The CHML Annual meeting will finish with a talk by Donna Cassidy. “The Painter from Maine”: Marsden Hartley in Lovell and across the State
Born in Lewiston, Maine, Marsden Hartley gained a reputation as a modernist artist having spent many years in avant-garde circles in New York, Paris and Berlin. Yet equally important for Hartley was his identity as a Maine artist. This talk will examine the critical importance of his connections to the state for his art, particularly his summers in Lovell and Stoneham in the first decade of the century.
Donna Cassidy is Professor of Art History and American & New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine, where she has taught since 1987. She has published widely on modernism and regionalism in early 20th century American art. She is the author of Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940 (1997) and Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (2005), and co-author (with Elizabeth Finch and Randall R. Griffey) of Marsden Hartley’s Maine (2017), the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name which she co-curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art. Soon to be retired from USM, she is looking forward to having more time to dedicate to two research projects: she is Guest Curator for a 2023 exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art: Shifting Sands: Beaches, Bathers and Modern Maine Art, and she is working on a new book—Looking North: U.S. Artists in Quebec and Atlantic Canada 1890-1940—which examines an unexplored site of artistic interest for early 20th century American artists.