University of New England Art Gallery

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University of New England Art Gallery

The University of New England promotes expansive visual dialogue through the UNE Galleries in Portland & Biddeford Maine

Hours: Thursday-Sunday 12-5 during exhibitions (closed for installation between exhibitions)

The galleries at UNE provide a unique approach to the visual arts in Maine through recognizing a wide range of academic and scientific interests in juxtaposition with contemporary art. Exhibits are chosen to highlight the institutional strengths and interests of UNE with an emphasis on earth, environmenta

l, and social sciences; medicine; education; arts; and humanities. We promote a broad, diverse, inclusive, and thought-provoking range of perspectives within the specific context of each exhibition. We maintain two gallery locations; on UNE’s Biddeford and Portland campuses. Each gallery mounts approximately three exhibitions each academic year in a variety of media and focusing on a range of themes.

08/08/2026

Please join us: UNE Art Galleries & the Maine Jewish Musuem present M. Annenberg 🌊 🌊

What Don’t We Know, and Why Don’t We Know It?
Thursday, August 13th, 2026, 5:30-6:30pm

Free & open to the public, at the Maine Jewish Musuem
267 Congress St, Portland ME 04101

Artist M. Annenberg’s talk traces the trend towards the consolidation of media as a result of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The consequence of this bill was the rise of unregulated cable news channels, owned by conservative billionaires. Annenberg analyses years of unreported climate studies, which made the American public vulnerable to claims of a climate hoax. She documents the silencing of chief climate scientist, Dr. James E. Hansen, Director, NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, by following the suppression of his scientific studies and the non reporting of his arrests protesting pipelines and mountain top removal from 2008 – 2025, in our national news.

Annenberg’s artwork is currently on view in the group exhibition, “Another Shore: Migration in Our Time” at the University of New England Art Gallery in Biddeford, Maine, through October 25, 2026.

M. Annenberg is a conceptual artist. Her paintings, sculptures, installations and videos focus on under-reported stories in American media, from 9/11 to climate change.
Annenberg’s paintings are in the permanent collections of museums, such as, The Vilna Goan Jewish State Museum, Lithuania, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Israel, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, England and The Florida Holocaust Museum. The BBC included her artwork in the documentary, The Private Life of a Masterpiece:” The Third of May”. She was named by Origin Magazine as one of America’s Top 100 Creatives in 2015.

More information contact [email protected]

06/30/2026

💥 Join us in Portland for a free concert! Arrows & Operators: Visual Debates in Music // opening reception on Friday July 10, 5-7pm will include the performance of selections from Cornelius Cardew’s (1936–81) Treatise 💥 this is a rare opportunity to see this famous piece performed, don’t miss it!

Arrows & Operators: Visual Debates in Music

Curated by John Fireman and Akiva Zamcheck (in collaboration with )
July 10 – November 1, 2026

Beginning in the 1950s, composers in search of new sounds and new modes of performance began to push beyond the limits of traditional notation and experiment with alternative ways of visualizing sonic thought. This exhibition juxtaposes Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise — the landmark graphic score composed between 1963 and 1967 — with works by contemporary artists who approach the graphic score from a variety of positions: as guide, as archivist, as scribe. Treatise functions here as both a visual and conceptual anchor, opening up larger questions of how information is imagined, structured, and shared, when seeking to describe what lies beyond the constraints of language.

Participating artists: CF , Philip Greenlief , Frank Mauceri .frank , and Lauren Tosswill

Treatise performers will include Jeremy Brogan , Philip Greenlief, Sigrid Harmon , Tessa Irons, Bonnie Han Jones , Frank Mauceri, and Cleek Schrey

Image: Frank Mauceri, Clangore #18, archival ink print

06/01/2026

Last week to catch “Gone From My Sight” 🌺 Through June 7 🌾
Join us for a closing reception with , Saturday June 6th, 5-7pm! Live music, gallery talks with artists, refreshments. No sign-up necessary, free & open 🍁

Gone From My Sight
UNE Art Gallery Portland
March 6th – June 7th 2026

Maine artists Jacqueline Scott , Rachel Sperry , Fran Vita-Taylor , and Ronnie Wilson , along with poet Hazel Koziol, offer a range of responses to the challenge of encountering death. The exhibit features painting, sculpture, photography, cut-paper drawings, and poetry, all reflecting upon end-of-life compassion and subsequent confrontation with loss. Drawing from combined experiences of loss and their own creative, empathic response, the work in “Gone From My Sight” offers a window into moments of emergent transformation.

