Image: Joe Bradley, You & I, 2025. Oil on canvas. 91 x 75 1/8 inches. 231.1 x 190.8 cm. © 2026 Joe Bradley. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) will present a major exhibition of work by Maine-born artist Joe Bradley from August 5 to November 14, 2027. Bringing together large-scale paintings, drawings and sculptures spanning the past 25 years of his career, the exhibition explores the pastoral as a defining current in Bradley's continually evolving practice.
Known for moving fluidly between abstraction, figuration and conceptual experimentation, Bradley has consistently challenged expectations of contemporary painting. His recent works turn toward the natural world, introducing expansive fields of color, earthy palettes and loosely articulated environments that evoke open skies, grazing creatures, standing figures and rural terrain.
Rather than offering a nostalgic vision of nature, Bradley reimagines the subject through gestural mark-making, material immediacy and the language of modern abstraction. In the museum's framing, the pastoral becomes less a place than a state of mind for Bradley — a space where abstraction and lived experience, figure and landscape, history and renewal converge. Presented in his home state, the exhibition offers a new perspective on this dimension of his practice while situating his work within the cultural and geographic context of Maine.
The Bradley exhibition is part of OMAA's 2027 season, which also includes an early-career survey of paintings by Rebecca Ness, the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of sculptor Ryan Schneider across the museum's three-acre sculpture gardens, a new facade mural by Portland, Maine-based artist Ryan Adams, and an exhibition on the artist and educator Elwyn George Gowen.
Founded by a community of artists and supporters led by Henry Strater and opened in 1953, OMAA presents modern and contemporary art on Maine's coast and is open to visitors from April to November.
