BY CARL LITTLE

In 1993, Acadia National Park launched its Artist-in-Residence (AiR) program, joining a nationwide movement to connect artists to national parks. Then Philadelphia-based painter Robert Pollien got it going.

“An artist’s residency did not exist in the late 1980s,” Pollien recounts, “so I wrote to Acadia stating that they should consider starting one.”

A while later, a leader for interpretation at the park, Shirley Beccue, invited him to be the first visiting artist.

Arriving in October 1993, Pollien remembers painting on the shore of Eagle Lake and in Otter Creek. The following year, inspired by his visit, he and his wife, fellow painter Amy Pollien, moved to Mount Desert Island for good.

In his painting The Bridgekeeper, Robert Pollien combines his love of crows with a view of the Waterfall Bridge spanning Hadlock Brook. “The bridge seemed to need a crow,” he notes, “so I gave it one.” The Bridgekeeper, 2021, oil, 12 x 12 in. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Like many of the artists who have followed in his footsteps, Pollien was most grateful for the opportunity to spend a block of time creating art in the park. He took a second turn as an Acadia National Park artist in residence in 2019 to paint on Isle au Haut.

Jay Elhard, the park’s interpretive media specialist, arrived in Maine in April 2017. As the former residency program manager at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, he took over Acadia’s program from Kate Petrie, who had inherited it from Beccue when she retired in 2001.

Sue Charles did the residency on Isle au Haut in 2018. Eli Creek, next to the cabin, became the subject for the painting she donated to ANP. “Lucky for me, it is hanging in the visitor center and I have received lots of emails since it was hung, resulting in sales and more interest in my work.” Eli’s Creek, Isle au Haut, 2018, oil, gold, palladium on cradled wood panel, 18 x 24 in. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

“That might be among the more significant and stabilizing things about Acadia’s program as compared with other programs, where turnover can be high,” Elhard observes. “We’ve only had three people at the helm for more than 30 years.” He adds, “Anybody who knows Shirley and Kate knows that’s a lot for me to try to live up to.”

Asked about changes to the program, Elhard points to stable funding, thanks to the park stores; no more $25 application fee; and a more diverse population of applicants. Another major change: the application and jury process is entirely online.

“In Shirley’s and Kate’s era,” he explains, “there was a lot of photocopying, postage, and shuffling of stacks of paper to jurors, which I can’t quite fathom now that we have more than 350 applications a year.”

Elhard also highlights the expanded range of artistic practices the residency supports: “everything from stand-up comedy to digital animation, dance, food writing, playwriting.” He appreciates having a core group of as many as 20 people each year who serve as jurors on three different panels, for visual art, writing, and at-large. They include past residents, subject matter experts, community members, and park staff.

The residency’s mission and vision remain the same, says Elhard: “to invite artists to help us interpret the park to visitors in new and interesting ways and, I hope, help to shape visitor experience for the better.”

The most significant contribution of the residency program, he believes, is the caliber of the artwork the park is able to share with the public. Some of the work donated by the artist residents is displayed at the Sieur de Monts Nature Center and the Hulls Cove Visitor Center, which was refurbished in 2019. A new gallery is being set up at the Jordan Pond House this summer—another opportunity to view the park through the artists’ eyes.

Known for her small-scale black and white prints, Siri Beckman was inspired by Acadia’s “BIG landscape filled with lakes, streams, the ocean, forests, cliffs, amazing skies, sunsets” to shift to color and a larger size. The result: The Bubbles, 1997, color linocut, 10 x 8 in. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Each resident artist is asked to host a public outreach activity. As part of her 2023 residency, Hollie Adams, a writing professor at the University of Maine, led a poetry writing workshop and read from her work at the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor. Here are lines from her “Trying to Try in Bass Harbor, Maine”:

I mean I want the ocean
at its splashiest, what I mean is
it should seem ecstatic to have made it
all this way, I mean I want each pine
needle visible in silhouette,
I mean I want the lighthouse
freshly white-washed, its light on
and beckoning, no matter the cost
of electricity.

–Hollie Adams, from “Trying to Try in Bass Harbor, Maine”

Learn More and Apply

The next open call for applications for AiR opportunities in 2025 is expected to be from July 1 through September 30, 2024. You can find more information—and art—at go.nps.gov/AcadiaArt.

CARL LITTLE, of Somesville, received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his art writing from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation in 2021. He and his brother David Little’s Art of Acadia came out in paperback this year. Their latest, Art of Penobscot Bay, is availablefrom Islandport Press.