Liv Kristin Robinson
Bicknell Building #2
“Rockland’s Bicknell Building once housed the thriving Livingston Manufacturing Company which provided the tools and equipment used for working granite and other hard stone and was intertwined with the history of this Maine coastal community known for supplying granite throughout the US and Europe. Now closed and stripped bare, this space became the interim home of the Center for Maine Contemporatry Art (CMCA) pror to it’s occupying it’s new home in Rockland in 2016. This space is still used occasionally for local arts event and the vestiges of its Nineteenth century, industrial past are still visible in its bare bones.
For more than thirty years, I have been drawn to the unexpected beauty of marginal landscapes. Inspired by a chance meeting with legendary photographer, Berenice Abbott in 1988, I initially found my best images along the decaying, commercial waterfront of my adoptive home town of Belfast. In 2004, while still documenting what little was left of Belfast’s industrial waterfront, I made my first digital photographs and soon began looking further-a-field—mostly along the coast—to what still remains of Maine’s manufacturing past.
Although these works are digitally created from start to their finish—they still owe much to the essentially 19th century technique of hand-painting photographs that characterizes much of my earlier work. Today, with the virtually unlimited digital tools available, it has become just as possible for me to emotionally color my subjects as I once did when applying oil pigments directly to the toned, black & white, silver prints.” - Liv Kristin Robinson
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2015 - Visualizing Home & Homelessness, University of Maine, Lord Hall Gallery, Orono, ME
A Tale of Three Cities: Period & Contemporary Photographs of Paris, NYC and Portland, University of New England Art Gallery, Portland, ME2011, 1998 - Biennial Exhibitions, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
2009 - Photographing Maine: Ten Years Later, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME
2000-2009 - Life of the City, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
2000 - Photographing Maine: 1840-2000, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME
1995 - University of Maine Museum of Art, Orono, ME, (“Best in Show”)
1993, 1995 - Maine Coast Artists, Rockport, ME
1991 Baxter Gallery, Portland School of Art, Portland, ME
1990 - Beyond Black & White: Contemporary Handpainted Photography in Maine, Farnsworth Museum of Art, Rockland, ME
1988 - 40th Anniversary Show, Farnsworth Museum of Art, Rockland, ME
EDUCATION
2008 - University of Maine, Orono, ME, (MSW: recipient of geriatric internship).
1984-89 - Professional photography courses at International Center for Photography (New York City) and Maine Photographic Workshops (Rockport, Maine).
1972-75 - New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, New York, NY (completed course work towards M.A. in art history). Recipient of Alumni Travel Grant to study Edvard Munch at Oslo’s Much Museet.
1971 - Hunter College, City University of NY, New York, NY. (B.A., cum laude)
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
Farnsworth Museum of Art, Rockland, ME
Maine State Museum /Special Collections, Augusta, ME
New York Public Library, New York, NY
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
University of Maine, Museum of Art, Bangor, ME
