Accra Shepp, “Barry’s Trees,” 2023. ©Accra Shepp, courtesy of Convoke

In 1955, Rockwell Kent made an oil painting of young spruce trees on Monhegan Island. They are scraggly things, reaching their adolescent limbs into the salty air, standing skinny but proud above the ocean.

In 2015, Barry Logan saw an image of that painting for the first time. Logan is a biology professor at Bowdoin College, where his research focuses on how plants cope with environmental stressors. For more than two decades, he has been studying how a parasitic plant called dwarf mistletoe is impacting the spruce trees on Monhegan.

“His trees were probably 15 or 20 years old when he painted them,” Logan said. “That would make them 70 or 80 years old, right, when I was out on the island. Those could be the trees whose death I am documenting.”

That realization planted the seed for an exhibition now at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art that will travel this summer to the Monhegan Museum of Art and History.

Artists have long visited the rocky shores of Monhegan 10 miles off the coast of Maine. Over time, they have created a sort of ecological record of their subject. The show, titled “Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island,” uses their work to tell a story about the way the landscape has changed and how it has stayed the same.

The exhibition found an overlap of science and art through its three curators: Logan worked with Frank Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Jennifer Pye, director and chief curator of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History. They all chose the works included in the exhibit and wrote essays for the catalogue, involving students from multiple disciplines and island residents.

“Barry is the scientist, Frank is the art historian and I’m the Monhegan historian,” Pye said.

‘Barry’s Trees’

At the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, three panoramic photos hang on the same wall.

The earliest image was made in 1908 by an unknown photographer. The second dates to 1930 by a Mainer named Lorimer Brackett. The third, from 2023, is by New York photographer Accra Shepp.

The three artists all stood on nearby Manana Island to capture a sweeping view of Monhegan. The images are all familiar. There’s the lighthouse atop the hill, which now houses the Monhegan Museum. Yet each one is different. In the 1908 image, the landscape is dominated by grassy fields, cleared of trees in the previous century to make way for sheep. By 1930, juvenile white spruce stood in the pastures where the sheep once grazed. In 2023, trees blanketed the island.

“There have been on Monhegan a series of human decisions over the last two centuries that have radically transformed the lands on that island, and as a visitor today, I just wasn’t aware that so much had changed over time,” Goodyear said. “When I went back to look at the paintings by Rockwell Kent or George Bellows or Edward Hopper, I came to realize that the island they encountered was very different than the island I encountered 130 years later.”

Logan first visited Monhegan more than 20 years ago to study how dwarf mistletoe kills white spruce trees. He had permission from private landowners on the mainland to conduct research on their properties, but struggled to find a place that could be guaranteed for a long time. So Logan took the ferry to Monhegan, where three-quarters of the island is in conservation.

Barry Logan, a biology professor at Bowdoin College, conceived of the project in part because of his experience conducting research on Monhegan. He curated “Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island” with Frank Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Jennifer Pye, director and chief curator of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald

Ted Edison, son of inventor Thomas Edison, first visited Monhegan in 1908 as a child. In 1952, he returned to the island after years away and noticed how the postwar boom in tourism had increased development and construction. Edison started buying dozens of small tracts, which he left untouched and open to the public. Eventually, he worked with residents to form a land trust still known as the Monhegan Associates. Today, that nonprofit manages nearly 400 acres of wildlands and nine miles of trails.

“It’s quite a conservation triumph out there,” Logan said. “This exhibition has an opportunity to bring that to people as well. It’s an effort which is largely managed to this day, but even from its origins, by members of the Monhegan community, be they year-round Monhegan islanders or people who had a connection to the seasonal community. But it was individual and community action that made that possible, and it feels like there are really important lessons in that.”

Capturing Monhegan

In 1916, Edward Hopper started painting “Monhegan Landscape.” In the middle of the scene is a brown and misshapen tree.

