REVERSING FALLS WINTER-INTO-SPRING SERIES

The Art of Protest: Politics and War

Given the explosion of violence we are currently seeing across our Planet, Reversing Falls Sanctuary has chosen the following theme for its Winter-into-Spring Series for 2024:  The Art of Protest: Politics and War. The series will highlight the work of three Maine artists who have devoted much of their lives to working for peace through the arts.

The first gathering on Sunday, March 10th, at 4 pm, will feature the work of Deer Isle artist, Patricia Wheeler. Pat is a mixed media painter. Using a form of imbrication – image and text arranged so that they overlap – she explores concepts of human interaction with the Earth. Her search is spiritual. By conjoining the visual and the verbal, the interrelated symbols encode and transmit meaning. She exhibits widely in the United States and teaches painting intensives throughout the United States and Canada to include Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, CMCA, Oregon College of Art & Craft, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology in Oregon, Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, and Vancouver Island Art Workshops in British Columbia. Patricia has been selected for numerous artist residencies. She graduated from Rutgers University with high honors in studio art.  On 3/10, Pat will be showing  two videos that she made during her art activism period during the Iraq War.  She will also be sharing stories about the art exhibit that is currently hung in the gallery within, featuring her war cloth paintings which she made as part of an activist group dedicated to ending the carnage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Portraits of peacemakers painted by Rob Shetterly will also be part of this show.

On Sunday, March 17th at 4 pm, Rob Shetterly, a Brooksville artist known nationally for his portrait series, Americans Who Tell the Truth, will share stories of peacemakers whose portraits he has painted. Rob was born in Cincinnati, graduated from Harvard University, and moved to the woods of Maine in 1970 as part of the “back-to-the-land” movement. There, he raised his family and taught himself drawing, painting, and printmaking. Having never painted a portrait, Rob was moved by the response of our government to the attacks of September 11th, 2001 to find Americans who stood courageously for Truth. He undertook the project as a way to cope with his own grief and anger by learning about and painting Americans who inspired him. He has now painted more then 250 portraits profiling Americans who have struggled for racial, social, gender, economic, and environmental justice. He is also the subject of a feature-length documentary film, Truth Tellers, directed by Richard Kane.

The third gathering on Sunday, March 24th at 4 pm, will feature Doug Rawlins.  Doug is a veteran of the American War in Viet Nam who believes that the arts provide the most effective medium for dealing with the impact that war has on individuals who survive their respective war zones. His chosen art form is the poem. He sees political poetry as a particular means to express the surreal nature of war, while pulling the poet away from mere therapeutic ramblings. He has published five books of poems, in addition to using poetry in Peace Studies courses that he has taught and in sessions he has led at the Togus Veterans Administration psychiatric ward. He retired from UMF twelve years ago and spends most of his time now working with Veterans for Peace, an international organization that he helped co-found here in Maine in 1985. He is ultimately working to save this planet from the ravages of war so this his grandchildren can live in peace. Doug’s books will be available for purchase throughout the series. There will be an art exhibit at the gallery within throughout the series, featuring the work of Patricia Wheeler and Rob Shetterly.

Reversing Falls Sanctuary, 818 Bagaduce Road, Brooksville.  Suggested donation $10.00.