The Annual Stephen May and Kathryn B. Wilson Lecture @ Skowhegan faculty artist Anne Poor painting the “Founder’s Fresco” on the Sap House, 1949. Courtesy Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture Guest Curator Faye Hirsch joins us for our annual Stephen May and Kathryn B. Wilson Lecture. Her talk concerns aspects of the research she undertook in preparing several chapters of the forthcoming book, In the Company of Artists: A History of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the first major publication on the topic, which she co-wrote with writer and curator Ingrid Schaffner. Established in 1946 and ongoing today, Skowhegan is instrumental in promoting the teaching and execution of buon fresco painting within its multidisciplinary arts pedagogy. Anne Poor, the stepdaughter of one of the school’s four co-founders, taught at Skowhegan throughout the School’s first decades. Poor specialized in fresco, and was responsible for one of the campus’s seminal documents: a fresco depicting its founders and embodying its pedagogical ideals. While lesser known than the 1950s frescos Anne supervised at the nearby South Solon Meeting House, the “Founder’s Fresco” survives today in a conserved state on a loggia wall of an original building. Faye Hirsch will discuss this aspect of the School and in particular the archival research that uncovered facts concerning the execution and content of Anne Poor’s fresco. A record of the school, and, by extension, the School’s broader emphasis on public-facing mediums evolved by its ongoing instruction, the so-called “Founders” or “Sap House” fresco is a significant record of Skowhegan and its ties to the wider American art scene. The Stephen May and Kathryn B. Wilson Lecture focuses on the art of the book, past and present. Katie and her late husband Stephen had a vision and passion to ensure the future growth and accessibility of the Farnsworth library, created through the bequest of the museum’s founder, Lucy Copeland Farnsworth. The library is the only publicly accessible library in the state of Maine devoted solely to art. Faye Hirsch, Faculty Portraits 2025 Faye Hirsch is a writer, editor, curator and teacher who has published widely on contemporary art. She was chair of the master’s degree program in Fine Art at the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY, from 2012 to 2024, and served as a senior editor at Art in America from 2003 to 2014. The author of dozens of catalogue essays, articles, and books, she continues to write reviews on contemporary art and exhibitions for Hyperallergic and Brooklyn Rail. Her book on the painter Lois Dodd (2017) is in its third printing, and she is a contributor to the catalogue for Dodd’s recent career retrospective at Kunstmuseum den Hague. She has co-written, with Ingrid Schaffner, In the Company of Artists: A History of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the first major publication on the topic, and she has contributed an essay on Harmony Hammond’s monoty...
