‘Finally, I want people to see it.’ Maine exhibition showcases a homegrown artist’s body of work.

Arts admin June 28, 2026 0 Comments

‘Finally, I want people to see it.’ Maine exhibition showcases a homegrown artist’s body of work.

Michael Rothschild has lived in Maine his whole life, farming, cider-pressing, and writing. He’s also been creating art for more than 40 years, from sculptures to sketches, and he’s finally ready to show them to the world.

His first exhibition in his home state, “Graven Images: Stone, Wood, Copper, Steel, Bone,” will be on display until Oct. 12 at the Monson Arts Gallery. The pieces, which range from copper etchings and stone sculptures to early concept sketches, don’t just display a local talent, but are a full-circle moment showing art in its place of origin.

Born in Bangor, Rothschild now lives on and tends to a 200-year-old farm on Tory Hill in western Maine. He doesn’t silo himself to any one field. Sometimes he’s a farmer tending to cows, chickens, ducks, and hogs. Other times, he’s an orchardist reviving a once-believed-to-be-extinct variety of apple. And in between, he’s an artist drawing from the nature around him. But for Rothschild, all these branches coexist under the same farm.

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“Stories are one of the things that we grow here. Sculptures are one of the things that we do,” he said in an interview with the Globe. “They all seem to be part and parcel of the same organic thing.”

His art reflects his deep love for Maine’s nature, which stems from a childhood passion for animals. “They’re my fellow creatures,” he said. “This isn’t a theory that I’m doing, and it’s not abstract. It’s my life, and it’s their lives, and it’s material.”

He isn’t just inspired by the surrounding nature, but rather uses it in his craft as well. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a 3,000-pound, 13-foot stone sculpture of a halibut carved out of slate from Monson itself. The other works in the exhibition depict sturgeons, moose, elk, turkeys, and rams.

“I don’t feel the need of going a long way away to find the stuff that is what I want to do,” he said. “Maine seems to have everything.”

Many of the exhibition’s pieces have been housed at Rothschild’s farm for years. Historian and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin has been a close friend of Rothschild for over 50 years. When she would visit his farm, she remembers seeing art everywhere.

“Some of them would be in what was his study, some might be still in the barn, others were in various stages of being worked on,” she said. “They weren’t displayed in a museum-like setting, but they were hugely impactful when you saw them.”

Parting ways with his art pieces wasn’t an easy decision for Rothschild, noting how the farm feels empty without them. “It feels sort of lonely. I mean, they’re part of the house,” he said.

Chantal Harris, director of the Monson Arts Gallery, described the pieces as breathing life into “these images [that] have been stuck in [Rothschild’s] head for his whole life.” With this being his first exhibition in the States, it’s a special moment for the gallery to host art that has strong connections to the surrounding area.

“It can be really scary to part with your artwork that you’ve held so close for so long,” she said. “We really feel honored that he put the trust into us to put this on.”

On Saturday, the Monson Arts Gallery hosted a reception to welcome and celebrate the new exhibition, including remarks from Goodwin to introduce Rothschild and the pieces. She noted how many tears were shed throughout the event.

“It was an extraordinary night, and it was partly just all being together and celebrating what we had always hoped would happen before, but he was finally ready for it to happen now,” Goodwin said.

For her, the exhibition couldn’t be a more harmonious opening to his work. While Monson is a small town of 650 people, Rothschild’s art is a direct reflection of being inspired by Maine’s nature. “It just seemed like the perfect place for it to have its beginning,” Goodwin said.

At the reception, Rothschild was drawn to how people can come together to have a shared “love of life.”

“Children look at these things, and they get excited. And men who don’t even think about art, they take their hat off in front of some of these things,” he said. “It’s not me that they’re doing it for, it’s the power of the thing, it’s the power of the material.”

With an exhibition finally on display, he hopes the pieces can change how people interact with the nature that surrounds them.

“Finally, I want people to see it,” Rothschild said. “Maybe it’ll change some little kid’s mind about how they think about the things that we’re lucky to share this place with.”