Karma’s Maine Group Show “A Particular Kind of Heaven” Offers a Century of Skygazing

Those who frequent Maine know that you can’t escape the draw of the skies. Spend any time near the coast and you’ll understand just how enthralled you become to orbital tugs: the lure of the sun as it rises over the broad Atlantic and sets over hidden coves, the quiet moon-rocking as the winds follow the water inland and the great pull as they suck back out. So it’s no surprise that New York’s Karma gallery gazed upward to develop their group exhibition “A Particular Kind of Heaven.” On view at their Thomaston outpost—a deconsecrated Catholic church—the show gathers more than one hundred pieces from artists in all stages of their careers (including those who have passed on from them) to portray the innumerable moods a sky can capture in twenty-four hours, and how those forces shape the tone and tenor of a day, a year—and eventually—a life. 

With its high vaulted ceilings, stained glass rose window, and expansive white walls, the church is a masterpiece on its own, so much so that it would be easy to resent the presence of so much art were it not so thoughtfully displayed. In the front portion of the main hall, the presentation is serene and spare, while in the back works soar up to the eaves in a salon-style hang much like a pipe organ would, offering the same mix of resonances—the clarion call of March Avery’s brazen reds and pinks in Pink Hill (2015), the minor chords of Yu Nishimura’s soft and sleepy Transition (2016).

The show tracks a full day, with works loosely arranged in their respective temporal zones—dawn, midday, dusk, and night—collapsing the years separating the artists under the constancy of celestial cycles. The oldest work on view (I think, as there are a few undated oils by Hirosuke Tasaki) is a small cheery farm scene by Marian Spore Bush (1919–1922), but you can find gems from every decade in the past century—a 1968 sunset by Louise Bourgeois, a 1987 striated skyscape by Norman Zammitt. Still, the bulk of the works were created in the past few years; nearly half are from 2024. 

The real joy of the exhibition is in discovering how the theme and the space call forth the unexpected. If you’re not paying attention, you could easily pass over a 1997 tondo by Barkley Hendricks; instead of the life-sized portraits we have come to expect, we have a small rendering of choppy ocean waves, part of a series completed in the Caribbean by Hendricks from 1983 through the early 2000s. Situated next to one of the church’s bright open windows, it reads as a porthole to the sea’s expanse, which—if you crossed the green lawn visible through the casement—is only four miles to the east.

Spin around to the windows opposite and you’ll notice how these architectural features are also used to delineate surprising pairings. Tracking from left to right highlights a surrealist landscape in paint and sand by Alice Rahon (1964), an eerie late-night walk in oil by Gertrude Abercrombie (1939), and a dark and luscious pastel on linen by Swiss artist Nicolas Party (2024). In each work—high and commanding—the moon. 

The lunar lady and her attendants have featured in Karma’s summer exhibitions since its first presentation in 2021, a two-person show featuring Reggie Burrows Hodges’s silhouetted angels and Ann Craven’s moons. Craven is the mastermind behind the church/gallery space and an artist who has been painting moons in her summer home of Cushing, Maine, since 1995. Here, you can find them in Buck Moon (Crazy 8 Clouds, Blue Night, Cushing, 7-13-22, 11:30PM), 2022 and Moon (Crazy 8 Clouds, Blue Night, Cushing), 2024. They gleam out from among Ugo Rondinone’s elegantly carved canvas ersterjunizweitausendundvierundzwanzig (2024), Luigi Zuccheri’s tumultuous tempura Untitled (Riccio ed anatre in volo, Hedgehog and ducks in flight), (c. 1950s), and many others is the back of the main hall. 

Craven isn’t the only artist on view who calls Maine home (for at least part of the year). Another of the state’s patron saints, Katherine Bradford, can be recognized immediately in the large day-glo work Pool Swimmers Under Green Moon (2023), her joyous pink figures frolicking under a sky spinning with lime stars, spotlit by a lime moon. Tucked away in a tiny sanctuary of an alcove, four small works by Lois Dodd (2009–2017) hold vigil while a burning sunrise by Melanie Essex (2024) blesses the stairwell.

I could go on. You could (and should!) consider this show to be a delicious start to an exhibition road trip around the state. Intrigued by the framed suns layed out in inked ash wood and want to see more from Passamaquoddy artist Jeremy Frey? Visit his solo show (the first-ever major retrospective of a Wabanaki artist in a US fine art museum!) at the Portland Museum of Art. Can’t get enough Lynne Drexler after seeing her writhing landscapes? Head down the road five miles and catch a show on her abstractions from the 1960s at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. When you’re done, pop just down the street to the Center for Maine Contemporary Art to check out Donald Moffett’s cautionary eco-sculptures. You’ll find his whimsical epoxy-coated Lot 050124 (nightfall) (2024) in the back of Karma’s main hall.

While “A Particular Kind of Heaven” is a veritable who’s who of Maine-based artists, some of the most exciting pieces come from farther afield. Blazing from the alcove, New York-based Kathryn Lynch’s Super Sun Over Wild Flowers (2024) demonstrates why painting lovers will get off on this show; her oils are applied in diffused blots and washes that bounce the sun’s light off of frothy dandelion heads. Tucked in the back of the main hall, Landscape IV (1986) by Hughie Lee-Smith—an artist who worked predominantly in Cleveland, Chicago, and New York—offers a surrealist take on Black joy in rural spaces with a fluttering pink ribbon exquisitely rendered in painstaking detail. Glimmering in the landing, Ugandan artist Sanaa Gateja’s tapestry Galactic (2022) depicts the majesty of the cosmos in a kaleidoscopic range of paper beads on barkcloth.

Each of these artists, and so many more, capture the feeling of Maine with its mutable arc of sky, regardless of where they come from, perhaps none more so than DC-born, New York-based Nathaniel Oliver. At a remarkable 60¼″ x 96⅛″, his cloud-heavy vista Over Here (2024) is the first thing you see when you visit the church, taking up the entirety of a floating wall that eclipses the space upon entry. I have seen this landscape—a mountain-ringed cove with waves frothing in the foreground against a thin lip of pebbled beach—many times during my travels up and down the coast, from the shores of Mount Desert Island to the hidden inlets of the midcoast. And yet, when I chatted with Oliver at the exhibition’s opening, he shared that he had been in the state for a total of eighteen hours. “I dreamed this place,” he said, nodding to the painting and showing me progress shots on his phone, a series of layers that he would paint, consider, and respond to, a rock slowly morphing into a turtle in the bottom left corner, the mountains darkening from buttercup yellows into hunter greens and slate grays. “I think you dreamed this place,” I replied, gesturing outside the church’s open door. He turned and grinned into blues and greens and whites of the heavenly Maine afternoon. “I think so too.”

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“A Particular Kind of Heaven” is on view at Karma’s summer outpost at 70 Main Street, Thomaston, ME, through September 1, 2024.