Portland Press Herald
By Jorge S. Arango
July 1, 2026
CMCA’s new exhibit explores identity with a focus on the human face | Column
‘Bianca Beck: Eyes’ is the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s new solo exhibition.
I have always seen Bianca Beck’s sculptures as a kind of celebration. Their sheer bigness, their jubilant electric colors, the confidence of their postures — all of this felt like an in-your-face proclamation of the insouciance, subversiveness, possibility and utter joy of queer culture. Beck’s works have always loomed, posed and vogued their way into our psyches.
All of that remains true in the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s solo exhibition, “Bianca Beck: Eyes” (through Sept. 6). But there is also a new element in the mix, something I would describe as a thoroughly disarming tenderness.
The occasion for this turn toward this gentle, nurturing emotion is primarily due, I believe, to Beck’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth. There is nothing like this transformative experience to soften one’s edges. The fact that this occurred more or less simultaneously as the artist declared themselves nonbinary creates a fusion between old and new artistic concerns. In at least some respects, the older and more recent works are not actually fundamentally separate. The sculptures and paintings that predated this show were at some level about identity, while this exhibition is more focused on the physical formation of selfhood before circumstance, familial and social conditions impose identities upon that self. It is a continuum.
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