Dwarf mistletoe infects young white spruce, causing a chaotic and deadly response within the host tree’s vascular system.

About five years ago, in one of those great “what if” moments that excite and provoke interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration, Logan wondered aloud while talking with Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s codirector Frank H. Goodyear and with Jennifer Pye, director and chief curator of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History: What would it look like to tell the island’s ecological story through art? “Monhegan is such a small, well-documented piece of the world,” says Pye, who has been walking the wildlands since childhood. “The idea that the ecological history of a place could be traced through museum art collections has changed how I see artwork.”

Artists have knowingly or unknowingly documented the island’s ecological history for as long as they’ve carried easels, sketchbooks, and cameras into the Monhegan landscape. The exhibition looks back to early depictions of the island landscape, when Monhegan was emerging as a tourist destination and artist colony. The watercolor Crowsnest, Monhegan(1892) by Sears Gallagher, Mary King Longfellow’s untitled watercolor circa 1900, and Bert Poole’s lithograph of Monhegan village from 1896 are time capsules of young spruce trees in Lobster Cove and the deforested Monhegan headlands at the turn of the century. Edward Hopper’s Monhegan Landscape, painted between 1916 and 1919, depicts a young white spruce clinging to the sea cliff, with branches distorted in a manner indicative of dwarf mistletoe infection. Rockwell Kent’s Sun, Manana, Monhegan, a centerpiece of the exhibition, was painted in two sessions divided by almost 50 years. Kent started the painting in 1907 and returned to the island with the same canvas in 1954 to add new young spruce trees to the foreground.

Throughout the galleries, a soundscape designed and recorded on the island by Bowdoin students evokes place, and Accra Shepp’s powerful photographs are a “record of this moment in time,” while also in compelling conversation with the historical works all around them. Shepp is a New York City–based artist who has lived most of his life on islands, documenting them. For the exhibition, he traveled to Monhegan in every season; Barry’s Trees (archival pigment photograph, 2023) is as much an ecological story of Monhegan’s secondary forest as it is an expression of the resilience of the wildlands. Also commissioned for the exhibition is an arresting series of woodcuts by Barbara Petter Putman depicting the “witches’ broom” effect of dwarf mistletoe infection on stunted white spruce branches. Putnam’s beautifully rendered entanglements are close-up, brutal documentation of the lethal parasite.

The exhibition highlights the many fascinating Monhegan ecologies—from the island’s geographical origins with the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the most recent ice age to the island’s use by the Wabanaki as a seasonal fishing station, and the near destruction of its forestlands in the nineteenth century. Later, abandoned sheep pastures throughout the island made way for white spruce trees to grow in clusters that the dwarf mistletoe could more easily infiltrate, and then, in the mid-twentieth century, the ecological balance was tipped further with the introduction of deer to the island, and the dreadful ticks that came (and eventually went) with the deer. In a hopeful sense, the exhibition affirms a present-day story of Monhegan wildlands on the rebound—a resilience deeply indebted to the passion and foresight of the Monhegan Associates. Formed in 1954 by Ted Edison (son of Thomas), the island’s land trust is dedicated to letting “natural processes prevail.” They do the hard work of keeping the island trails wild.

A smaller-scale version of the Bowdoin exhibition will travel to the Monhegan Museum of Art and History this summer. While the Monhegan Museum does not normally exhibit works by living artists, the curators will make an exception for Shepp’s photographs. On Monhegan, the soundscape will be live, and the ancient woods and wildlands that inspired so many of the exhibition’s works will be open to wandering and loving exploration. Bring a sketchbook.

Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island will be on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick until June 1, 2025; it will then travel to the Monhegan Museum of Art and History on Monhegan Island from July 1 to September 30, 2025.