UMaine Machias Creative Arts faculty to open a spring show at the Powers Hall gallery

MACHIAS, Maine — The University of Maine at Machias will open its spring gallery show on Feb. 12 from 4-6 p.m., featuring some of the latest pieces and previous work from five faculty from the Creative Arts Program. 

The mixed media artwork will be from the collections of Bernie Vinzani, Leslie Bowman, Lauren Luloff, Audra Christie, and Jennie Hahn. 

Vinzani teaches courses in design, drawing, printmaking, papermaking and book arts at UMaine Machias and is the director of the Art Galleries, the Book Arts Studio and the Gallery of the Book on campus.

After receiving his MFA in printmaking and drawing from Indiana State University, he was a master papermaker at Twinrocker Paper Inc. and has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in various venues, such as the VI International Print Biennial in Kraków, Poland; Das Papier in Düren, Germany; ARC Gallery in Chicago and the Maine Invitational in Portland. His work has also been featured in several publications, including Hand Papermaking, “The Book of Fine Paper,” American Craft Magazine, The Boston Globe and Art New England. Additionally, his work is in numerous corporate and private collections, such as the Library of Congress, the American Museum of Natural History and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Bowman holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, as well as an MFA in Painting from Washington University, St. Louis, and has been teaching art at UMM as an adjunct faculty member since the mid 1990’s. 

She has taught classes in photography, graphics, drawing, design and painting, and worked with many senior students on their final projects. Her professional work, outside of teaching, includes photography for several state publications. 

Luloff received her MFA from Bard College at The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and her BFA from Pennsylvania State University.

Known for her paintings created on silk with dye, Luloff opened her first solo museum exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in September 2024. Alongside her larger works, she has created dozens of smaller florals and landscapes in her studio,  painted en plein air along the coast of Maine in summer and fall 2024.  

Luloff’s recent solo exhibitions have been with Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine; Dunes, Portland, Maine; Ceysson and Benetiere, New York; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, New York; Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg and Geneva, Switzerland; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; The Hole, New York; and Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy.

Christie is a full-time high school art teacher and has been an adjunct art professor at the UMaine Machias since 2015.  She has taught a wide range of courses, including Art Fundamentals: 3D, Special Topics in Art, Socially Engaged Art, Senior Project, First-Year Seminar and Art History I & II. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts from UMaine Machias and an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art & Design.

As a fiber artist living in the woods of Downeast Maine, Christie is deeply connected to the landscape and rural traditions. She wet-felts wool hats by hand, using fiber from her sheep and other locally sourced Maine wool. In addition to spinning, knitting and crocheting, she creates intricate needle-felted landscapes, capturing the textures and colors of the natural world in wool. This practice will be displayed in Christie’s piece for this show as a large-scale needle-felted landscape of Jasper Beach.

Hahn is an interdisciplinary, performance-based artist committed to social repair and environmental care in Wabanaki/Maine — a place with which she is in a multi-generational, settler-colonial relationship. 

Holding an MFA in Intermedia, Hahn is currently a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Study program at the University of Maine. Her research investigates performance methodologies that work to fulfill responsibilities to place. Hahn is also a graduate assistant in the Graduate Student Exchange Program at UMaine and an instructor in the Creative Arts Department at UMaine Machias, where she teaches graphic design and photography.

Hahn is co-creator of ”In Kinship Collective,” a cross-cultural performance project that follows the tradition of Wabanaki guiding. As a producer of community-based theater and performance, she has developed multi-year and multi-partner performance projects with Maine farmers, municipal and state agencies and fisheries biologists Hahn’s relationship-driven practice is profiled in the “Municipal-Artist Partnership Guide,” published by Animating Democracy and A Blade of Grass. Her work has been funded by  theNew England Foundation for the Arts, Kindling Fund, MAP Fund, the Center for Performance and Civic Practice and the Maine Arts Commission, among others.  

For more information or to request a reasonable accommodation, call 207.255.1279.