Spaces Places Traces

Featured artists: Patricia Brace, Jackie Brown, Joshua DeMello, Bethany Engstrom, Pia Paulina Guilmoth, Hilary Irons, Peter Precourt, Julie Poitras Santos, Susan L. Smith and John Umphlett.

Patricia Brace’s practice is located in rural Maine. Overall her work is concerned with the body as it relates to place and crisis and examines how we cohabitate with nature during a rapidly unfolding climate situation. Brace currently teaches at Maine College of Art and Design and formerly taught at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Brace will attend the Arctic Circle residency in 2025 and attended the Studios at MASS MoCA, Alumni Residency at Maine College of Art and Design and Vermont Studio Center. Selected exhibitions include PS122 Gallery, Gary Snyder Project Space and SOHO 20 in Manhattan and Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Smack Mellon and Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.  Maine based exhibitions include 82 Parris Street, Center for Maine Contemporary Art and The Institute of Contemporary Art. Brace is the recipient of the Kindling Fund, Professional Development Grant at MECA&D and Women Invigorating the Curriculum and Cultivating Diversity Committee Grant at University of Maine, Augusta. Brace is the Co-founder of the Performance Art Initiative, Sine Gallery and GROUNDWORK retreat and has work in the permanent collection at the Portland Museum of Art and Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in NYC.

Jackie Brown’s sculptures explore the shifting processes of growth and transformation that connect human life with the living systems around us. Working primarily in clay, she uses 3D printing and mold making as starting points for experimental forms that invite reflection on how we perceive and relate to the natural world. Her work was featured in a 2025 solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Art Center following a Best in Show award from an earlier group exhibition. Other venues include the American Museum of Ceramic Art in California and Atlantic Gallery in New York City. She is also an active member of Life Forms, a collaborative sculpture collective that is currently developing a joint sculpture project and preparing for a 2027 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine. Brown’s honors include a Maine Artist Fellowship and Lighton International Artists Exchange Program Award, which supported a residency at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands. Additional residencies include the Archie Bray Foundation, the Museum of Arts and Design, and most recently the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts where she will return in summer 2026 to expand her research into new technologies and materials. Brown lives on a creek among the hemlock and white pines of Maine. She teaches at Bowdoin College, where she is currently Chair of the Visual Arts Department and oversees the sculpture area. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA from Hamilton College.

Joshua DeMello is a Maine artist with a multi/interdisciplinary creative practice since 1998. Hailing from a small coastal town south of Boston, MA, he moved to Maine in 1996 to pursue an education in environmental science but soon shifted his focus to pursue the studio arts. Moving to Western Maine in 2000 he opened a studio and built a small off the grid home where he, his wife and two children lived before moving to their current home. Josh returned to school in 2008 as a non-traditional student and graduated from UMF in 2011 with a B.A. focused on installation, sculpture, and digital
arts. He then continued his education to receive his MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts in 2015 at Goddard College, VT. Josh started teaching in 2015 as an adjunct professor of Art in 2-d digital arts. He then spent five years as a certified art teacher in secondary ed from 2016-21. He is currently working in his own studio and teaching Painting as an adjunct professor of arts at UMF. Josh is also currently acting as the UMF faculty liaison for early college education through a partnership with UMF and Foster Tech.

Bethany Engstrom is an artist, curator, and educator living and working in Belfast, Maine. She received a BA in Art History 2002, her MFA in Intermedia in 2011 and Interdisciplinary PhD in Intermedial Collaborative Practices in 2014, each from the University of Maine. Engstrom’s recent work utilizes objects, installation, audio, and video, focusing on how these materials can express ideas of time, care, environment, labor/work, and motherhood. She has participated in residencies at the Volland Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation and Mildred’s Lane. She recently had a solo exhibition at the University of Maine Farmington Art Gallery and her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island; Gallery 263, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Collar Works in Troy, New York; Parsonage Gallery, Searsport, Maine; Speedwell Contemporary and Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine; Asymmetrick Arts and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine; Waterfall Arts in Belfast, Maine and the University of Maine. Engstrom is the recipient of the Kindling Fund, part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. Engstrom is a part-time Assistant Professor of Art in the Intermedia MFA program at UMaine and an adjunct Lecturer of Visual Arts at the University of Maine Augusta and has taught at Bowdoin College and Unity College. Formerly Associate Curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine, and recently the Managing Director of SPEEDWELL Contemporary in Portland, Maine, she is co-founder and director of the Performance Art Initiative in Maine. She is currently the 2026 Maine Art Commission Fellow in Media Arts.

Pia Paulina Guilmoth (b.1993) is a trans woman who lives, and works in rural Franklin County,
Maine. In her free time she likes to lay in the dirt, drive her truck down muddy dirt roads, and be with friends. In 2025 her work was placed in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her third monograph, titled Flowers Drink the River, was awarded the 2025 Paris -Aperture Photo Book of the Year Award. She has had 12 solo exhibitions of her work including at Leica Gallery, in London (2021), Webber Gallery, London (2024), and CLAMP gallery in NYC (2025). She was awarded a Macdowell Fellowship in 2022. In 2025 she won an Aperture x Google Creator Fund for her work Flowers Drink the River. In 2026 she will be a featured artist at MOMA’s annual Forum on Contemporary Photography, and a keynote speaker at the Chico Review.

