Summer 2025
Tessa Greene O’Brien and Jana Benitez painting at the Backshore Beach, Castine. 2024
With a dynamic slate of residencies and events this season, we are also delighted to share a number of updates at Annex Arts:
Recent renovations allow us to offer more artist housing and more studios than ever before.
We are experimenting with new ways of using spaces, including two new first-floor studios. This allows artists to rotate studios during residencies.
Open Door Policy to past Annex Fellows: When space and time allow, we welcome fellows of Annex Arts to return and utilize the space.
This summer offers Open Studios nearly every Friday from 4 to 7 pm. Watch this space or follow us on Instagram and Facebook for updates and reminders.
NEW ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
June 11 - 30: Hannah Burr
RESIDENCY:
Hannah Burr from Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be our first Artist-in-Residence at Annex Arts this summer. She will be working in the front studio from June 11-19 and then in studio #2 from June 19-30. Hannah Burr has a long history with the Blue Hill Peninsula, with a family home in Brooksville to which she has returned annually for her lifetime. Hannah works with paint and concepts of ambiguity, spareness, emotion, and spiritual inquiry; using the most minimal starting point for putting together a glowing and abstracted sense of place.
Events:
Open Studio: Friday, June 13, 4-7 pm
Open Studio: Friday, June 20, 4-7 pm
Open Studio: Friday, June 27, 4-7 pm
Opening Reception at Annex Arts and gallery b: Tuesday, July 1, 5-7 pm. including Sara MacCulloch and Mara Korkola, as part of ArtWalk in collaboration with The Annex, gallery b, and Adam Gallery.
Exhibition at Annex Arts and gallery b.: July 1-24
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Hannah Burr grew up in Boston, now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has exhibited her paintings, drawings, and projects nationally as well as locally, at places like the Drawing Center in New York City, and the Judith Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill. Burr has enjoyed a lifetime of annual visits to a home on Penobscot Bay which has informed her art practice for almost 40 years. She is the author of five books that blend visual art with philosophical inquiry about direct connection to inspiration, as well as new ways of seeing and being in the world. Hannah is a graduate of Brown University in Fine Art and Religious Studies.
July 1 - August 20: Marwa Abdul-Rahman & Robert Dewhurst
RESIDENCY:
Marwa and Robert come to Annex Arts for a full-summer residency. A first for our organization, and a response to support artists meaningfully.
Their home was lost during January’s devastating Eaton Fire in Altadena, California. As a result, we are humbled to host Marwa and Robert so that they can enjoy time to create and connect as a fine artist and author.
Events:
Open Studio - Marwa: Friday, July 11, 4-7pm
Open Studio - Marwa: Friday, July 18, 4-7pm
Meet and Greet, Robert: Friday nights, by chance. Events may be connected to his current work-in-progress — a literary biography of poet John Weiner.
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Marwa Abdul-Rahman is a painter and sculptor. She received an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design in 2011, and prior to that studied film at Yale University. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at MaRS Gallery (Open That Shit Wide Let Me See How Big Your Mouth Is, 2016), Wilding Cran (Eternal Return, 2019), and the Box LA (The World, 2022–23).
About her art-making practice, in her own words:
“My practice explores ideas of power, perception, and transformation. Most recently, this interrogation has centered specifically around the cycle of life and death, especially life and death as illusions and/or boundaries. While I have been able to hear the invisible all my life, in 2019 I embarked on learning spiritual practices which would allow me to more clearly and specifically work in the unseen world. Rather than illustrations of what I see, my sculptural paintings are translations and impressions of the interaction with the unseen, encoded with a nonverbal language that speaks directly to the viewer.
I am looking forward to the ways this residency in Maine will inform my practice and my life, as an artist who is interested in seeing the world through different perspectives. I reflect this attitude in my artwork with my use of mixed media and mixed practices (sculpture, weaving, tapestry, and painting), and often force unlikely companions onto the same plane in an attempt to create a new dialogue.
Each project I work on is site-specific in that I begin by walking through the city, gathering found materials and detritus, which are charged with history/survival, and carry a tactility and intensity of their own. I then start a process of channeling and communion with the invisible world, forming a new body of work through the information I pick up from the streets, the conversations I have with the people around me, the books I am reading, as well as the objects I come across in the city. While I am never certain what I will make or what it will look like when I am done, the work always benefits from this inclusion of the unknown.”
Articles & Interviews
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Robert Dewhurst is a writer and editor. With Joshua Beckman and CA Conrad, he coedited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015); and with Hedi El Kholti, he coedited Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian (Semiotext(e), 2024). His recent writings on poetry include an introduction to the expanded second edition of David Rattray’s How I Became One of the Invisible (Semiotext(e), 2019), a foreword to Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series (Fonograf Editions, 2023), and an afterword to the forthcoming fiftieth-anniversary edition of John Wieners’s Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike (Song Cave, 2025). For years, he has been writing a literary biography of Wieners, and in Castine, he will bring this project closer to completion.
