Down East: How the PMA Launched the New North Atlantic Triennial

The Portland Museum of Art’s ambitious international exhibit takes visitors “Down North.”

This article appears in Down East.

By Michaela Cavallaro

Arngunnur Ýr (Iceland, born 1962), Skaftafell–Pia II, 2021, oil on birch panel, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Arngunnur Ýr. Photograph by Bára Kristinsdóttir

On a map, Maine may look isolated, hemmed in by an ocean and an international border, adjoining just one other state, but Jaime DeSimone, a curator of contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art, would have you believe it’s anything but. With the inaugural North Atlantic Triennial, running at the PMA through June 5, she and her counterparts from museums in Iceland and Sweden propose a new way of seeing the map — a vision they call “Down North.” The term is a play on an old nautical reference that gave this magazine its name, and the larger idea is a sort of international regionalism, seeking to highlight and build cultural affinities among northerly peoples.

Pulling in artists from Maine to the Faroe Islands to Finland seemed natural, DeSimone says, since denizens of the far–Northern Hemisphere share a certain hardiness of character and dependence on the sea. Plus, there’s a lot going on across the north that’s relevant worldwide, and the triennial gives particular attention to climate change and indigenous rights, themes that DeSimone says emerged organically. Peter Soriano, for instance, a Philippines-born French-American sculptor started out studying the rate at which snowdrifts melted in his backyard, in the small town of Penobscot, then went to watch icebergs as they drifted off the coast of Greenland. For the triennial, he translated his observations into arresting, schematic-like wall drawings, an evocative flurry of lines and angles.

Superflex, a Danish arts collective, contributed a fanciful take on increasingly unstable thresholds between human and aquatic environments: wooden pallets stacked with maze-like blocks that are laced with openings that look like entry points for venturesome fish. The exhibition also includes work from several indigenous artists, including Julie Edel Hardenberg, a Greenlandic Inuit artist who stitched Denmark’s red-and-white flag with black hair, an expression of the complex, often troubled relationship between the Inuit and the country of Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

Jordan Bennett (Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), Mi’kma’ki, born 1986), Birds Shed Feathers-Peskewikús from 13 Moons: Full Suite, 2020, giclée print on rag paper, 24 x 24 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Museum purchase with support from the Contemporary Art Fund, 2021.13.1–13. © Jordan Bennett. Photography by Luc Demers

Cultural exchange between Mainers and subarctic and arctic peoples picked up in 2013, when Eimskip, the Icelandic shipping company, located its North American headquarters in Portland, making the city a key juncture in northern commerce. A wave of international concerts, beer festivals, and economic summits ensued. That all prompted the PMA’s leadership to rethink what had been a long-running biennial exhibition of contemporary Maine artists, and they ended up partnering with the Reykjavik Art Museum and the Bildmuseet, in Umeå, Sweden. The project was delayed a full year by the pandemic, and it also faced some public opposition, including from former PMA director Daniel O’Leary. The overarching concern was twofold: that ending the biennial violated the intent of the donors who established it and that opportunities for Maine artists would be diminished.

For her part, DeSimone notes that seven of the show’s 30 artists are Mainers and that their work will travel to Reykjavik and Umeå after the Portland show closes. Showcasing Maine artists remains at the core of what the museum is doing, she says. “I can’t think of any better way than creating an international context for their work.”

At the Portland Museum of Art, Down North: North Atlantic Triennial runs through June 5. 7 Congress Sq., Portland. 207-775-6148.