An opening reception for “Martha Miller: A Retrospective” will be held from 4-7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 12, at the UMF Art Gallery on the campus of University of Maine at Farmington. It is free and open to the public.

This vibrant retrospective exhibition documents the past 20 years of Martha Miller’s extraordinarily layered and nuanced human studies. When her studio and 30-years of her artwork was destroyed in a fire in 2002, Miller refocused on portraits of family, friends, her students and herself. In their expressionistic vitality and acute observation Miller’s portraits are startlingly intimate, moving beyond a simple physical and emotional study.

Her process is novelistic – she gathers the stimuli of the moment surrounding the subject – music, conversation, fleeting expressions and shadows to create a larger story of a singular human history with its passions and fears and spirit. Her most recent work, intense mosaic walls of memory-images exploded from family photographs, dramatically expands the visual language of her portraiture.

Miller describes her self-portraits as “pictures from the pages of my life; the life of a woman, an artist, a wife, a mother, a grandmother. They tell stories of joy and struggle, and of the different roles a woman plays in living this life. In my drawings I strive to illuminate my spiritual connection to the outer natural world as well as to the dark inner realm of dream and symbol, making manifest images of a personal mythology.”

Miller received her BFA from the Maine College of Art and has for many years taught privately and in MECA’s Program of Continuing Studies. This summer she exhibited a new series, the “Women of Color Portrait Project “at the Camee Davidson Gallery in Readfield.

The UMF Art Gallery is dedicated to bringing contemporary art to the campus and regional communities. artgalleryumf.org The gallery is located at 246 Main Street, behind the Admissions Office. Gallery hours are Tuesdays-Sundays 12-4 p.m., and by appointment. Please contact Sarah at maline@maine.edu  or 778-1062 for more information or to make an appointment.

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