Hilary Irons is a Maine-based painter and curator.  Her work revolves around opticality, the landscape, and material culture, exploring the ways in which our reading of space and object are impacted by color, mark, and light.  She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2008 and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2002.

Peter Precourt lives and works in Winthrop Maine with wife Jane and teenage children Charlotte and Will. He is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and Professor of Art at the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA) where he coordinates the UMA Art Department. He received his MFA in Painting from the University of Houston in 2000, and later served as an affiliate artist there. In 2005-2006, he served as head of the painting department at William Carey University in Gulfport, Mississippi. In 2007, he conducted a four part lecture series at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, concerning art since 1960. His studio-based hybrid painting/drawing/graphic story memoir The Katrina Chronicles recalls the events of after his family’s time in coastal Mississippi before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. In the community, Professor Precourt has installed a number of site-specific, large-scale wheat paste murals in an effort to revitalize central Maine’s downtown areas. He has placed this work in Augusta, Gardiner and Waterville, Maine. Peter has an active studio and social art practice. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Southern Maine, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Reed College, Fort Lewis College, San Jacinto College, Lincoln Memorial University, Kennesaw State University, ArtHouse center for Contemporary Art, New York University and the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Peter’s work has been exhibited in Austin, Cincinnati, Dallas, Gyeonggi-do, Korea, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Nashville, New York, and Portland.

Julie Poitras Santos’ crossdisciplinary practice connects ecological thinking and earth science disciplines with immersive experience and community engagement. Poitras Santos’ solo and collaborative work has been exhibited in the Portland Museum of Art, ME; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), Sweden; Queens Museum, NY; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden; Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain; Reykjanesbaer Art Museum, Iceland; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, among others; and at International Walking Art conferences in Girona, Spain (2024), Prespes, Greece (2019) and Le Romieu, France (2017). Poitras Santos’ writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Leonardo: MIT Press, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, The Café Review, Living Maps Review, and numerous curatorial publications. Her curatorial projects include co-curating with Catherine Besteman Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways (2018) for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has also been supported by the Kindling Fund, Onion Foundation, Collective Futures Fund, and Maine Arts Commission. Other recent projects include, Platform Projects/Walks 2020: ecologies of the local, bringing artists and scientists together for conversations about climate change; Liveable Worlds (2023) co-curated with Sabine Malcolm, focusing on how artists have seen environmental disruption as a moment to reimagine and rebuild; and SOIL CUL TURE (2024) with Maria Patricia Tinajero, fostering embodied understandings of the environmental and social impacts of soil. Poitras Santos served as Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design from 2019-2023. She has taught visual art since 1995, serving as a professor of Studio Art in the MFA program at MECA&D since 2010.

Susan L. Smith, MFA PhD, is a practicing artist and educator, Associate Research
Professor of Art, and Graduate Coordinator of the Intermedia Programs at the University of Maine. Smith’s research is situated within issues of land/power and questions concerning extractivist practices, economic and climate forced migration. Her practice encompasses community- based collaboration, and site-based research. Susan believes the physical work is not the art, but an “artifact,” the art lies in the process of immersion and witness of place and community. Recent work focuses on work in camps at the southern border, on riverbanks and industrial sites contaminated with PFAS chemicals, and a project of fruit tree reforestation and pollinator guerrilla gardens. Susan is a member of the Urban Soil Institute, a division of the NYC Soil & Water Conservation District, serving as a Co-Director for the art extension service, working collaboratively with soil and plant researchers and artists at SWALE, Governor’s Island, NY. Susan is founder and co-creator of “uprooted collective,” a vehicle to create work that focuses on stewardship and interdependency; dismantling inequitable systems and hierarchies in garden and educational spaces, growing an alternative present.

John Umphlett was born in southern­ New Jersey in 1974. He trained in Richmond Virginia in drawing and sculpture where he graduated with a BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. John continued his education at Bennington College at which he graduated with a MFA in 1999. John currently holds a position as a faculty member at Bennington College in the Visual Arts Department with a specialization in Sculpture. His work has crossed between many mediums including, but not excluded to, installation, video, performance and drawing. John has shown and attended residencies at Southern Vermont Art Center; VT, Collar Works; Troy NY, Franconia Sculpture Park ; MN, Bennington Museum; VT, Emory Community Art Center / University of Maine Farmington, Empac; Rensselaer NY, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson,VT, to name a few and has  also worked with numerous artists, architects, and engineers in New York and around the world, as a fabricator and designer producing work for Brooklyn Museum, Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building,  Moody Center of the Arts, Rice University, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, Fowler Museum, UCLA, Simone Subal Gallery, NY,NY, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, PAFA, Philadelphia PA, Viva Arte Viva, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice,IT, Kunsthallen, Brandts, Odense, DK, Yokohama Triennale,Yokohama Japan, and  Guimet Museum, Paris, France.