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