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Maine Fine Art Museums

Known for its rugged coastline and beautiful nature, it's no wonder artists flocked to Maine to create their work. Maine's art museums offer works by important world artists as well.

"Medusa," by Franklin B Simmons, Portland Museum of Art, Portland ME
Medusa, by Franklin B Simmons, Portland Museum of Art.

Maine's art museums hold works of local, state, regional, national and international interest and importance.

Maine Art Museum Trail

Maine's eight best art museums are organized in the Maine Art Museum Trail, with guidance on how to tour them all. More...

Bates College Museum of Art

The Museum of Art in the Olin Arts Center at 75 Russell Street on the Bates College campus in Lewiston ME (map) holds over 5,000 works, including The Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, modern and contemporary works on paper, photographs, select holdings of pre-modern prints, contemporary Chinese art (particularly photographs), pre-Columbian art, African art, and works by Maine artists. More...

Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Bowdoin College Museum of Art

The beautiful Museum of Art on the Bowdoin College campus in Brunswick ME (map) boasts 20,000 works of art, including pieces by Fra Angelico, Eugène Louis Boudin, Alexander Calder, Denys Calvaert, Jacopo da Carrucci (Pontormo), Mary Cassatt, John Singleton Copley, Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer, John La Farge, René Magritte, Louise Nevelson, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Peter Paul Rubens, Jackson Pollock, John Ruskin, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Egon Schiele, Gilbert Stuart, Andy Warhol and others. More...

Center for Maine Contemporary Art

Founded in 1952 as a cooperative effort named Maine Coast Artists, the Center is in a Toshiko Mori-designed headquarters at 21 Winter Street in downtown Rockland. Over the years the center has shown and encouraged such artists as Alex Katz, Louise Nevelson, Fairfield Porter, Lois Dodd, Alan Magee, John Walker, Neil Welliver, Robert Indiana, and Jamie Wyeth. More...

Colby College Museum of Art

On the Colby College campus at 5600 Mayflower Hill Drive, Waterville, Maine 04901 (map), the museum's collection of more than 8,000 items includes works by American folk artists, 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century American sculpture, and late-19th-century American painting. Artists represented include Jennifer Bartlett, George Bellows, Rudy Burckhardt, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Chuck Close, John Singleton Copley, Lois Dodd, Adolph Gottlieb, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, Alex Katz, Sol LeWitt, Paul Manship, John Marin, Elizabeth Murray, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Willson Peale, Fairfield Porter, Richard Serra, Gilbert Stuart, Terry Winters, and others. More...

Farnsworth Art Museum

The fine Farnsworth Art Museum at 16 Museum Street, Rockland ME 04841 (map) holds more than 15,000 works of American art, mostly related to Maine.

Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland ME
Farnsworth Art Museum

It has one of America's largest collections of works by sculptor and former Rockland resident Louise Nevelson, and its Wyeth Center is especially strong in works by Andrew Wyeth, N C Wyeth, and James Browning (Jamie) Wyeth, but there are also works by Jennifer Bartlett, George Bellows, Rudy Burkhardt, Francesco Clemente, Thomas Cole, Joseph DeCamp, Frank Duveneck, Janet Fish, Red Grooms, John La Farge, Bernard Langlais, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Philip Pearlstein, William Ryman, David Salle, Hunt Slonem, and William Zorach. More...

Monhegan Museum of Art & History

Housed in the historic Monhegan Lighthouse Station on Monhegan Island (map), the museum specializes in art and objects related to the island and its history. Changing exhibits in the gallery feature artists who have come to Maine and featured it in their work. More...

Ogunquit Museum of American Art

In the popular summer resort town of Ogunquit, at 543 Shore Road (map), the museum is rich in works by artists associated with the Ogunquit Art Colony, including Edward Betts, Charles Woodbury, Hamilton Easter Field, and Robert Laurent. It has a large collection of ceramic sculpture by Carl Walters; watercolors by Eliot O’Hara; oils by Henry Strater; and drawings and sculpture by Isabella Howland and Bernard Langlais.

Other American artists in the permanent collection are Peggy Bacon, Will Barnet, Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley, Walt Kuhn, Gaston Lachaise, Reginald Marsh, and Marguerite and William Zorach. More...

Portland Museum of Art

The Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square in Portland, is Maine's oldest (1882), largest, and most important art museum, with 17,000 works of art displayed in a complex of several buildings.

It holds the largest collection of European art north of Boston, as well as a significant collection of great American painters.

The collections include works by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Edwin Church, Edgar Degas, Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Rockwell Kent, Fitz Henry Lane, Claude Monet, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gilbert Stuart and Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth and N C Wyeth. More...

Zillman Art Museum

The Zillman Art Museum on the campus of the University of Maine, 40 Harlow Street, Bangor, ME (map), holds more than 3,800 works by American and international artists, most created after 1900, and especially after 1945: Georg Baselitz, Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Francesco Clemente, Richard Diebenkorn, Jim Dine, Eric Fischl, Helen Frankenthaler, William Gropper, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, Yvonne Jacquette, Käthe Kollwitz, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

The museum also has works by artists with significant ties to Maine, including Berenice Abbott, Richard Estes, Winslow Homer, Alex Katz, John Marin, Emily Muir, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth. More...