Banner image: Ann Craven, Moon (Blue Crescent, Cushing, 9-6-21, 7PM), 2021 (detail), 2021, oil on linen, 14 x 14 in. Collection of the Artist. © Ann Craven. Courtesy the artist and Karma

On May 22, 2025 the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) opened Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory), focusing on Ann Craven’s paintings of the moon, made between 2020 and 2024. Based on the artist’s direct observation, each work documents the date, time, and place at which they were created, underscoring Craven’s interest in the relationship between the cyclical rhythms of nature and the personal experience of time and memory. The show remains on view until August 17.

To highlight the experimental breadth of Craven’s work, the exhibition features the artist’s “laboratory” of lunar studies, a collection stored and inventoried through carefully labeled cardboard containers of 15 x 15 inches each. This presentation offers visitors insight into the artist’s process, revealing how Craven’s canvases represent both a celestial trajectory and a personal one.

The exhibition will take place in three rotations, with each installation reflecting the vision a different curator: BCMA co-director Anne Collins Goodyear (May 22–June 30); Jay Sanders, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Artists Space (July 1–18); and Adam Weinberg, Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art (July 20–August 17). Approximately 50 paintings, each one executed from nature, will be on view during each rotation, providing insight into the more than 400 total works in Craven’s lunar laboratory from 2020-2024. The related digital catalogue, available here, reflects the works collectively chosen from Craven’s laboratory by the three curators over the course of Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory).

Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) is organized by BCMA co-director Anne Collins Goodyear in collaboration with the artist. The exhibition appears in conjunction with the two concurrent solo exhibitions of the artist’s work in Maine: Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024), on view May 3, 2025–January 4, 2026 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, and Spotlight: Ann Craven, on view May 14– September 14, 2025 at the Portland Museum of Art.