Features

Do Go Chasing Waterfalls

From roadside chutes to backcountry cascades, tiny slides to dramatic plunges, here’s where to find our favorite falls.

By Adrienne Perron and Brian Kevin

Wet, Hot Lakeside Summer

Pontoon flotillas! Dance parties! Disco-themed booze cruises! The little town of Naples is one big party all season long — and nowhere else in Maine is quite like it.

By Jaed Coffin

Blasts from the Past

Restaurants come and restaurants go, but these time-tested diners, lodges, lobster shacks, and more only get better with age.

Departments

North by East

The high-tech equipment that aids LifeFlight of Maine, the end of the Maine Sea Goddess’s reign, and an Aroostook-reared poet with home on the brain. Plus, in Maine Dispatches, L.L.Bean goes dark on social.

Food and Drink

Gifford’s Ice Cream recovers from a factory fire, Trudy Bird’s Ølbar brings Scandinavia to North Yarmouth, and Veazie’s Korean Dad hosts a buffet of global pop-ups.

Good Things from Maine

A unique South Porland welding school blazes a path for those underrepresented in the trades. Also, a roundup of Maine-made skin-care and a visit with the volunteer knitters of the Loose Ends Project.

Maine Homes

Orono gardeners go big on hostas, determined cottagers go off-grid in Harpswell, and a Brunswick inn launches an innkeeper essay contest.

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Where in Maine

Maine Moment

Dooryard

Editor’s note, responses to May’s Where in Maine, the masthead, and more.

Columns

Room With a View.

My Favorite Place

Swordfishing captain Linda Greenlaw, on Surry’s Morgan Bay. 

On Our Cover: Long Lake, in Naples, by Mat Trogner.

Additional Photos: Benjamin Williamson, Kelsey Kobik, and Nicole Wolf

Oceanside High School wrestler Maddie Ripley won in the 106-pound weight class at the state championships. She is the first girl to take home a Maine title. Her twin brother, Gavin, also won in his weight class.

Augusta

The Bureau of Motor Vehicles, cracking down on provocative vanity plates, nixed LOVETOFU. The plate’s owner, a vegan, was reassigned an unambiguously generic plate number. 

Bethel

A bill introduced by state senator Lisa Keim and supported by Maine Mineral and Gem Museum curator Myles Felch would make granitic pegmatite, found in 14 of Maine’s 16 counties, the official state rock. Presently, there is no state rock, but the state gemstone is tourmaline.

Fort Fairfield

Three bison went running down Route 1A after escaping from a local farm. Two were corralled by police later that day. The third remained at large until the following evening.

Ogunquit

Based on user reviews, TripAdvisor named Ogunquit Beach the ninth-best beach in the country. Last year, the beach placed 23rd.

Portland

Retired University of Southern Maine philosophy professor Robert Louden donated $300,000 to his former employer to fund a public lecture series bringing prominent outside scholars to the campus. 

Granted, the Biennial at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art has always been about showcasing what’s new, but the state’s longest-running juried exhibition is especially brand spanking this time around. It’s the first Biennial under executive director and chief curator Timothy Peterson, and new selection criteria gave preference to artists who didn’t play a part in the prior Biennial. Of 432 applicants, 35 Maine-based or Maine-connected artists were selected by independent jurors, and only one of those appeared in the 2020 Biennial (this year’s show, which opened in January, teetered into triennial territory after the pandemic pushed back exhibition schedules).

As ever, the Biennial is a multimedia affair, with works ranging from painting to film to textile, but a distinct emphasis on sculpture and installation grew out of the submission pool and selection process this year, featuring quite a bit of recycled and repurposed material, like used wooden furniture and discarded commercial fishing gear. Even what’s old can be new again. 

Through May 7. 21 Winter St., Rockland. 207-701-5005.

