Cross Currents
Visual Art Distilled from the Maritime World
group exhibition, Maine Maritime Museum (Nov. 20, 2010 - Feb 7, 2011)

Cross Currents is part of Maine Maritime Museum’s continuing effort to push beyond the narrowly perceived notion that maritime history, or any history for that matter, is simply an orderly dry tally of the years, and that a museum of such history must behave in an appropriately orderly, dry manner. Like the Kennebec River alongside us here in Bath, history is hardly dry and orderly, but rather a surging, murky torrent that never stops, washing all before it, and churning up hidden surprises from its turbulent depths.
Maritime history is simply a convenient, but surprisingly superficial way to cope with the broad disorderly snarl of culture, economics, folklore, craftsmanship, politics, and technology that is life lived in close proximity to Maine waters, whether upcountry lakes, descending rivers, or convoluted miles of ocean shoreline.
Art offers another kind of foothold in such a tide. Year in and year out, the agitating brine that is Maine has proved irresistible to all manner of artists; it has for years behind and will for years ahead, each practitioner dipping into the streaming current and laying their catch before us.
Drawing on the same complex interwoven sources as history, Cross Currents will explore how diversely maritime life has been distilled by four disciplines in the visual arts: printmaking (Carroll Thayer Berry); painting (Loretta Krupinski); photography (Salt Institute for Documentary Studies); and sculpture (Christy Georg).

By continuing to mount unique exhibitions like Cross Currents, Maine Maritime Museum is exploiting the true power of a museum as a publicly accessible interface for art, science, and technology.