The Farnsworth Art Museum offers its constituency an unparalleled opportunity to enjoy the country's most comprehensive collection of American art related to Maine. Located on Main Street in the heart of downtown Rockland, the museum's collections mirror the history of Maine, its people, their occupations and values. Maintaining its commitment to collect art related to Maine, the museum uses the works in its collection as prisms for interpreting broad artistic and historic developments in American art. The museum's permanent installation Maine in America (reinterpreted and reinstalled in 1997 with funding from an American Collections Enhancement grant from the Luce Foundation and annually updated) documents the artistic innovation and vitality that are a celebrated part of Maine's cultural history from colonial times to the present. Within the exhibit on Maine, works are hung with other relevant examples of American art, allowing Maine's role to be interpreted in broader context. Temporary shows are centered on works from the collections and further document and celebrate the state's artistic heritage. (top)

Robert Bellows, an advisor to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and acting as an agent for the estate of Lucy Farnsworth, formed the Farnsworth's initial collection in the 1940s. Working with the museum's first collections committee, Bellows established the direction of the museum's collecting and acquired many exceptional works, including those by Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, Eastman Johnson, and younger artists William Thon and Andrew Wyeth. Over time, the collections have grown through gifts and purchases. Recent gifts include watercolors by Charles Dana Peale, Winslow Homer, and Andrew Wyeth, a major oil painting of Mt. Desert by William Herzog, and an important group of works by Bangor native modernist Eve Peri. Recent purchases include Robert Indiana's large polychrome sculpture Love, the only extant preparatory drawing for Martin Johnson Heade's Storm Clouds on the Coast (1859), contemporary paintings by Jon Imber and Alan Bray, and a mixed media work on paper by James Wyeth. (top)

The museum's collections play a vital role in the cultural life of the state and serve as an invaluable resource for the study and understanding of Maine and American art. The collections are the foundation of the museum's Arts Initiatives for Maine Schools (AIMS) education program, which serves school children across the state and in outlying island communities. Access to the collection is promoted through school visits, studio programs, teacher workshops, lectures, family programs, youth and adult docent programs, video and film programs and seasonal celebrations. The Maine in America collections catalogue, exhibition catalogues, articles in scholarly and popular journals, and the museum's Web site provide further access to the collections. (top)