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Jaime DeSimone has been visiting Rockland’s Farnsworth Art Museum for so long, she can’t remember her first trip. Childhood vacations involved museum-hopping Route 1 road trips between her family’s Massachusetts home and Mount Desert Island. When she studied art history at Bates College, around the turn of the aughts, Maine museums like the Farnsworth were “her textbooks.” She’s since done curatorial work at museums across the country, specializing in contemporary art, most recently at the Portland Museum of Art. Last summer, she became the Farnsworth’s chief curator, arriving just in time to help shepherd the museum’s 75th-anniversary reinstallation.

The museum reopens in February after a five-week closure and massive overhaul of the permanent-collection exhibition galleries. The new approach shows off new acquisitions and groups artwork thematically: One room focuses on Maine industry, with pieces related to fishing, say, or Rockland’s historic granite quarries. Another is devoted to landscapes, with work exploring places real and imagined. Another is full of art concerned with the sea. Placards offer not only descriptions and background but also questions and prompts, which DeSimone hopes will help prompt moments of “personal discovery, rather than just a static experience.” We spoke to DeSimone about the anniversary revamp and more.

What attracted you to the position at the Farnsworth?

I love Maine, and I believe there’s something special happening here that has informed and directed American art in a way that not many places have. The Farnsworth is the only museum with this mission to celebrate Maine and American art — others carry and share that responsibility, but it really is the Farnsworth where all of our collections strategy goes back to that mission, all of our exhibition program goes back to that mission. And there is a lot to celebrate here.

What makes Maine so exceptional in its relationship to American art?

The artistic community here is endless, which gives us a lot of opportunities and moments of discovery that I don’t think people expect. Every little peninsula, every community, I know there’s some artists there doing something. And I hope they’re really proud of it, because they’re the cultural fabric of our state.

How is the ongoing push to “decolonize” museums playing out at the Farnsworth?

We have a commitment to Wabanaki artists, and what we’re looking at now are these early 18th- and 19th-century American landscape paintings and the subject of visibility and invisibility. Who was inhabiting those lands at this time? Who was portrayed, and who wasn’t? Of course, we know Native Americans were living on Turtle Island for 13,000 years. Did artists choose to represent them? No. So we can have a conversation about that just through absence.

What do you think long-time visitors will make of the reinstallation?

I hope it will excite people. I hope it will continue to remind them that the Farnsworth is one of the greatest repositories of American art. I think it’s really just a matter of broadening the story and who’s a part of it. I love going to museums where I think I know the work really well, until I see it next to something I’ve never seen it next to — and then I see something I’ve never seen.

JASON BROWN AKA FIREFLY, (PENOBSCOT, B. 1973), WABANAVIA, 2022, STILL IMAGES FROM DIGITAL FILM, MUSEUM PURCHASE, LYNNE DREXLER ACQUISITION FUND, 2022.11. © JASON BROWN DAVID DRISKELL, COLD NIGHT, FALLING TREES, 2005, OIL AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS, 20 X 15 INCHES, MUSEUM PURCHASE WITH SUPPORT FROM THE FRIENDS OF THE FARNSWORTH COLLECTION, 2006.10

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Features

Season Unseen

Acadia National Park’s summertime splendor attracts millions of visitors, but in the depths of winter, the park takes on a different character.

Photographed by Benjamin Williamson | Text by Ann Pollard Ranco

The New Maine Classics

The last 25 years have given us a bumper crop of motley, memorable Maine storytelling. We picked out 25 Maine-media artifacts — a sundry set of books, films, digital projects, and more — that’ll stand the test of time.

The World Through Kaleidoscope Eyes

Abstract paintings by the late Lynne Drexler are suddenly fetching upwards of a million dollars apiece. Who was Drexler, and why is her immense talent only just beginning to get its due?

By Will Grunewald

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Special Advertising Section: Retirement

How Maine came to be a pioneer in lifelong learning — and what’s on offer for those heading back to the classroom.

By Bridget M. Burns

Departments

North by East

Mainers love their pond-hockey tournaments, a novelist hates on “nor’easter,” and a new chief curator reflects on 75 years of the Farnsworth. In Maine Dispatches, Maine elects its first Black Speaker of the House.

