Image: Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art will open ‘Carl Sprinchorn: All the World is a Painting’ on August 6, 2026, presenting what the museum describes as a major exhibition devoted to an underrecognized voice in American modernism. The show runs through November 15 and is positioned as a substantial reappraisal of Sprinchorn’s work, with the museum linking it to broader discussions of modernism, queer history, environmental concern, and transnational artistic exchange.
According to the museum’s exhibition page, Carl Sprinchorn was born in Sweden and arrived in New York in 1903 to study with Robert Henri. The artist, identified in the source material as Sprinchorn (1887–1971), developed a wide-ranging practice informed by travel and artistic community. The museum says he moved within circles that included Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Marguerite and William Zorach, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, and Florine Stettheimer, placing him within the network of early twentieth-century American art.
OMAA says the exhibition aims to bring renewed attention to Sprinchorn’s contribution to American art while shifting him beyond a strictly regional framework. In the museum’s words, the project traces how travel, industry, sexuality, gender, and class shaped his work both within and beyond Maine. The show is co-organized by guest curator Donna Cassidy and OMAA’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Devon Zimmerman.
The museum’s own description emphasizes the breadth of Sprinchorn’s subjects. Although long associated with Maine, where he produced some of his most compelling images, his career also encompassed scenes from other places and contexts. OMAA highlights his movement between working-class subjects and scenes of leisure, and between intimate portraits and animated compositions featuring lumberjacks, hunters, dancers, and swimmers. The exhibition frames those subjects as part of Sprinchorn’s negotiation of identity as a Swedish immigrant, a gay man, and a modern painter attentive to shifting ideas of region, nation, labor, and the natural world.
Zimmerman said in the exhibition text that ‘All the World is a Painting’ repositions Sprinchorn beyond a regionalist framework and helps illuminate the complexities of American modernism in the early twentieth century. The museum also notes that the exhibition will help contextualize his practice through the lens of queer history and the artist’s ties to Maine, where he made some of his strongest work.
The exhibition is being presented alongside another Sprinchorn project at Bates College Museum of Art. OMAA says ‘Carl Sprinchorn: Points of View’ will be on view there from October 1 through December 19, 2026, and that the two exhibitions together represent the most comprehensive presentation of his paintings and drawings to date. The museum also says a catalogue, ‘Carl Sprinchorn: A Rediscovery,’ will be published by University of Maine Press in August 2026 in collaboration with OMAA and Bates College Museum of Art, bringing together more than 180 sketches and paintings.
OMAA’s 2026 season runs from April 10 through November 15, and the museum notes that several galleries will be closed through August 5 as it installs the exhibition. A related public program, ‘OMAA Conversations: Jonathan Katz,’ is scheduled for August 13 at 5–7 pm, while a children’s story hour with the Ogunquit Memorial Library is listed for August 18 from 10–11 am in the sculpture garden, weather permitting.
