Networks of Modernism: 1898 - 1968
Works from the Ogunquit Museum of American Art
January - April 2025
Ogunquit was one hub in a vast network of progressive art schools and communities connecting modern artists across the United States and abroad. New advances in transportation technologies, from trains to ocean liners, and more importantly greater access to them, linked artists and their ideas from Taos to Monhegan to New York to Paris. The massive upheavals across the globe stirred by colonialization, political persecution, war, and economic depression prompted the migration of peoples to the United States. These migrants generated connections to new artistic communities and stimulated a flourishing of multicultural artistic exchange that shaped American modernism. The routes of these networks were also subject to racial segregation and anti-immigrant sentiment, denying the equitable access to artistic spaces. Out of the euphoria, anxiety, and struggle that defined modern American life, emerged the diverse artistic responses to modernity on view in these galleries.
Organized into a series of thematic groupings, Networks of Modernism contextualizes the artists who lived, worked, or frequented Ogunquit within this broader, interconnected story of American modernism. From the shifting landscape of rapid urbanization and modern forms of labor, to places of escape from the effects of modernity—in both nature and the imagination— this exhibition maps the many ways artists reacted to the immense social, political, and economic changes affecting life in the United States over a roughly 70-year period.