Food and Drink

A Sunday River food truck slings sweet on the slopes, they’re lining up for waffles in Dover-Foxcroft, and a new Stephen King cookbook is more scrumptious than scary.

Good Things from Maine

Trying on our favorite Maine-y graphic tees and a Waterville mask maker’s masquerade pieces. Plus, checking in on Bangor’s vintage revival.

Maine Homes

A Bangor Garrison designed on the cheap, UMaine’s innovative 3D-printed houses, and a welcome historic designation for Portland’s Mechanics’ Hall.

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Where In Maine

Maine Moment

Dooryard

Editor’s note, responses to December’s Where in Maine, the masthead, and more.

Columns

Room With a View.

My Favorite Place

Maine Coast Heritage Trust president and CEO Kate Stookey, on Blue Hill’s Falls Bridge.

On Our Cover: Acadia National Park’s Jesup Path, by Benjamin Williamson.

Additional photos: Cait Bourgault and Benjamin Williamson.

Seven years ago, the cargo ship El Faro sailed from Jacksonville, Florida, bound for Puerto Rico, carrying shipping containers, trailers, and cars. Captain Michael Davidson and four of the 32 crew members — Michael Holland, Dylan Meklin, Danielle Randolph, and Mitchell Kuflik — were graduates of Maine Maritime Academy. Two days out of port, their 791-foot vessel strained under wind gusts greater than 100 miles an hour and waves in excess of 30 feet, near the eye of Hurricane Joaquin. Soon, the El Faro had sunk, and all hands were lost.

This fall, shortly before the anniversary of the tragedy, hundreds of people attended a dedication ceremony for a monument, El Faro Salute!, that Maine Maritime alumnus Jay Sawyer erected in Rockland, where Meklin and Randolph lived. The steel sculpture depicts two faceless merchant marines, a man and a woman, saluting above a stern the shape of El Faro’s, with the names of all 33 victims etched in it.

Sawyer’s path to the arts wasn’t a straight line. He graduated from the academy in 1983, then worked for five years as an engineer on an oil tanker. After stashing away a nest egg, he came ashore for good and started a welding business, earning a reputation for skillful metalwork. To his surprise, artists began looking him up. “I had these sculptors calling me to help them finish their works or to do repairs,” he says. “I already had those skills and took them for granted. I had thought anyone could do this if they just put their mind to it.”

Eventually, he felt creative impulses of his own, and he now has public and private works in nearly every state along the Eastern Seaboard and as far away as Texas. At his studio, in the woods in Warren, he shapes steel into large spheres and other mostly abstract forms (visitors to Portland International Jetport might register one of his spheres, raised on a gracile pedestal, just down Jetport Boulevard from the main terminal). Sawyer first learned about the sinking of El Faro on TV. “I felt it immediately,” he recalls. “I remembered my own experiences in storms and how vulnerable I felt.”

He set to thinking what he could do to honor the memories of the lost sailors, and the idea for a waterfront installation took shape. “Over time, it became pretty obvious that this was something I had to do,” he says. “I truly felt this sense of responsibility. . . . I understand the power of art to heal.”

The process wasn’t easy — developing a concept, fundraising to help cover costs, creating the sculpture, working with local officials to find a site. This fall, friends and family of El Faro’s crew came to the dedication ceremony, midshipmen from Maine Maritime Academy and Massachusetts Maritime Academy formed a color guard, and attendees laid flowers at the foot of the memorial. In the background, sailboats swayed gently at their moorings in the placid harbor. “Public art is a tricky thing,” Sawyer says. “My community gave me the privilege to do this. With the help of lots and lots of people, we pulled off something good.”

Sawyer’s El Faro monument is on Atlantic Street in Rockland, just south of South End Beach, where public parking is available.

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A Few of Their Favorite Things

Maine’s talented artisans tell us about the heirlooms and objects of art that have inspired them, shaped their lives, and informed their craft.

By Adrienne Perron, Brian Kevin, and Arielle Greenberg

Legacy Keeper

After a wild year, Aroostook musher Jonathan Nathaniel Hayes, champion of a canine hero and a Maine heritage breed, looks ahead to another ambitious challenge.