ESSAY
https://the-song-cave.com/products/behind-the-state-capitol-or-cincinnati-pike-by-john-wieners
RETURNING ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
June 18 - July 2: Sara MacCulloch & Mara Korkola
RESIDENCY:
Returning Annex Arts Fellows from Les Canadiennes (2023), Sara MacCulloch and Mara Korkola from Toronto and Nova Scotia, will be in residence together. They will be painting en plein air around the peninsula and also working in their studios.
EVENTS:
Open Studio: Friday, June 27, 4-7 pm
Opening Reception: Tuesday, July 1, 5-7pm, in conjunction with Hannah Burr. The exhibition will be on view at Annex Arts for a few days before moving to gallery b. , as part of ArtWalk in collaboration with The Annex, gallery b., and Adam Gallery.
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Sara MacCulloch is a Toronto-based Canadian painter who is well known for her sublime landscapes and interiors which capture the feel of a place with minimalist brush work, subtle color, and vivid feeling in buttery oil paint.
A Nova Scotian native, MacCulloch holds BFA (1992) and MFA (2019) degrees from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, she has lived across Canada, exhibited extensively in North America, and is represented in galleries in Toronto, Maine, New York, and Chicago. MacCulloch has taught painting at Canadian art colleges and participated in residencies internationally. Her work is included in major collections like TD Bank and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and featured in publications on contemporary Canadian painters. A book about her work is forthcoming from St. Thomas University. Though based in Toronto, she maintains a strong connection to Canada's and New England’s East Coast.
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Mara Korkola graduated from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto (AOCA); Wichita State University, Kansas (BFA) and the University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio (MFA).
She has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the US and Germany, including Painting as Paradox at Artists Space in New York, Synthetic Psychosis at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Auto-Motive: World from the Windshield, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Sequence and Passage: Mara Korkola and Monica Tap at Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ontario, and Commuter, a comprehensive solo exhibition of her No Place series of paintings at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario.
Korkola's work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and Now Magazine among others, and has been included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters. She was also featured on an episode of the television series The Artist's Life. Images have been reproduced in BlackFlash, Coupe Magazine and Harper's Magazine. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is held in private and corporate collections, including Scotia Bank, Fidelity Investments and Hydro Quebec.
Mara Korkola lives in Toronto.
June 1 - August 21: Viktor Butko
RESIDENCY:
Viktor will be in residence again for the entire summer. While in residence, Viktor will do plein air painting around the Blue Hill Peninsula.
EVENTS:
Viktor will particpate in Open Studios and Exhibitions, exact dates to be determined
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Viktor Butko, born in Moscow in 1978 into a family of renowned artists, continues a legacy of Russian Impressionism, working both in Russia and in the USA. His artistic education began with his grandfather, Victor Chulovich, a celebrated painter in the Russian tradition, and continued at the Moscow Art School and the Academic Dacha of Artists under Alexey Gritsay and the Tkachev brothers. Based in Massachusetts, Butko is known for his landscape oil paintings of Maine and Long Island. Butko has received accolades such as "Five to Watch in 2023" from Fine Art Connoisseur, and Best in Show at the Rockport Art Association. His work is held in museum and private collections internationally, including the Vyshniy Volochok Museum collection, Collection of the IRRA, and private collections in Russia, China, Europe, and the U.S. Butko also teaches and accepts commissions from his Waltham studio where he lives with his wife and great painter, Kelly Carmody. Influential Russian artists Alexei and Sergei Tkachev have hailed his work as the "next generation of greatness."
July 25 - August 9: Hannah Bureau
RESIDENCY:
Hannah is a perennial resident at Annex Arts, which started as a residency with a mission specifically supporting artists parenting young children. Due to the annual residencies of Hannah and sometimes her husband, Jeff, their children have grown up calling our village home for two weeks of the year since they were infants. Welcome back, Jeff and Hannah, Isla and Elsi!
EVENTS:
•Open Studio: Friday, July 25, 4-7 pm
•Open Studio: Friday, August 1, 4-7 pm
•Opening Reception: Wednesday, August 6. 5-7 pm, as part of ArtWalk in collaboration with The Annex, gallery b., and Adam Gallery.
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Hannah Bureau is a French and American painter known for her abstract landscape paintings, often depicting New England coastal scenes. She blends abstraction and landscape using geometric shapes and visual planes to create structure and formal composition. Vigorous brushwork creates a sense of visual distance and depth. Bureau is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
“My paintings are at the intersection of representation and abstraction. I am interested in creating space and distance that feels like the familiar world around us but that is edited, and simplified. Visual plains and geometric shapes create structure and formal composition while keeping a sense of visual distance and depth.”