Maine Maritime Museum expands Re|Sounding with artist workshops, lectures
Maine Maritime Museum is turning Re|Sounding into a monthly hands-on series, opening May 10 with James Eric Francis Sr. and a painting workshop in Bath.
Maine Maritime Museum is pushing Re|Sounding beyond a gallery visit and into a spring and summer program built around making, listening and learning. The first session will begin Sunday, May 10, with James Eric Francis Sr., the Penobscot Nation’s tribal historian and a visual artist, leading a lecture, time in the gallery and a painting workshop in Bath.
Francis’ day at the museum will run from 2 to 3 p.m. for the lecture, 3 to 4 p.m. for gallery exploration and 4 to 7 p.m. for the workshop. The museum says all materials will be included, and the workshop cost is on a sliding scale, a sign it is trying to keep the series accessible to families, art audiences and summer visitors looking for something more interactive than a standard exhibit stop.
The program will continue monthly from May through August and will move through four media: painting, oral storytelling, assemblage and poetry. Each month will bring a different contributing artist and a different learning experience, with the museum using the series to connect art to local and personal histories. That approach gives visitors a reason to come back more than once, since each session will offer a different medium and a different perspective on how history shapes artistic work.
| The series is tied to Re | Sounding, which Maine Maritime Museum says opened on November 15, 2025 and will remain on view through 2027. The exhibit takes its name from the maritime practice of sounding, or measuring depth beneath a vessel for navigation, and the museum says the show is meant to re-measure its understanding of Maine’s maritime history by centering Indigenous and Black perspectives. For a museum rooted in Bath’s maritime identity, that makes the exhibition part of a larger shift in how the city’s story is being told. |
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| Francis is a fitting artist to launch the series. The museum points to his work on the relationship between Maine Native Americans and the landscape, his role in implementing Maine’s Native American Studies law and his curatorial work at the Bangor Museum and Center for History, the Abbe Museum, the Hudson Museum and Harvard University. His presence underscores what Re | Sounding is trying to do on Maine Maritime Museum’s 20-acre waterfront campus in the City of Ships: turn history into a living conversation about place, identity and who gets centered in the telling. |
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