OMAA Announces the Exhibition Schedule for 2027
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) announces its 2027 exhibitions in anticipation of the season ahead. More details will be confirmed and shared in the months to come.
Rebecca Ness, April 23 – July 18, 2027
Rebecca Ness, Herstory, 2024, Oil on linen, 80 x 120 inches. Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection at The Warehouse Art Foundation, Dallas, TX. Image courtesy of the Artist and Morgan Presents. Photo by Alex Yudzon. © Rebecca Ness
This early-career survey of paintings by Rebecca Ness is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, exploring works from the past five years as well as new work reflecting the most current developments in her practice. Rebecca Ness’s paintings draw on the intimate textures of daily life, transforming scenes from her immediate surroundings into quiet studies of attention, memory, and connection. Her compositions emerge from careful observation—moments in the studio, time with friends and loved ones, and the rhythms of domestic spaces that came into sharper focus during periods of social isolation.
The exhibition is organized around four interrelated themes: the studio as allegory; the archive—both personal and historical; nature and contemplation; and queer spaces and community building. Together, these frameworks situate Ness’s deeply personal imagery within broader reflections on community, belonging, and the ways environments shape experience.
Ryan Schneider, April 23 – November 14, 2027
Ryan Schneider, Hunter / Seeker, 2023, Bronze, edition of 3 + 2 AP, 67 x 19 x 17 inches, Collection of Almine and Bernard Picasso. Image courtesy the artist. © Ryan Schneider.
Sculptor Ryan Schneider’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States will be installed throughout the Museum’s three-acre sculpture gardens on the Atlantic coast. The exhibition will survey Schneider’s materially driven practice across wood, stone, and bronze. Based in Joshua Tree, California, Schneider creates figurative and abstract forms that emerge from the inherent qualities of natural materials, revealing knots, fractures, crystalline patterns, and other traces of geological and ecological time. His work offers a contemporary extension of Ogunquit’s historic tradition of direct carving while exploring urgent questions of landscape, ecology, mythology, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
The exhibition will include a new site-responsive work created from a white ash tree from the Museum’s grounds which was killed by the invasive emerald ash borer beetle. Over a monthlong residence at OMAA, Schneider developed and worked on a pair of new large-scale sculptures. The project continues Schneider’s exploration of material transformation while creating a dialogue between the Museum’s modernist history and the evolving ecological landscape of coastal Maine.
Ryan Adams, April 23 – November 14, 2027
Ryan Adams, Elements of Development, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD, 2020. Image Courtesy of the Artist. © Ryan Adams.
For its fourth annual mural commission in 2027, OMAA has invited Portland, Maine-based artist and muralist Ryan Adams to transform the Museum’s facades with a new site-responsive work. Working in direct dialogue with the Museum’s distinctive architecture, coastal setting, and grounds, Adams will create a mural that responds to the experience of encountering art in this singular landscape. Known for his signature “gem” style, Adams deconstructs letterforms into dynamic geometric compositions, using color, shadow, and highlight to create a sense of depth, movement, and visual energy.
Adams’s practice bridges his roots in graffiti with painting, design, and large-scale public art, bringing a vibrant visual language and an interest in the power of words and place to projects across Maine and beyond. His murals have been commissioned by a range of private and public institutions and organizations, including Nike, L.L.Bean, Patagonia, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Baltimore County Public Library. Adams’s new mural invites visitors into a dynamic new encounter with art, place, and the landscape of Ogunquit.
Elwyn George Gowen: Artist and Educator, April 23 – July 18, 2027
Elwyn George Gowen, North West Day, 1936, Oil on canvas, 23 ¾ x 29 ¾ in. Courtesy of Ken Turino & Chris Mathias Collection.
The exhibition Elwyn George Gowen: Artist and Educator explores the networks of arts education that connected artists, designers, and institutions across early twentieth-century New England, through the career of Elwyn George Gowen (1895–1954). A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1918, where he received highest honors, Gowen was trained in the principles of color, composition, and design. He continued his studies at the New York School of Interior Decoration and worked as an assistant to Harvard’s Dr. Denman W. Ross, an influential theorist of color, as well as collaborating with Jay Hambidge on the principles of Dynamic Symmetry, a design theory. His design practice encompassed textiles and interior decoration, earning him the Degree of Master Craftsman from The Society of Arts & Crafts, Boston.
In 1932, Gowen joined an outdoor painting class with Charles H. Woodbury in Ogunquit, Maine, an experience that redirected his career toward landscape and seascape painting. In 1935, Woodbury invited him to become an instructor and associate at his Ogunquit and Boston studios. Gowen also taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and other art schools and private studios throughout Maine and Massachusetts, eventually serving as Artist in Residence at Nasson College in Sanford, Maine. His career offers a distinctive lens through which to understand Ogunquit not as an isolated space of summer learning, but as part of a broader ecosystem of art education in New England, one in which ideas about design, color, composition, and painting circulated among schools, museums, artists, and independent studios.
Joe Bradley, August 5 – November 14, 2027
Joe Bradley, You & I, 2025. Oil on canvas. 91 x 75 1/8 inches. 231.1 x 190.8 cm. © 2026 Joe Bradley. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art will present a major exhibition of work by Maine-born artist Joe Bradley, bringing together large-scale paintings, drawings, and sculptures spanning the past 25 years of his career. The exhibition explores the pastoral as a defining current in Bradley’s continually evolving practice. Known for moving fluidly between abstraction, figuration, and conceptual experimentation, Bradley has consistently challenged expectations of contemporary painting. His recent works turn toward the natural world, introducing expansive fields of color, earthy palettes, and loosely articulated environments that evoke open skies, grazing creatures, standing figures, and rural terrain.
Rather than offering a nostalgic vision of nature, Bradley reimagines the subject matter through gestural mark-making, material immediacy, and the language of modern abstraction. For Bradley, the pastoral becomes less a place than a state of mind—a space where abstraction and lived experience, figure and landscape, history and renewal converge. Presented in his home state, the exhibition offers a new perspective on this significant dimension of Bradley’s practice while situating his work within the cultural and geographic context of Maine.
ABOUT THE OGUNQUIT MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART (OMAA)
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) presents thought-provoking exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and engaging education and community programs. The Museum’s seaside landscape and three-acre sculpture park offer a sense of place and a destination for experiencing art and nature, with stunning panoramic views of Maine’s iconic coves and outcroppings.
Founded by a community of artists and supporters, led by Henry Strater (1896-1987), and opened in 1953, OMAA celebrates its ties to one of America’s earliest art communities which directly contributed to the roots of modernism in the United States. OMAA’s collection includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs from the late 1800s to the present.
Led by Executive Director David Cunningham and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Devon Zimmerman, OMAA is open to visitors from April to November. For more information, visit ogunquitmuseum.org.
Media Contact: Meg Blackburn, meg@blackburncreative.com
