FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: May 15, 2026

Maine to Host Ninth Biennial AHAA Symposium During Nation’s 250th Anniversary; Registration and Full Program Now Live

BRUNSWICK, PORTLAND, and WATERVILLE, MAINE — As the United States prepares to commemorate its 250th anniversary, Bowdoin College and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Colby College and the Colby College Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) are proud to announce the program and opening of registration for the Ninth Biennial Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) Symposium taking place September 24–26, 2026.

This convening marks the first time the symposium—held biennially since 2010—will be hosted in Maine, and collaboratively across three of the state’s premier art institutions. The symposium will draw on Maine’s rich artistic history as it explores the nation's complex visual legacy during its semiquincentennial.

A Comprehensive Program of Scholarship and Engagement

The 2026 program features a diverse range of topics designed to challenge and expand the field of American art history. Highlights include:

• Transforming Museums Across the Dawnland: The symposium opens at the Portland Museum of Art with a roundtable featuring artists and curators. This session sets a collaborative tone for the event, exploring how regional institutions are reimagining their roles and responsibilities within Indigenous homelands.

• Themed Presentations and Roundtables: Across three days and three venues, participants will engage with a broad range of critical topics. Sessions will investigate Indigenous histories and archival temporalities, environmental construction and destruction, racial geographies, Jewish experiences in American art, disability studies, the evolving definitions of national identity and borders, and more.

• Platforms for Emerging Scholars: In keeping with the symposium’s commitment to the future of the field, dedicated Lightning Rounds at both Colby College and Bowdoin College will showcase the work of the next generation of art historians. These sessions provide a vital stage for both graduate and undergraduate students to share their research alongside established professionals.

• Gallery Talks:  A new feature of the 2026 symposium will be object-based gallery talks that highlight the rich collections of the host museums.

In addition to the core sessions, attendees will have access to collateral programming on Thursday, September 24, and Sunday, September 27. This programming includes guided tours of exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art as well as excursions to the Winslow Homer Studio at Prout’s Neck, the Victoria Mansion in Portland, and several arts institutions in Rockland, such as the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

Registration is now officially open: $60 for non-student members of AHAA; $35 for student members. Attendees are encouraged to visit www.ahaaonline.org/page/symposium to view the full schedule and secure their attendance. AHAA membership is required to register. 

Key Dates:

• May 15: Registration opens and travel grant applications become available.

• June 19: Deadline for symposium travel grant applications.

• September 10: Registration closes.

To facilitate the statewide nature of the event, free chartered buses will transport attendees from Portland to Waterville on Friday and to Brunswick on Saturday. Participants must indicate their intent to use the chartered buses during the registration process.

The Ninth Biennial AHAASymposium is co-chaired by Jessamine Batario, Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement, Colby College Museum of Art, and Tanya Sheehan, Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jette Professor of Art; Humanities Division Chair; and Chair of the Department of Science, Technology and Society, Colby College. 

For more information, contact ahaamaine@gmail.com. 

Exhibitions on View

Symposium participants will have the opportunity to engage with significant exhibitions across the host venues, including:

• Portland Museum of Art: Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher; Passages in American Art; Eve Biddle: Wonderlands; and Jared Lank: Bay of Herons.

• Colby College Museum of Art: Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas; By Design: The Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth; and Alex Katz | Out of Sight: A Drawing Survey.

• Bowdoin College Museum of Art: USA @ 250; permanent collection installations including Legacies: Art from Renaissance Europe and the Americas and Currents: Art Since 1900. 

About the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Recognizing the power of art as an intellectual pursuit, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art promotes creative thought, global engagement, inclusivity, and the common good through its exhibitions, collections, programs, and engagement with faculty, students, and the public. Always free and open year-round, the Museum is a laboratory for creativity and an engine for new learning and scholarship.

About the Colby College Museum of Art Since its founding in 1959, the Colby College Museum of Art has been dedicated to its mission of access to, meaningful engagement with, and joyful connection through art. Free and open to all, the museum advances Colby College’s educational and research mission, enriches the region’s cultural and community life, and contributes to the great field of American art.

About the Portland Museum of Art The Portland Museum of Art, located blocks from the working waterfront in Maine's largest city, seeks to tell multifaceted stories through art. Showcasing significant holdings of American, European, and contemporary art, as well as iconic works from Maine—the extensive collection highlights the rich artistic tradition of the state and its artists. Committed to its “Art for All” mission, the PMA seeks to create an inclusive space that champions open expression and makes art accessible to all.

Please contact Bart Pushaw, AHAA Programming and Events Coordinator, at  events@ahaaonline.org with any questions you may have about the groups.

AHAA has signed the statement issued by the American Council of Learned Societies condemning “the recent increase in incidents of violence against Asians and people of Asian descent in the United States and around the world.” We mourn the loss of eight people—seven of them women, six of them of Asian descent—murdered in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16, 2021. “These and other attacks against the Asian American community represent the latest chapter in our history of xenophobia” and racial violence in the US.

AHAA is committed to elevating perspectives on Asian American and Pacific Islander experience, as evidenced by a special section in Panorama's spring 2021 issue on "Asian American Art: Past and Futures," which will address both Asian American artistic production and renewed public discourse about race, racialization, xenophobia, and activism. We stand in solidarity with Asian American communities under attack. 

To read the statement in full and to see the list of co-signers, please click here or visit the ACLS website.

To read the statement in full and to see the list of co-signers, please click here or visit the AHA's website.

Panorama, AHAA's online scholarly journal, hired Jessica Skwire Routhier as its new managing editor in July. This position is funded with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. For more information about the grant, see our previous news announcement here. For more information about the journal, visit the website (http://journalpanorama.org/).

“The Henry Luce Foundation was a founding supporter of Panorama, and we are delighted to receive continued support as we move into the next phase of our development,” said Betsy Boone, an Executive Editor for the journal. “Luce funding will allow us to professionalize our administrative structure, helping us work more efficiently with our authors and expanding our readership into new quarters.”

Panorama is published twice a year, with past issues archived on the journal website. In addition to scholarly articles, Panorama publishes Book Reviews, Exhibition Reviews, and short Research Notes presenting innovative projects currently in the works. It also features “The Bully Pulpit,” a section pairing brief scholarly and polemical texts with responses from academics, curators, critics, and other interpreters of art and visual culture in the United States. Its most recent issue features two articles on American sculpture, a suite of essays about the state of the sculpture field, as well as a Bully Pulpit asking, “What are Museums For?” 

Panorama

Panorama (http://journalpanorama.org) is the first peer-reviewed electronic publication dedicated to American art and visual culture (broadly defined) from the colonial period to the present day. The journal is intended to provide a high-caliber international forum for disseminating original research and scholarship and for sustaining a lively engagement with intellectual developments and methodological debates in art history, visual and material cultural studies, and curatorial work. It encourages a broad range of perspectives and approaches within an interdisciplinary framework encompassing both local and global contexts. Panorama publishes work utilizing the insights of both traditional and new historical and interpretive approaches to American art.

Henry Luce Foundation

The Henry Luce Foundation (http://www.hluce.org/) was established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., to honor his parents who were missionary educators in China. The foundation seeks to bring important ideas to the center of American life, strengthen international understanding and foster innovation and leadership in academic, policy, religious and art communities. The American Art Program was established in 1982 to support efforts to advance the knowledge, understanding and experience of American art through research, exhibitions, publications and collection projects. The American Art Program has distributed over $177 million to some 428 museums, universities and organizations in 48 states, the District of Columbia and internationally.