The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) will present the exhibition American conversations from April 10 through November 15, 2026. Responding to the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the exhibition examines how artists have brought their own experiences, identities, and artistic perspectives to the shared and ongoing project of making—and remaking—America.

Artists featured range from figures closely connected to Maine—including Marsden Hartley, Lynne Drexler, Winslow Homer, Lois Dodd, Katherine Bradford, and Jay Stern—presented in dialogue with fellow artists shaping the national conversation—including Derek Fordjour, Philip Guston, Cara Romero, Jack Whitten, Alexander Calder, Dana Schutz, Hughie Lee-Smith, Nicholas Galanin, and Kara Walker, among others.

Across a range of artistic practices, the exhibition considers how art gives form to questions of belonging, memory, conflict, aspiration, and value, revealing the role artists play in negotiating who we are, individually and collectively. Defining “America,” and what it means to be an “American,” is not a fixed or settled act. Rather, American Conversations understands American identity as something continually shaped through reflection, challenge, and reinvention.

American Conversations is curated by Devon Zimmerman, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Says Zimmerman, “What it means to be an American has never been static. Rather than trying to define it, this exhibition looks at how artists speak around the idea—through lived experience, contradiction, and imagination—capturing the texture of life in this country in all its humor, tenderness, beauty, violence, and unease.”

Drawing primarily from the Ogunquit Museum of American Art’s permanent collection and supplemented by significant loans from Art Bridges and other partners, the exhibition is organized as a constellation of visual dialogues. Each section pairs two works of art, inviting visitors to consider how artists across generations and backgrounds engage with themes central to American life. Some pairings bring contemporaries together, while others create transhistorical encounters that reveal shared concerns or unexpected resonances across time and place.

Over the course of the exhibition, pairings and individual works will shift, allowing new interpretations and relationships to emerge. This fluid structure—constantly changing and deliberately colliding the local and regional with the national and global—mirrors the evolving, entangled nature of American life and art. American Conversations underscores that the meaning of “America” is continuously shaped through exchange, interpretation, and imagination.