PHOTOS: Opening Reception for Opening Art Exhibitions 2026 at Barn Gallery, Ogunquit, Maine

On Saturday evening, May 23, the Barn Gallery in Ogunquit, Maine opened its 2026 season with a reception that drew a large crowd of collectors, neighbors, tourists, and Ogunquit Art Association artists. People came early and stayed. Wine was poured, food disappeared, and the conversations that started in front of one painting migrated to the next wall and kept going.

Inside, the walls were packed — literally packed, floor to ceiling in places — with paintings, prints, photographs, and mixed media work from the Ogunquit Art Association’s juried membership. The effect was dense in the best sense: you had to slow down, work the room, let your eye settle. Landscape painting dominated on some walls, but the full membership show ranged considerably wider than that. Bold abstracts in red and orange. Black and white photography. Graphic prints. Sculpture on pedestals. The work didn’t share a sensibility so much as a standard, and the variety made for a show you had to actually move through rather than absorb from the doorway.

Two showcase exhibitions anchored the show, and both were worth the trip on their own.

Nancy R. Davison’s retrospective spans work from 1976 to 2019 — black and white linoleum cuts and aquatint etchings of architectural Maine, precise and unhurried, the kind of work that asks you to look at a familiar coastline as if you’ve never quite seen it before. She studied printmaking under Leonard Baskin at Smith College, set up her own studio after graduation, and has been working in this exacting medium for nearly five decades. Some of the prints carry a harder edge — she began making political work during the Gulf War, and that shift in intention is legible in the images. What the retrospective format reveals is range: the early work, the political work, the long sustained attention to the architecture of southern Maine, all of it in conversation across the wall. Davison is also a founder of the Ogunquit Arts Collaborative — the volunteer-run 501 (c) 3 not-for-profit corporation that owns and administers Barn Gallery — which gives the retrospective an added dimension. The work on the wall was made by someone who also played a major role in helping to maintain the legacy and physical structure of the institution showing it. CLICK HERE TO READ AN INTERVIEW WITH NANCY R. DAVISON.

Madeleine Hopkins’s section drew sustained attention all evening, visitors pausing and returning, pulling out phones to photograph labels. Her paintings of the Maine coast and interior landscape are instantly recognizable at a distance: saturated color, simplified forms, a quality of light that reads as both carefully observed and deliberately decided. She’s a Rhode Island School of Design graduate who has worked across a wide range — illustration, interior design, gallery management, architectural design, self-published writing — and that breadth seems to have sharpened rather than scattered her painting. The canvases have conviction.

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Photos of the Opening Reception for the 2026 Opening Exhibitions at Barn Gallery (by OAA Artist Member, Dave Wade)

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Out in the Sculpture Court, the evening extended into open air. The red-painted fence enclosure that defines the space turns out to be a good foil for the work — stone and metal read differently against that saturated backdrop than they would on a white gallery wall. Visitors slowed down out here in a particular way, spending time with individual pieces by a variety of invited New England sculptors, circling, stepping back. There’s something about sculpture in open air that changes the terms of looking. The court holds more work than you can take in at a reception, and it rewards a return visit on a quieter afternoon when you can move through it without the crowd, letting the weight and texture and form of each piece have its full say.

The OAA turns 98 this year, and Barn Gallery has been the home for these openings since 1959. Saturday’s crowd was the usual mix — artists, collectors, neighbors, newcomers — and the rooms had the easy energy of people who know how to enjoy an evening like this. The Opening Exhibitions continue through June 20th, 2026. No trip to Ogunquit is complete without a visit to Barn Gallery.