LEWISTON — The Atrium Art Gallery at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College has issued a call for entries for “The Figure Revealed IV,” a statewide open juried exhibition.

Fourth in a series of exhibitions that focuses exclusively on work created in the environment of life drawing groups, artists are encouraged to submit work in all media completed within the past two years.

Drawing groups exist around the state, somewhat in isolation. They usually meet  weekly for the purpose of drawing, painting, or sculpting with a live model, with participants chipping in to pay the model.

“Since most of the work is not intended for exhibition but as practice, we have an opportunity to enter the private world of artist and model, and to better understand the tradition they continue — a tradition that began in Europe during the 15th century,” exhibit curator Robyn Holman said. 

In his essay for the Atrium Art Gallery’s “The Figure Revealed II,” in 2005, naturalist and writer Peter Steinhart described drawing groups as “deliciously democratic institutions, with professional artists working alongside wincing amateurs and 80-year-old matrons working alongside tattooed teenagers, all together searching for what makes us human.”

The exhibition primarily of figure drawings will also include paintings, prints, and work in clay, plaster, wire and other sculptural media.

One or two works can be submitted. Delivery dates are Monday, Sept. 24, and Tuesday, Sept. 25, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Work may be mailed at any time before that but must arrive by Sept. 25. There is no entry fee. 

Exhibition dates are Nov. 9 through Dec. 14 at the gallery at the college, 51 Westminster St.

For entry forms and guidelines, contact exhibit curator Robyn Holman at753-6554 or [email protected]. Guidelines are also posted at www.usm.maine.edu/atriumgallery.

Jurors for the exhibition are Joel Babb and James Strickland. Babb, one of Maine’s most-noted representational painters, is known for his large street-level views of historic city districts, cityscapes from an aerial perspective and woodland landscapes inspired by his home in rural Sumner.

Strickland of Belfast is an artist, theologian, heliocentric and kinetic sculptor, and philosopher whose studies of architecture, Japanese temples, ocean navigating, mountaineering and technology illuminate his work.

“The Figure Revealed IV” will include an essay and poem by Elizabeth W. Garber of Belfast, who has created many poems in collaboration with painters and sculptors. She studied mythology and Greek epic at Johns Hopkins and Harvard, worked as a renovation carpenter in California, received a master’s degree in traditional five element acupuncture and has been practicing this for 27 years in Belfast.

Three of her poems have been read on National Public Radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac” and Garrison Keillor included one poem in his anthology “Good Poems for Hard Times.”