Image: Gallery U, Montevideo
Alexandre Gallery is presenting a summer pop-up devoted to Emily Nelligan’s charcoal drawings in Rockport, Maine, with the exhibition running from 2 July to 16 August 2026 at 162 Russell Avenue, in the former Maine Coast Artists building. The show, titled ‘Emily Nelligan: Cranberry Island’, centers on the artist’s decades-long focus on Great Cranberry Island, a subject she rendered almost exclusively in charcoal. According to the gallery, preview days were held on 2 and 3 July, and the exhibition is open Thursdays through Sundays from 11 am to 5:30 pm.
The Rockport presentation is part of Alexandre’s Maine pop-up program and follows the gallery’s return to the former CMCA/Maine Coast Artists space. The gallery’s exhibition page describes the 2026 season as centered on Emily Nelligan (1924–2018), who spent decades drawing Cranberry Island, Maine, and who adopted charcoal while studying at Cooper Union in the 1940s. The material also notes that her first full-scale exhibition came in 2000 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and that Alexandre plans to publish a catalogue to accompany a New York showing in the fall.
Nelligan’s work is defined here by restraint and concentration. The available source material repeatedly emphasizes that she worked with charcoal because it was affordable and portable, and then mastered the medium’s capacity for depth, atmospheric contrast and deep emotion. Her drawings are described as landscapes and seascapes around Great Cranberry Island, where gray tones can suggest twilight, fog, moonlight and the shifting light over water. The gallery’s own text characterizes her images as intimate and atmospheric, while a linked essay by Isabelle Dervaux is titled ‘The Quality of the Light is the Essence of the Work’.
The exhibition includes a wide selection of charcoal drawings from different decades. Works listed on the gallery page include ‘Dark Pool’ (1958), ‘Untitled Maine’ and ‘Untitled Cranberry Island’ drawings from the 1960s, ‘Landscape #4’ and other untitled sheets from the 1970s, and dated late works such as ‘19 OCT 95 (1)’, ‘14 OCT 01 (1)’, ‘15 JULY 10’ and ‘31 July 04 (1)’. The page also lists some ink drawings, including several ‘Geraniums’ works and ‘New Hampshire Landscape #2’, indicating that the presentation extends slightly beyond charcoal while remaining anchored in the medium most associated with Nelligan.
The gallery has also highlighted commentary from artists and critics in connection with the Rockport project. Alexandre’s email newsletter thanked Jorge Arango and Edgar Allen Beem for their reviews of Nelligan’s drawings at the Maine pop-up. The linked sources include Arango’s Portland Press Herald column and Beem’s essay in the Maine Arts Journal, both of which describe the exhibition as focused on Nelligan’s longstanding, highly specific attention to Cranberry Island and the changing qualities of light there.
Beem’s essay, published in the Maine Arts Journal, gives the clearest institutional framing for the exhibition: it says the pop-up features sixteen charcoals and four pen-and-ink drawings, and notes that Nelligan studied at Cooper Union and lived part of each year on Great Cranberry Island with her husband, artist Marvin Bileck. The same essay also quotes Wolf Kahn from an earlier Alexandre Gallery catalogue, describing Nelligan’s charcoal drawings as having “a near-mystical intensity,” with “the quiet concentration of deep meditation.” The current Rockport show remains open through 16 August at 162 Russell Avenue.
