The Center for Maine Contemporary Art will open its three summer exhibitions Saturday, May 24. An opening reception is from 3-5 p.m. Saturday.

The exhibitions are “Cheek to Cheek” by Nicole Wittenberg, May 24 through Sept. 14; “the shape of memory” by Carlie Trosclair, May 24 through Sept. 7; and “Leaf Litter” by Elizabeth Atterbury, May 24 through Sept. 7.

CMCA is located at 21 Winter St., Rockland.

‘Cheek to Cheek’

Wittenberg’s show is a new grouping of her largest paintings to date. Depicting lush, color-saturated flowers, stems and leaves against hot, florescent grounds, the enormous canvases surround the viewer with unabashed beauty.

Known for her previous erotic works of figures in the landscape, in recent years, Wittenberg has spent long periods each summer immersed in the landscape of coastal Maine, where she encountered the wildflowers that serve as references for her current imagery. Capturing their ephemeral nature in quick pastel studies created on-site, the artist uses these small-scale drawings as jumping off points for the mural-sized paintings created in her studio.

“Wildflowers like these grow on the side of the road; they seem to portray the feeling of our time, a flower that grows without tending and returns year after year, despite our best efforts to contain them or weed them out,” Wittenberg said in a prepared release.

“Cheek to Cheek” is curated by CMCA’s Executive Director and Chief Curator Emeritus Suzette McAvoy. The exhibition at CMCA is presented in concert with “Nicole Wittenberg: Sailboat in the Moonlight” at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, France. The three concurrent exhibitions are also marked by the publication of Wittenberg’s first career-spanning monograph by Monacelli Press, with texts by Suzanne Hudson, David Salle, Devon Zimmerman and an interview by Jarrett Earnest.

Wittenberg was born in San Francisco, California, and received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ coveted John Koch Award for Best Young Figurative Painter in 2012. From 2011–2014, she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and in 2017, she was a professor in the Critical Theory Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

“Cheek to Cheek” is presented in CMCA’s Main Gallery.

‘the shape of memory’

The opening of this show includes an artist dialogue from 2-3 p.m. Sunday, May 25, with Trosclair in conversation with artist and educator Heather Bird Harris.

Metaphor is essential to Trosclair’s work in this summer exhibition — architecture as body, architectural surface as skin, latex as skin, the domestic space as a vessel of memory and past lives. The resulting sculptures and installations explore the vulnerability and ephemerality of home, as both a physical space and a concept. The poetic takes on a visceral existence in Trosclair’s ghostly sculptures — created by painting liquid latex onto man-made and natural surfaces, allowing it to dry, and then peeling it away. The milky liquid (tapped from rubber trees), applied in multiple layers, dries to a translucent amber. At times, the latex picks up color from the original surface; in other works, the artist adds natural pigment to suggest the passage of time.

Trosclair, the daughter of an electrician, recalls spending her childhood in historic New Orleans residential properties at varying stages of construction and renovation. These memories go hand in hand with the impacts of the Gulf Coast climate, where one is perpetually subjected to evacuation and uncertain return. The repeated act of leaving home and belongings behind led Trosclair to consider closely the haptics of memory and the psychology of place.

“Chrysalis: Reflections on the Interstitial” (2019) is a double porch cast from a historic shotgun house in New Orleans. A design reflective of its tropical climate, the traditional shotgun house was made to receive and expel air; for Trosclair, the idea of home as a breathing body.

Trosclair lives in New Orleans. She had an artist’s residency at the Tides Institute & Museum of Art in Eastport in 2021 and is the recipient of the 2023 Visual Arts Award of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, a national award given by the Rockland-based foundation.

Carol S. Eliel, senior curator emerita of modern art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wrote the essay in the exhibition brochure, “Carlie Trosclair: Ephemeral Ghosts,” on which the foregoing text is based.

‘Leaf Litter’

Throughout her practice, Portland-based Atterbury explores the shifting legibility of objects — the way forms can be reworked, recontextualized and transformed through material and scale. Atterbury’s sculptures emerge through a process that is deliberate and intuitive, embracing both intention and improvisation as ways to engage with history, memory and personal narrative. In “Leaf Litter,” she examines how objects carry traces of past lives and accumulate meaning over time — how a shell outlives its inhabitant or how an oversized fan, scaled beyond human use, takes on a mythological presence.

The works in “Leaf Litter” — rendered in wood, metal, clay and stone — coalesce into a shared visual language that blurs the boundary between artifact and invention. Some shapes feel immediately recognizable — a lock, a shell, a leaf — while others resist easy identification, hovering between the symbolic and the abstract. Ceramic feet, playful yet sentinel-like, appear as vessels of presence, holding the body, its history and its weight.

In Atterbury’s work, viewers see a persistent questioning of what is legible, what is coded and how meaning is constructed and destabilized over time. Like fallen leaves that decay and enrich the soil, the works in “Leaf Litter” accumulate significance through the act of reinterpretation. Each object functions both as a relic and as a catalyst for renewal.

Atterbury has exhibited widely, including in solo shows at the Clark Art Institute, Colby College Museum of Art, in Chicago and in Queens. Atterbury’s work is in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Colby College Museum of Art and CELINE. Since 2017, she has collaborated with Anna Hepler on four “Percent for Art” projects across Maine. Atterbury received her MFA from MassArt in Boston and her BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

“Leaf Litter” was organized by Kate M. McNamara, a curator and educator based in Providence, Rhode Island, currently the interim John R. and Barbara Robinson Family director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

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