Portland Museum of Art 2018 Biennial is a political, provocative, excellent show
Portland Museum of Art 2018 Biennial is a political, provocative, excellent show
It features about 75 works by two dozen artists and diverges in terms of media.
BY DANIEL KANY
The 2018 Portland Museum of Art Biennial is possibly the most handsome since the Thon Bequest set the every-other-year exhibit in motion about 20 years ago. This year’s biennial was organized by outside curator Nat May, who worked with a committee that included PMA director Mark Bessire, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture co-director Sarah Workneh and Theresa Second, the founding director of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. May (who is not related to PMA curator Jessica May) is the executive director and co-founder of Hewnoaks Artist Colony but is probably best known regionally for his tenure as executive director of Space Gallery from 2004 to 2016.
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To begin, entering the biennial’s first gallery, we are met by paintings of black people, photographs by a black artist and paintings by a black artist. Around the corner is a huge installation of paintings by Daniel Minter, a vast and complex altar to the African American experience. We’ll come back to the initial curatorial presentation later, but Minter’s installation is a masterwork. It exudes a presence that outstrips anything I have ever seen in that space. Sean Alonzo Harris’s four photographs of young black males playing basketball at Kennedy Park in Portland are also extraordinary. Harris’s technical skill is outstanding, and his sensibilities for photographing black and brown skin are superb. My take on Harris is expanded by a solo exhibition of his work now on view at PhoPa Gallery in Portland, which I recently reviewed.
And I have also written extremely positive reviews of the work of Minter and David Driskell (both of whom show at Greenhut Galleries in Portland). Driskell is a national treasure, and Minter’s “A Distant Holla” show at Portland’s Abyssinian Meetinghouse topped my year-end list of Maine’s 2017 visual-art high points.
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