Gibbs Library’s Summer art show will be “Displacement: Immigrant Portraits” by Waldoboro artist Jean Kigel. A reception with light refreshments will be held Sunday, July 19, from 2 to 4 p.m.
“These moving watercolor paintings have comprised a topical traveling art show, which will have our library as its summer home,” said the Library, in a news release.
Jean Kigel grew up in a Latvian family on a poultry farm in Warren, with German and Finns as neighbors, and came to appreciate the hard-working and the intellectual qualities of immigrants. After a career in teaching high school world literature, she became a full-time artist, specializing in Asian brush painting, watercolors, and oils. Coastal life and abundance of nature inspire her paintings.
“I have created a series of emotive watercolor portraits depicting the suffering and the terror that pushes a person to leave one’s home and come to the United States,” said Kigel, in the news release. “I show men, women, and children, uprooted by war, famine, persecution, national disaster, climate change, corrupt regime, and economic collapse. Each portrait is a testimony documenting the emotions that accompany forced displacement: the suffering and terror, but also the persistent, fragile hope that propels someone to abandon everything familiar in search of safety and dignity. I accompany each portrait with facts on immigration. By using harmonious colors and background atmosphere, I want the public to value the immigrant people who make up a large part of this country’s labor force, and its intellectual leadership.”
Kigel traveled to Japan and China to study Asian brush painting, and later taught at the Round Top Center for the Arts, the Farnsworth Museum, and University of Southern Maine in Portland. Her Maine paintings have been shown in the Arts in the Embassy program in Amman, Jordan.
Kigel is a member if the Sumi-e Society of America and the Union of Maine Visual Arts.
Gibbs Library | July through August 202640 Old Union Road, in Washington Village, ME
Hours: Monday 4-7 pm; Tuesday 9 am-Noon and 4-7 pm; Wednesday 3-6 pm; Thursday and Saturday 9 am-Noon.