Interview by Brian Kevin

How Did Gulf of Maine Lobster Get Canceled?

And does it matter? A look at the red-listing of Maine’s iconic export — and the fallout.

By Kathryn Miles

Departments

North by East

The curtain comes down on a Belfast theater, a new children’s book salutes Maine’s very own Christmas song, and Rockland unveils an El Faro memorial. In Maine Dispatches, things are getting off the rails in Orneville.

Food and Drink

A Rockland chocolatier’s Maine-y Advent calendar, a reboot for Portland’s sky-high cocktail bar, and a Vassalboro brewery with lab leanings.

Good Things from Maine

A Portland ceramicist sculpts funky menorahs, and a printmaker in Brooks turns out folksy designs. Plus, fuzzy fleece neck warmers with flair.

Maine Homes

Tour a Cape Elizabeth muralist’s 1952 Cape, a cute-as-a-button Portland artist’s studio, and block after block of festive holiday-lighting displays.

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Where In Maine

Maine Moment

Dooryard

Editor’s note, reader feedback, responses to October’s Where in Maine, and more.

Columns

Books: 80 Years of We Took to the Woods; Room With a View.

My Favorite Place

USM director of choral studies Dr. Nicolás Alberto Dosman, on Portland Head Light.

On Our Cover: Snow-covered branches in Acadia National Park, by John K. Putnam.

Additional photos: Jason Frank, Benjamin Williamson, and Tara Rice.

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The Glass Feather

Vet tech Heather Burgess (@the.glass.feather) learned the craft seven years ago from old hands Lisa and Dave Roy, at Bucksport’s stalwart Stubborn Cow glass studio. Today, her work is on display at several Maine galleries, including Camden’s Small Wonder Gallery and the Maine Coastal Island National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center, in Rockland. Burgess doesn’t put her work in frames; instead, she mounts some of her pieces — which might include paper cranes, loons, coral, or mermaids — on pieces of driftwood, giving them a little sculptural flair.

Seagull Adrift, $200.

Girl with a Glass Heart

On a whim, Roberta Mershimer (@girlwithaglassheart) took an eight-week community-ed course in stained glass shortly after moving to South Paris, back in the ’80s. Two weeks in, she was hooked enough to buy her own glass grinder. Her work since has included entire kitchen windows, pieces that encapsulate bike gears inside glass patterns, and round window hangings depicting moose in the mountains. For extra Maine-y flair, she frames some of her work using wooden snowshoes.

Great Blue Heron, $350. Mershimer’s work is for sale at Norway’s Food for Thought café or via Instagram.

Luna Glass Design

In 2020, Kaela Brennan (@lunaglassdesign_) met her partner, John, a glassblower, and before long she was making glass pendants in his backyard studio. A year later, she got a job with Manchester’s Stained Glass Express, and soon she was creating her own stained-glass designs. “I use my photographs of nature and trace them to create patterns,” she says. Many of her pieces focus on animals, and some of her favorite projects are custom orders to stained-glass-ify pets (including, recently, a pit bull in a beanie and shades).

Daisy, $100. Brennan’s work is for sale on Instagram.

Botanic Magic

A Maine College of Art and Design masters program drew Lauren Berg (@botanic_magic) from New York to Maine, in 2017. After graduating, she set about brainstorming ways to blend her passions for art and herbalism, eventually buying a soldering iron and incorporating pressed botanicals into stained glass made from shards she collected on roadsides. “Herbalism taught me about the fragility of Maine’s ecosystem,” the Warren-based artist says. “I wanted to preserve botanicals in something that was strong but also fragile, as a metaphor.” These days, she uses more-professional materials, and her signature pieces frame plants and seaweed inside simple, colorful shapes.

Queen Anne’s Lace Mooncatcher, $115.

