Open call for UMVA artists: Missing Maine Landscapes at the UMVA Gallery, Portland The Portland chapter of the Union of Maine Visual Artists invites UMVA member artists working in all media to submit work for a planned exhibition of landscape and landscape-related art at the UMVA’s Portland gallery in September, 2020. In the event that COVID-19 safety-related issues prevent a physical show at the gallery, work will be presented and promoted online. The show is titled Missing Maine Landscapes . Much of the appeal of the most popular subjects for Maine landscapes is their visually unchanging nature. The coastline, forests, lakes, and rivers appear eternal. But the environments that surround these landscapes have been changed, and are changing still — often too rapidly to recognize. Many of these changes are the result of economic and cultural upheavals from capital and development (i.e., manufacturing and fisheries decline, loss of ancestral lands, forestry and agriculture, sprawl, gen...

The Covid pandemic reshapes our lives. It continues to strip down our existence, separating us from loved ones and exposing weaknesses in our system of governance and our political leadership. It demonstrates the devastating impact of the nation's grave social injustices. Systemic racism and socioeconomic disparity put oppressed peoples at greater risk for Covid-19. Then, on May 25, as many of us bunkered inside our homes, we witnessed the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd. This videotaped tragedy and the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests across the nation revealed the depth and breadth of racism in America. It is a contagion every bit as present and virulent as the coronavirus. In the face of both existential challenges – pandemic and racism – we can only recover through radical social change. The images and words of UMVA artists in this online exhibition surface from the isolation and compression of life in the pandemic. The works express personal and universa...