“Gone From My Sight” takes its title from a 1904 poem by Luther F. Beecher, frequently reprinted as part of hospice literature for the benefit of both individuals in hospice and their families. “I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze, and starts for the blue ocean,” the poem begins. “I stand and watch her until she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to meet and mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says: “There! She’s gone!” Gone where? Gone from my sight—that is all (...) Her diminished size is in me and not in her.”

Beecher’s poem, which has helped many individuals and families face the inevitability of death at its most immanent, reminds us that within death is a shift, a change, from one state to another. None of us know what that really means, and the artists in this exhibition turn to creative expression to look more deeply into this question, wrestling with death’s closeness to all of our lives by bringing beauty and compassion into the world along with pain and doubt. The addition of Hazel Koziol’s powerful suite of poems allows a broad range of expression and image to surface, enriching the visual artwork in the show.

Image: Jacqueline Scott
Memorial Piece 2
Papercut, 2025

05/08/2026

Upcoming in Biddeford! "Another Shore: Migration in Our Time" opens Friday, June 5, at the UNE Art Gallery Biddeford. Please join us for this remarkable show about the pressing topic of migration.

Another Shore looks at issues surrounding climate migration, political disruption, and how even a simple act of relocation is an act of upheaval and faith. Artists include Portsmouth artist Sachiko Aklyama, whose carved wood sculptures evoke voyages and transformation; New York sculptor M. Annenberg, who looks at the human impacts of a warming planet, and Maine painter Flynn Donovan, who migrated to the US from Ecuador and whose work thematizes metamorphosis. The exhibition will also include text by author Anne Marie Mukankusi, a survivor of the Rwanda genocide, who is now based in Maine. In a time of uncertainty, the impulse to find safe harbor is more pressing than ever.

Image: Flynn Donovan

04/03/2026

Upcoming!

Death Cafe: UNE Art Gallery Portland

12-1pm, Sunday April 19 and Monday April 20, 2026

Join us to connect about Death. Free and open to the public; no advance sign-ups required. Come as you are!

Please join Shelby Goldsmith, jeweler and end-of-life doula extraordinaire, for a Death Cafe gathering at the UNE Art Gallery Portland. Join the conversation…if you are mortal, this event is for you!

No experience necessary; participants will discuss any and all topics of interest related to the inevitable. This is a free-form event with no requirements; please note, the Death Cafe is not a grief support group. The UNE Death Cafe series is hosted in conjunction with our current exhibition, “Gone From My Sight”.

For more information about Death Cafes, visit deathcafe.com

CONTACT
Hilary Irons
UNE Art Galleries/Library Services
207-221-4499
[email protected]

03/23/2026

Giving day 2026 is Tuesday, March 24! Please consider supporting our wonderful UNE Art students 🩵 https://securelb.imodules.com/s/1080/lg23/form.aspx?sid=1080&gid=1&pgid=3213&cid=6963

09/10/2025

Save the Date! 🩵 Opening Reception Thursday, September 25th, 5-7pm at the UNE Art Gallery Portland

Unspoken Resilience: Healing from the Lewiston Shooting Two Years In

Work by Artists of the Maine & National Deaf Communities and Photographs by Michael Kolster

Co-curated by Michelle Ames and Meryl Troop

September 25th 2025 - February 7 2026

Unspoken Resilience celebrates Maine’s Deaf community through a group exhibition of work by Deaf artists and craftspeople, in conversation with Michael Kolster’s recent series of color photographs of Lewiston. The exhibit foregrounds American Sign Language and issues of communication access, and recognizes ASL interpreters, who offer a linguistic and social bridge between the distinct cultures of Deaf individuals who use ASL and people who cannot sign. Co-curated with Michelle Ames and Meryl Troop, the show is a site of both remembrance and creative action.