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When Kate McAleer opened Bixby Chocolate in an old ice warehouse in Rockland, in 2011, she was the only Maine chocolatier working from scratch, beginning with unroasted cocoa beans, and she offered just one line of candy bars. Now, Bixby offers more than 50 products, many of which — from pecan-pie truffles to chocolate-covered Amarena cherries to maple-vanilla bonbons — appear in the Advent calendars McAleer introduced last year. The icons on each perforated door — roaring fire, Bean boots, lobsterboat — were drawn by Portland graphic designer Mali Welch and lean more Maine-y and wintery than explicitly Christmas-y, because McAleer wanted to capture the seasonal spirit regardless of personal holiday traditions. “It was just such a joyful time as a child,” she says. “So expressing that joy in the form of this calendar is kind of like one of my Wilhelmina Wonka dreams come true.”

Bixby Advent calendars feature Maine-made chocolates and Maine artwork, and they are printed in Maine too. $70.

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The autumn was Edna St. Vincent Millay’s favorite season — or anyway, it was the time of year that seemed to find the Camden-reared, Jazz Age poet at her most rapturous. “Oh, Autumn! Autumn!—What is the Spring to me?” she beseeched in one poem, denigrating mud season like a true Mainer. In another of her many autumn verses, she extolled the season’s stillness, which “will lie upon the spirit like that haze / touching far islands on fine autumn days.” Growing up, Millay glimpsed far islands from the wooded Camden Hills, which seemed, in the fall, to “ache and sag and all but cry with color,” as she wrote in “God’s World,” one of her best-known works. Wander Camden and its surrounding towns — arcadian hamlets like Lincolnville, Hope, Union, and Rockport — during foliage season, and it’s easy to see what left Millay so euphoric. From the harbors to the hilltops to the rolling pastures, from the vibrant hues of the early season to the rustier tones of its waning days, there is a romance to autumn in the Camden Hills that no place in New England can match.

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Farnsworth Art Museum

Farnsworth Forward: The Collection

The Farnsworth is well-known for its Wyeths, and rightly so — the museum holds a remarkable stash from the First Family of American Art. Farnsworth Forward: The Collection, though, highlights how its holdings — some 15,000 works — can more broadly and deeply convey Maine’s place in American art. The show is guest curated by Suzette McAvoy, who was the museum’s chief curator in the early ’90s before helming the CMCA for many years. The concept began with a chat between McAvoy and the Farnsworth’s brass about how to look anew at the permanent collection. One key outcome: what McAvoy calls “contemporary interventions” — pairings of historical and contemporary paintings meant to “spark a visual conversation.”

So a 2003 work by Boothbay-born artist Sam Cady, for instance, appears next to a 1916 painting by George Bellows. Both depict the construction of a wooden ship, showing the continuity of a traditional Maine industry but also an evolution of how to see it: Bellows brings a realist’s eye, Cady zooms in on crisscrossing beams, blurring the line between realism and abstraction. The pairs of works seem to challenge and reinforce each other — and cast the collection in a meaningful new light. Through December 31. 16 Museum St., Rockland. 207-596-6457.

Ogunquit Museum of American Art

The View from Narrow Cove

The painter Charles Woodbury first ventured from Boston to Narrow Cove, in Ogunquit, in the late 1800s, after marrying a native Mainer. The couple bought five acres, and Woodbury, an established painter and instructor back in the city, began hosting multi-week art courses on the shore. His influence jump-started a seasonal migration up the coast, turning Ogunquit into a renowned arts colony. The View from Narrow Cove is in its fifth iteration now, after debuting in 2018, each summer bringing a fresh dive into the collection of the museum, which opened on Woodbury’s old property in 1953.

The exhibition draws lines between the Ogunquit colony and broader movements in art. It’s interesting, for example to see a landscape by the German-born Rudolph Dirks, a famous early-20th-century cartoonist who honed his fine-arts skills in Ogunquit. The overall impression is of the diversity of the influences that have flowed in and out of the little town. Associate curator Devon Zimmerman describes the exhibition as “a wonderful opportunity to see the rich history of Ogunquit but also to look at it through the lens of the larger artist communities.” Through October 31. 543 Shore Rd., Ogunquit. 207-646-4909.