“I’ve seen this painting many times over the years,” Pye said. “You look at who was influencing him, or what his color palette is, or where he was standing. And all this time, right in the center, there is a diseased white spruce with a dwarf mistletoe infection that I never would have recognized.”

Edward Hopper, “Monhegan Landscape,” ca. 1916-19, oil on panel. Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum

The art in the exhibition offer clues about the ecological conditions on Monhegan over time. In 1885, sheep outnumbered residents, who cleared large swaths of land for their grazing pleasure. But the flocks dwindled by the turn of the century as New England farmers struggled to compete with those in other regions. Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott, one of the first artists to purchase a home on the island, painted and photographed a few of the remaining sheep

Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott, photograph of sheep on the headlands, ca. 1895. Maine Historic Preservation Commission

With the sheep gone, the trees returned. In 1907, Rockwell Kent started a painting called “Sun, Manana.” In 1950, he returned to his Monhegan home after a long period away and added the spray of spruce trees along the bottom of the canvas. They had grown into his view in the intervening years.

In 1954, the island requested that the state release deer on Monhegan “to amuse tourists and give locals game to shoot.” Six deer arrived and quickly multiplied. Geraldine Tam spent years documenting the island flora in watercolor and ink, including a detailed ladyslipper that is part of the exhibit. She wrote to Ted Edison in 1969 to tell him that the deer had destroyed the native flowers. The state eradicated the deer on Monhegan in 1997, allowing broadleaf trees to flourish – yet another change to the island canopy.

“It’s just an amazing thing to witness and to see that the artists have captured too,” Logan said. “I would say that there’s lots left to capture out there. The invitation to the artists is to go out and represent what they see there now as a forest that is dynamic and quite different from the forests of past decades.”

Rockwell Kent, “Sun, Manana, Monhegan,” 1907, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Bowdoin College Museum of Art

A singular place

The gallery at Bowdoin College is definitely landlocked. Technically, it’s underground. But close your eyes, and you might forget for a minute.

The exhibit includes a looping 21-minute compilation of audio clips from the island gathered by students to transport visitors to the middle of the Gulf of Maine. The first stop inside the gallery door is also a one-minute video to introduce visitors to Monhegan, also recorded and edited by a student.

“One of the things I find singular about the place is the combination of natural and manmade sound on the island,” Logan said. “You have bird life from dawn until dusk, and the waves, and the wind, but also the buoy bells and the diesel engines that pump water up to the water tower, and the ferries and their horns, and the crunching of people’s footsteps. It’s a very auditory place, and we were working very hard to try and bring that to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where we’re in two subterranean, windowless exhibition galleries in Brunswick.”

Those elements help establish the island inside the gallery in Brunswick in a way that the island museum does not need to do.

“If you’re physically here on the island, if you’ve made that journey, we don’t need to lay the background in the same way,” Pye said.

The exhibition will be different in each of its two locations: Bowdoin College has a larger gallery and more art on display. Monhegan Museum does not show work by living artists. Monhegan will also include works that might have particular meaning for longtime islanders — for example, a painting by Joanne Scott, who was a past president of the Monhegan Associates. The island museum will also offer guided walking tours this summer, both in the gallery and on the trail.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Monhegan became the artists’ island, the one that drew so many,” Pye said.

The three curators of “Art, Ecology and the Resilience of a Maine Island” at the exhibit opening at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art: From left, they are Frank Goodyear, co-director of the college’s museum; Jennifer Pye, director and chief curator of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History; and Barry Logan, a biology professor at Bowdoin College. Photo by Amanda Skinner and courtesy of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island: The Monhegan Wildlands”

WHERE: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 9400 College Station, Brunswick

WHEN: Through June 1

HOURS: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday (Thursday until 8:30 p.m.) and 1-5 p.m. Sunday

HOW MUCH: Admission to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is free

INFO: bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3275

UP NEXT: The exhibit will be at the Monhegan Museum of Art and History from July 1 to Sept. 30. For information about the show at Monhegan, visit monheganmuseum.org or call 207-596-7003.