This year the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, Maine) has mounted three exhibitions devoted to gifted female artists of different generations.
Coming first chronologically is “Capturing Her Environment: Women Artists, 1870–1930,” a survey of nine women who worked in Maine yet were typically dismissed as hobby painters or overshadowed by their male artist relatives. On view through July 20, 2025, this display features works drawn primarily from the museum’s collection, including miniatures, still lifes, landscapes, and botanical illustrations.
A summer resident of Maine, Ann Craven (b. 1967) is the focus of “Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024),” on view through January 4, 2026. The show moves beyond the motifs for which she is best known — the moon, flowers, and birds — to explore the mechanics of painting itself. Here seriality, repetition, and shifts in scale function as both meditative and formal devices, connecting viewers to the recurring rhythms of nature.
Finally, painter Anne Buckwalter (b. 1987) may be based in Durham, Maine, but she is deeply inspired by the folk traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage. She arranges disparate objects in mysterious domestic interiors, and this show of new paintings and two site-specific murals offers what she calls a “mash-up of objects and patterns from iconic New England spinster homes (the Farnsworth homestead, Sarah Orne Jewett House, Emily Dickinson house… maybe others?) and some of my own personal/domestic objects.” It closes September 21, just as summer draws to a close in Maine.
For more information, visit farnsworthmuseum.org.
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