FARMINGTON — The UMF Emery Community Arts Center and Visiting Writer Series are proud to feature an exciting presentation of dual events by Maine-based artist, author and UMF alumna Shanna McNair on Thursday, Sept. 25. Events are free and open to the public.
The evening will start with an opening reception for McNair’s solo exhibition “You Know This by Heart: New and Selected Works by Shanna McNair,” from 5-7 p.m. in the Emery Gallery. Immediately following, the audience will move downstairs to the Emery Performance Space where McNair will present a reading from her recently published debut novel, “Soul Retrieval,” (High Frequency Press, 2025).
McNair’s exhibit presents oil and acrylic paintings, mixed-media works on paper, graphic design and an audio soundtrack by the artist. It opens in conjunction with the recent publication of McNair’s debut novel “Soul Retrieval”, a BookLife Editor’s Pick.
McNair writes, “My love of painting and drawing came roaring back when I realized my novel ‘Soul Retrieval’, which is a “gritty, lyrical reimagining” of Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece “The Prophet” needed to include my own original artwork. ‘The Prophet’ contains original illustrations by Gibran. My book, then, needed my art. And so it began.”
The gallery exhibition includes the original figurative and abstract works that became the illustrations in Soul Retrieval, as well as large-scale murals, graphic design, audio work and more. These new and selected pieces reflect McNair’s journey from an undergraduate student at UMF to her current career in the arts, and explore themes of tradition, identity and the age-old question, “what is art?”
McNair is founder and director of The Writer’s Hotel and Founding Editor and Publisher of High Frequency Press and The New Guard literary review. Shanna writes prose, poetry and scripts, is a multi-disciplinary artist (visual art, music) and is an award-winning journalist. She is also the daughter of UMF Professor Emeritus Wes McNair.
Her artwork has shown at various places in Maine; many cafes and spaces and most notably at UMaine at Farmington and The Grand Movie Theatre in Ellsworth. Also of note, she’s shown at SFMOMA and Mad Magda’s in San Francisco and Mash Tun in Portland, Oregon. Her creative writing has appeared on KGB Bar Lit online, The Galway Review, WAVEBACꓘ and in Maine Magazine, Naugatuck River Review and elsewhere; her work in journalism appears on Village Soup.
She was selected for writing residencies at Studio Faire (2022 and 2024) and Gullkistan (2024). She has been a writer-in-residence at Hewnoaks Artist Colony, at the Thomas Lynch Cottage and at the Stonecoast Ireland Residency. She is a graduate of the Dartmouth College Creative Writing MALS program, the Stonecoast MFA program, University of Maine at Farmington (double-major creative writing BFA/ Studio Art BA) and holds a Creative Writing Certificate from Oxford University, via Dartmouth. She has worked extensively in the visual and performing arts. McNair lives and works in Maine, alongside her husband, the writer Scott Wolven. More at shannamcnair.com.