Maine’s Deaf community is vibrant and bright, and was disproportionately impacted by the mass shooting in Lewiston on October 25th, 2023, which left 18 people dead and 13 injured. One of the deadliest mass shootings in US history, it is believed to be the only example in the country to impact the Deaf community so severely; over 20% of the victims were Deaf. The tragedy claimed the lives of four Deaf community members; wounded two; and traumatized many more, as in-person ASL interpretation services were withheld by authorities at hospitals and other official settings during the unfolding event. Unspoken Resilience offers a place of healing, recognition, and learning, both centering the enduring creativity of the Deaf community in the group of artworks curated by Ames and Troop, and uplifting Lewiston in Kolster’s sensitive, luminous cityscapes.

Reception is free, open to the public, and will be accompanied by two ASL interpreters

09/02/2025

Save the date: Saturday September 6th, at 3pm!

Activating the Labyrinth: A Performance for Two People in Three Parts 🍁🍃 9/6/25 🍃🍁 Presented by Elana Adler and Patricia Brace.

3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Portland Campus for the Health Sciences (UNE Art Gallery Labyrinth )

To celebrate the closing of our remarkable exhibit “An Unreliable Record: Exploring the Photographic Imaginary”, curated by Nelleke Mack, UNE Art Gallery Portland presents an outdoor performance by Elana Adler and Patricia Brace. Free and open to the public; refreshments served; rain date September 7th.

“Much like the Cottingley Fairies photographs that blurred the lines between fantasy and reality, artists Elana Adler and Patricia Brace venture into the woods to create their own kind of magic—this time by activating the 14-year-old labyrinth on the University of New England’s Portland campus through a trilogy of walking performances. Rooted in the meditative tradition of labyrinths—ancient structures with a single, guiding path—this collaborative project emerges from a shared conversation about failure and the paralysis often felt in the face of political uncertainty.

By engaging with the elements of water (ice), air (leaf), and earth (stone), the artists move slowly along the pine-needle path in a somatic, reflective ritual that emphasizes grounding, presence, and connection—to each other, the land, and their fellow walkers. In the final act, audience members are invited to join the journey, placing stones at the labyrinth’s center as a quiet, collective monument to care, slowness, and shared intention.”

08/30/2025

🍂🌞 Happy Labor Day!

The UNE Art Gallery will be closed Sunday, Aug 31st, 2025.

We’ll reopen Thursday Sept 4th for the last week of “An Unreliable Record”. And please consider visiting our upcoming performance, “Activating the Labyrinth”, Sept 6 at 3pm. Questions, pls email Hilary at [email protected]. ~ Thanks ~

06/24/2025

Join us! 💫An Unreliable Record: Exploring the Photographic Imaginary 💫
Opening reception Thursday, July 10 2025
5-7pm, UNE Art Gallery Portland
✨✨✨✨
An Unreliable Record: Exploring the Photographic Imaginary
Artwork from the Stephen K. Halpert Photographic Collection at UNE; curated by Nelleke Mack

July 10-September 7, 2025
Opening reception Thursday, July 10th, 5-7pm
UNE Art Gallery Portland

In 1917, two girls set off into the woods of West Yorkshire to make some magic. Elsie, aged 16, and Frances, aged 9, borrowed a quarter-plate camera to prove that their fairy friends were real. Although the authenticity of the images (referred to by historians as the Cottingley fairies photographs) has been routinely called into question, Elsie managed to capture something very real: our belief in the photographic record.

An Unreliable Record explores some of the more imaginative corners of the Stephen K. Halpert Photography Collection, including a newly acquired Cottingley Fairies print. The works on view are less concerned with empirical documentation, instead demonstrating the possibilities of photography to create or capture the impossible. Some illustrate the ability of photography to manipulate that which is seen, while others employ more subtle fabrications to harness the viewers’ experience.

The constructed nature of photographic images has long since been debated for its ability to communicate truth, but this selection celebrates that illusion and the power it has to communicate the ineffable, that very real magic we experience every day.

Image: Alice and the Fairies ~ Cottingley Fairy Photograph, by Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, silver print on matte paper mounted to thin brown board, miniature print of 1917 original c. 1920

Address

716 Stevens Avenue
Portland, ME
04103

Telephone

+1 207-602-3000

Website

http://www.une.edu/artgallery/portland-campus

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