Alumni News 2020

Hewnoaks alumni are out in the world doing amazing things! We’ll keep a running list here. To see alumni news from 2019 and before, click here.

(If you are a past participant in our program, please drop us a line so we can celebrate what you’ve been doing.)

November, 2020

Daniel Minter is included in a group show entitled I Am an American at Cove Street Arts, which runs till January 16, 2021. The exhibit explores the complexities and contradictions of race, identity and what it means to be an American.

Anne Buckwalter featured recently as a part of a group show at the Rachel Uffner Gallery, NYC, entitled Warmth and Promise, which presented a small selection of artists depicting intimacy through representational art.

Amanda Marchand’s solo show The World is Astonishing is on display at Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, CA until January 6, 2021. Not traveling to California anytime soon? Schedule a virtual gallery visit here.

In October, Megan Grumbling released her second poetry collection, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, with Acre Books. The collection “vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change, as the goddess comes and goes erratically from our warming world,” and can be ordered here.

In partnership two collaborators, Leah Sobsey has launched a new clothing line, LEA, that blends art, ecology, and sustainability and features threatened plants from Thoreau’s woods. Click here to take a look at the Indiegogo campaign they’ve set up to help fund the venture.

Elias Peirce and Isaac Jaegerman’s collaborative work A Time of Wild Meaning recently appeared at the New Systems Gallery in Portland, ME. This exhibition was the fruit of a joint residency they undertook at Hewnoaks funded by a project grant from the Maine Arts Commission.

June, 2020

Congratulations to these Hewnoaks alumni writers for winning Maine Literary Awards from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance this year:

Maureen StantonBody Leaping Backward (Book Award for Memoir)
Rebecca Turkewitz, “At This Late Hour” (Short Works Competition in Fiction)
Jennifer Lunden, “Fugitive Justice” (Short Works Competition in Nonfiction)
Jefferson Navicky, “Other Fathers” and other poems (Short Works Competition in Poetry)

Rebecca Turkewitz also published a short humor piece in The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts on May 29, titled “The Pre-Apocalyptic Novels We All Need Right Now.”

Douglas Milliken released a new EP on Bandcamp with his project The Plaster Cramp, titled Four Roads :: Losing Drafts. Proceeds from sales will be donated to the Grassroots Law Project.

Julie Poitras Santos will screen Chronicle of Mud, a video she made with the support of the Bates College Museum of Art for the exhibition Anthropocenic, Art About the Natural World in the Human Era, on the evening of July 1 at Vox Populi in conjunction with a performance by Maddie Hewett and a Q&A with the artists. Follow their website for more details soon.

May, 2020

Hewnoaks is well represented with alumni who will be included in the upcoming Center for Maine Contemporary Art Biennial (October 2020 – February 2021):

Anne Buckwalter, Ben DeHaan, Brian Doody, Jenny McGee Dougherty, Meg Hahn, Breehan James, Gregory Jamie, Baxter Koziol, Isabelle Maschal O’Donnell, Maia Snow, Benjamin Spalding, Jimmy Viera 

March, 2020

Dave Camlin‘s film “Welcome to Commie High” tells the story of an alternative public school that was founded in 1972 while following the 2016 – 2017 school year, and will be premiering at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Pat Mew‘s play Being Tennessee, about Tennessee Williams, was chosen for a staged reading by Acorn Productions for their Maine Play Festival this month.

February, 2020

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Anne Britting Oleson‘s new novel “Cow Palace” comes out in March from Bink Books.

Erin Dorneys “QUESTION THE BODY”, created during her 2019 Hewnoaks residency, will be featured at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art as part of their “SCREEN” series of video work by artists with a connection to Maine. March 7 – June 7. erindorney.com/

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Shoshannah White: River Constellation: Rio Grande, Socorro, New Mexico. *
Gelatin Silver Photogram Prints from Rio Grande sedimentary silt and river water

Shoshannah White has work in two venues in New Mexico: The Richard Levy Gallery is showing her underwater iceberg works and the Roswell Museum and Art Center is exhibiting a new triptych of photograms related to the Rio Grande and the United States and Mexico Boundary Survey of 1857.

Hilary Irons will have a solo exhibition at Unity College in Maine February 27 – March 28, with an opening reception on Thursday March 5.

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Jimmy Riordan brought a bus from Pittsburgh to Alaska to launch Anchorage’s first Bookmobile. Listen to this report from Alaska Public Media from December.

January, 2020

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Daniel Minter received a Caldecott Honor for his work illustrating Going Down Home with Daddy, written by Kelly Starling Lyons.


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Elaine Ng has work at Interloc Projects in Rockland from January 18 – February 29, in a show called OVER/UNDER.


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Meghan Brady releases her new book of paintings, which contains essays by Jenna Crowder, Anna Hepler, and Matt Phillips. Saturday February 1, 4-6 pm @bettyforevermaine in Camden, Maine

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Nat Baldwin will release his newest album at SPACE on February 6, which includes songs he worked on at Hewnoaks last summer. Also on the bill is avant performance and sound artist Lauren Tosswill.

Chris Patch curated “Happy Agitation” at Able Baker Contemporary in Portland, running January 31 – March 15, 2020.

Maureen Stanton‘s essay, “Through a Glass, Tearfully,” was published in Longreads in January 2020.

Bess Weldon will present a reading of her play MERGIRL SAVES THE WAVES, a feminist, environmentalist adaptation of The Little Mermaid, with A Company of Girls at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater the weekend of March 20-22.

Thalassa Raasch and Pamela Moulton received Kindling Fund grants from SPACE Gallery for 2020.

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