Emily Nelligan: Cranberry Island
ALEXANDRE Maine Pop-Up
July 2–August 16, 2026
162 Russell Avenue, Rockport, Maine
Thursdays through Sundays, 11 am to 5:30 pm
203-219-6615

Alexandre returns to Rockport, Maine this summer, opening its second pop-up exhibition in the former Maine Coast Artists (CMCA) building.

The 2026 season centers on Emily Nelligan (1924-2018), who spent decades drawing a single subject: Cranberry Island, Maine. Trained at Cooper Union in the 1940s, Nelligan adopted charcoal over paint for its economy, and came to master the medium for its capacity to convey depth, atmospheric contrast and deep emotion. Long admired by other artists in Maine, where she and her husband, the artist Marvin Bileck, lived part of each year, she did not receive her first full-scale exhibition until 2000, at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Included will be a selection of early drawings, never previously exhibited, and a new text by Isabelle Derveaux, former curator at The Morgan Library. In the fall the gallery will publish a catalogue to accompany its showing in New York.

Also on view will be a selection of works by artists including Will Barnet, Stuart Davis, Lois Dodd, Marsden Hartley, Susan Hartnett, Lisa Sanditz, John Walker and Neil Welliver, among others.

A rolling screening of Gerrit Schreurs’s documentary Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral, produced for Dodd’s first European retrospective at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, which closed in April 2026, will run throughout the exhibition. The film features contributions from David Breslin, Roberta Smith, Ann Temkin, Adam Weinberg, and others.