Center for Maine Contemporary Art

The View from Here

The CMCA has always held a laser focus on the here and now — a non-collecting institution ever on the lookout for what’s new, never stashing anything away for later. On the occasion of the museum’s 70th anniversary, however, curators are allowing themselves a glance back, at least sort of. The View from Here contains work from 20 artists, ranging in age from their 20s to 90s, who have played a part in CMCA history, from exhibiting work to donating work for auction. It’s still very much of the moment — most pieces are recent, though 95-year-old Lois Dodd, who had a major solo show at the CMCA in 2008, lent her 1974 painting Sunlight on Spruce at Noon, which previously hung in her Cushing home. Dodd’s fellow nonagenarian midcoast-based painter Alex Katz, one of the institution’s earliest exhibitors, contributed his 2017 abstract landscape Grass 7, a large canvas of vivid green and yellow brushstrokes.

“We wanted to celebrate our history,” CMCA executive director Tim Peterson says, “but from a contemporary perspective.” It’s a retrospective that’s light on retrospect but still gets at the identity of the museum. Over the decades, the CMCA has been a home for artists in any and all media, so long as they’re connected to Maine. If You Lived Here (You’d Be Home By Now) is a fiberglass replica of a camping trailer with a neon sign on the side that reads “It’s the little things” and an embedded screen showing looped video of the coast. Tectonic Industries, the collaborative duo behind it, had been searching for a creative community by the sea where they could live and work, which landed them here. Through September 11. 21 Winter St., Rockland. 207-701-5005.

GEORGE BELLOWS, THE TEAMSTER, 1916, OIL ON CANVAS, BEQUEST OF MRS. ELIZABETH B. NOYCE, 1997; RUDOLPH DIRKS (1877-1968), HILL TO THE SEA (OGUNQUIT, MAINE), 1930, OIL ON CANVAS, 21 X 24 INCHES, GIFT OF JOHN AND MARY DIRKS, 1997.10.2. KATHERINE BRADFORD, SUMMER NIGHT, 2021, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID CLOUGH

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White Mountain Majesties

New Hampshire might claim the biggest piece of the White Mountain National Forest, but western Maine’s slice has a quiet grandeur all its own, from crystal-clear streams to dense forests to rocky peaks.

By Will Grunewald, Joel Crabtree, Adrienne Perron, and Brian Kevin

Nirav Shah Is Ambivalent About His Celebrity

And uncommonly curious and deliberate about everything else. On the state’s surprisingly visible CDC director (and his ego, waffle recipe, and . . . political ambitions?).

By Jesse Ellison

Catch and Release

A close call on the Kennebec River Gorge interrupted one writer’s life. Two years later, he reflects on the accident and on the changes since — for him and for all of us.

By Franklin Burroughs

Departments

North by East

Divers explore a mysterious Frankfort quarry, the Maine Lobster Festival returns for a big anniversary, and three venerable art museums get back to their roots. Plus, in Maine Dispatches, a high-schooler in Boothbay treats a horse disease with honey.

Food and Drink

An iconic Skowhegan ice-cream stand keeps on scooping. Also, the scoop on a reborn Peaks Island hangout and the best (and worst) of Maine-food TV.

Good Things from Maine

Our summer guide to Maine-made outdoor gear, full of tools and toys you’ll love, from sunglasses to surfboards, rucksacks to rain pants.

Maine Homes

A unique multi-peaked home in Lincolnville, an Orono garden commingling native and tropical plants, and three historic politicos’ homes campaigning for attention in a red-hot market.

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Where In Maine

Maine Moment

Dooryard

Editor’s note, reader feedback, responses to June’s Where in Maine, and more.

Columns

Books: Three Maine Summer Novels; Room With a View.

My Favorite Place

AARP Maine state director Noël Bonam on the George Brook Flowage.

On Our Cover: Caribou Mountain, by Chris Shane.

Additional photos: Benjamin Williamson, Dave Waddell, and Chris Shane.

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