Finding opportunities for engagement with a wider art world in northern New England is increasingly possible—even in local spaces—for regionally anchored artists. Panel discussions and community gatherings, largely run through the area’s museums and nonprofits, present classic routes into such activity. But the traditional format of a celebrated, polished speaker presenting work to a quiet audience or an enthusiastic crowd of fundraiser attendees is shifting, becoming more specific, personal, and experimental as artists and institutions dig deeper into the generative forces behind creative labor. Dunes, a small gallery in Portland, Maine’s East End, takes the idea of public presentations into a space of experiment and inquiry, regularly hosting events that invite participation in something more unexpected.
“I’ve always been interested in the aesthetics of pedagogy as an experimental form,” said Boru O’Brien O’Connell, founding director of Dunes. “It’s both a form and a conduit.” Since opening in 2022, O’Brien O’Connell has looked to experimental event and performance groups like Our Literal Speed as a point of inspiration in the creation of his programs. Dunes has hosted talks by artists, architectural historians, and supposed remote-viewing experts. Events like these have encouraged communities to come together in a purposeful way that is neither exhibition reception nor panel talk, but instead a strange, happy hybrid.
Dunes has also consistently drawn from the exploratory spirit of 1970s publication, bookselling, and pamphleteering culture. In June, a program invited four Maine writers and artists to pull from books that were both for sale and part of the concurrent exhibition “The Wrong Tree,” which was on view from December 2024 through June 2025. This exhibition functioned as a bookstore, an interior design experiment, and an interrogation of printed material as collection. The reading event on June 13 unfolded with a suite of approaches to presenting published text to a group. The atmosphere was active and engaged. With a new exhibition now on view, the back of the gallery continues to feature a bookstore with rare and unusual art books, both vintage and new.
In terms of exhibitions, Dunes gravitates toward work that has a loose, free approach to materiality with a tight sense of composition and display. Shows such as “Days,” on view now through September 1, with work by Dmitri Hertz and Eric Palgon, have a sense of elegance and restraint pushing through the materiality of the paintings and sculpture on view. In contrast, the public presentations embrace a wider aesthetic and a more unpredictable set of parameters. These presentations also allow O’Brien O’Connell to work toward collapsing the distance between art world centers and the periphery that northern New England can seem to inhabit.
