We will be open on July 4th and 5th from 10am-4pm
and on July 6th from 10am-4pm and 5-8pm, which includes
our First Friday Art Walk.
Reminder: Our current exhibitions with artists Ted Arnold, Rush Brown, and Alex Sax are showing through July 6th. If you haven’t seen these fine artists’ exhibitions, come to the Museum during First Friday Art Walk, 5-8pm.
SUMMER ART EXHIBITIONS
Artists Nancy Glassman, Samuel Gelber and Henry Pollard (curated by his daughter, Jessica Lantos), will exhibit their distinct art work at the Maine Jewish Museum during July and August.
Reception: Thursday, July 12, 2018 5pm-7pm
Exhibition: July 12, to August 31, 2018
First Friday Art Walk: August 3, 2018, 5 pm-8pm
Home │ Nancy Glassman
Spiegel Gallery
The nuances of seasonal cycles enthrall me. The changing light that drives the Earth’s energy and reveals the colors and moods of sky, land, and water inspires me to paint. When what I see gets me, I know it is time to pick up the brushes and open up to the here and now. The pulses and rhythms of the scene inform my hand and guide my choices. I paint to apprehend the Life Force and that connection restores me every time.
Coming back to my home town, to have a show at the Maine Jewish Museum, puts me in mind of my roots. Our South Portland neighbors and Jewish friends were like extended family. The resilience of humor, endurance and personal integrity were common themes. My family moved away when I was 10. Maine influences and sensations stuck. I needed to be with these people and to have these landscapes in my eyes. In 1974, I got a summer job in the Mid-coast area, and stayed. There has been much to paint.
The theme of home led me to explore many directions: the visible evidence of climate change, questions of whose home this is my grandparents’ loss of their home country. This show is both a homecoming and a homage.
Nancy Glassman’s work is shown courtesy of Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, Maine.
Getting Wind of It │ Samuel Gelber
Fineberg Family Community Room
Painting is guiding someone from where he or she is to another experience, that is, to add to one’s total enrichment, in a substantive way, providing a new basis for ennobling life and being enriched by it. It is also a personal delight, a constant challenge to me to engage the new.
Through My Father’s Lens │ Henry Pollard
Third Floor Sanctuary
Curated by Jessica Lantos
My father’s wartime photographs are powerful in their beauty, and unique in that they were taken by someone who was not a journalist or a historian, but by a man who saw and captured great beauty through a camera lens. The portraits of soldiers on board ship as they prepare to invade North Africa, army officers at a Valentine’s Day dance in Rome, townspeople greeting soldiers in the streets, bombed out buildings in Pisa, and donkeys pulling carts across an Algerian backdrop are both sensitive and evocative. When paired with my father’s journals, the story is powerful. Together they convey the sense of time and place, the vitality and courage of those young men and women, and the grave expectations placed upon them. Until he died in 2003, these images were hidden. I am committed to sharing his talent and his window onto the world so that more people can see the history my father trapped in cigar boxes.
