Abby Shahn

About the Exhibition

Abby Shahn – 50 Years is a retrospective look at the artist’s works through paintings, drawings, hand-made books, three-dimensional objects, and a site-specific installation.

What all of Shahn’s work has in common is an underlying political agenda articulated in an abstract vocabulary of color, form, and gesture. Shahn is a protest artist with a distinguished family provenance. Her father, Ben Shahn, was a noted social realist who once worked with muralist Diego Rivera. Her mother, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, was also a progressive realist.

The exhibition featured a selection of Shahn’s artist’s books, suspended globes like wasps’ nest (some with real comb cells), paintings of heads large and small that coalesce out of the energy of her brushwork, a series of ghostly figures emerging from chromatic space, and an alcove for her newest work entitled “Rust World.”

Figures, heads, globes, and debris on the floor are all painted with rust, as though the art is in decay. Or perhaps the art is decay.

Some of the same issues her parents dealt with explicitly in their art – racial injustice, war, women’s rights, repression – form the subtext of Shahn’s abstract and conceptual work. 

About The Artist

Abby Shahn chose to move to Maine from New York City in the late ’60s and has lived and worked in rural Maine ever since. Her main studio is a separate building in the field behind her house and is heated with wood and has no running water. She also keeps a small studio in her home in order to work when the weather doesn’t allow her to make the walk to her primary studio.

“I feel that the isolation from the ‘art world’ and from current trends in art has had both good and bad effects.... I’m more than glad to be free of the dictates of style and of the marketplace. I like my ideas to develop at their own pace. I love growing my garden, tending my fires, picking wild mushrooms, etc. At the same time, I feel fortunate to be part of a loose group of artists scattered around in the boondocks who have evolved in many different ways, sometimes overlapping with current ideas floating around the “big city”, sometimes veering off in crazy and unexpected directions. The artists that I’ve come to know here have been a constant source of inspiration to me.”