Join us for the OMAA Conversations Series, featuring talks with fascinating artists, curators and others who provide further insight into our exhibitions, the historical Ogunquit art communities, and more. Talks will be held in person, from 5-7pm, unless otherwise noted.
The OMAA Conversations Series is free with admission, and always free for members. Click here to join as a member.
A Conversation with Hank Willis Thomas & Looking for America Artist Panel
Thursday, May 21st, 3:00-5:00 PM at Leavitt Theatre
Join us at the historic Leavitt Theatre for a panel featuring Looking for America artists Andina Marie Osorio, Hector Rene Membreno-Canales, and Chris Bernsten, moderated by Helen Banach. The panel will be followed by a conversation between Hank Willis Thomas and Kalia Brooks.
Cara Romero
Join us at the historic Leavitt Theatre for a lecture by artist Cara Romero.
Cara Romero is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, a visual storyteller, activist, and mother. She is known for dramatic fine art photography that examines Indigenous life in contemporary contexts. With extensive training in photography, her work is shaped by 25 years of formal study and artistic practice. Blurring the lines between fine art and activism, Romero tells stories of cultural memory, collective histories, and autobiography to convey the complex realities of contemporary Native peoples. Her work has been acquired by major institutions including The Met, The MoMA, The Amon Carter, as well as the Forge Project Collection. Over the past 3 years, she has been commissioned to create monumental-scale public art including the 2019 Desert X Biennial and NDN Collective’s #TONGVALAND billboard series in Los Angeles. Romero travels between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where she inherited her childhood home and maintains close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands through art and activism.
Grace Yasumura
Join us at the historic Leavitt Theatre for a lecture by Grace Yasumura.
Yasumura co-curated the 2024-2025 exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She will speak about the show, which examined the intertwined histories of sculpture and race in the United States, and brought together 82 works created between 1792 and 2023. Ranging from palm-sized coins to monumental statues, and created in diverse media such as clay, feathers, shoes, rhinestones, and hair, these sculptures invite nuanced and complex conversations about the enduring power of sculpture as a potent tool in the making and unmaking of race and racism in the United States.
Jonathan Katz Thursday,
August 13th, 5:00-7:00 PM at OMAA
Join us for an OMAA Conversation with Jonathan D. Katz on Thursday, August 13 from 5-7 PM. This event will take place at the Museum and is free and open to the public.
Jonathan D. Katz is a pioneering scholar, curator, and activist whose work has helped establish the field of queer art history. As an author and curator, he has written many of the first queer histories of major artists and curated groundbreaking exhibitions, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s first major museum exhibition on queer art in the United States. He is currently Professor of Practice, History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gordon Wilkins
Wednesday, September 9th, 5:00-7:00 PM at OMAA
Join us for an OMAA Conversation with Gordon Wilkins on Wednesday, September 9th at 5pm. This event will take place at the Museum and is free and open to the public. We welcome you to arrive at 5 pm to find your seats and enjoy the galleries; the presentation will begin at 5:30 pm.
Constructing The Maine Idea: Nativism, Modernism, and the Fascist Aesthetic in Interwar Maine
This talk will explore the complex nexus of regionalism, fascism, tourism, authenticity, and racialization that characterized the depiction of Maine and its people in both high and low sources of modern interwar visual culture ranging from the work of Marsden Hartley and Marguerite Zorach to tourist brochures and postcards.
Gordon Wilkins is the Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. Wilkins oversees the care, exhibition, and growth of the Addison’s world-renowned collection of American art across media with a particular focus on the art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Donna Cassidy
Tuesday, October 6th, 5:00-7:00 PM at OMAA
Join us for OMAA Conversations with Donna Cassidy on Tuesday, October 6th at 5pm. This event will take place at the Museum and is free and open to the public. We welcome you to arrive at 5 pm to find your seats and enjoy the galleries; the presentation will begin at 5:30 pm.
Carl Sprinchorn’s Worlds: New York, Sweden, Maine: Carl Sprinchorn was always on the move. His travels took him to diverse locales across North American and Europe as he sought new experiences and new ways of artmaking. This lecture will look at how three of those “worlds”—New York, Sweden, Maine—shaped his art. Sprinchorn was not a mere tourist passing through these places but was grounded in their art and culture—in Robert Henri’s realism and the spectacle of the modern city; in Scandinavian painting, naturism, and mysticism; and in Maine and its regionalism.
Donna M. Cassidy, Professor Emerita, University of Southern Maine, has published widely on modernism and regionalism in early twentieth-century American art and culture, most notably with her books Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940 (1997) and Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (2005). She was also co-author with Elizabeth Finch and Randall R. Griffey of Marsden Hartley’s Maine (2017), the catalogue of the exhibition which she co-curated at Colby College Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, she has curated two exhibitions at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art—Shifting Sands: Beaches, Bathers, and Modern Maine Art (2023) and Carl Sprinchorn: “All the World Is a Painting” (2026). She is currently working on the forthcoming exhibition Layered Terrain: Art, Land, and Environment in Eastern Canada, 1890-1940 at the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2027-28).
