This Month the Museum Will Open "Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory)"

On May 22, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) will open Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory), focusing on Ann Craven’s paintings of the moon, made between 2020 and 2024. Based on the artist’s direct observation, each work documents the date, time, and place at which they were created, underscoring Craven’s interest in the relationship between the cyclical rhythms of nature and the personal experience of time and memory. The show will remain on view until August 17.

To highlight the experimental breadth of Craven’s work, the exhibition will feature the artist’s “laboratory” of lunar studies, a collection stored and inventoried through carefully labeled cardboard containers. This presentation will offer visitors insight into the artist’s process, revealing how Craven’s canvases represent both a celestial trajectory and a personal one. The exhibition will take place in three rotations, with each installation organized by a different curator: BCMA co-director Anne Collins Goodyear (May 22–June 30); Jay Sanders, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Artists (July 1–18); and Adam Weinberg, Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art (July 20–August 17). Approximately 20 paintings will be on view in the context of each rotation, selected from over 150 compositions, each one executed from nature. Craven’s complete laboratory will be made accessible through an accompanying digital catalogue. 

This rotating series of installations is organized by BCMA co-director Anne Collins Goodyear in collaboration with the artist. Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) is presented in conjunction with the two concurrent solo exhibitions of the artist’s work in Maine: Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024), on view May 3, 2025–January 4, 2026 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, and Spotlight: Ann Craven, on view May 14– September 14, 2025 at the Portland Museum of Art.

The following interview with Craven was conducted by Goodyear on Friday, April 11, one day before the artist completed her move out of her Harlem studio, a space she had occupied for twenty-five years, and the place where her “laboratory” of paintings of the moon first took shape. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anne Collins Goodyear [ACG]: Part of what makes this move so poignant is the fact that this is where the lunar laboratory itself took shape.

Ann Craven [AC]: The idea of creating a laboratory of my work, so that I could go in and take from it, began here. It was like my petri dish …

ACG: Ann, your way of picturing the moon creates a metaphor that is so capacious that it’s possible to see almost every element of human experience through it. So it is very poignant to me, and it touches me very deeply, that the BCMA’s exhibition of the lunar laboratory—Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory)—is happening at these incredible moments of transition, and transit, in your own life. You painted the first components of it up on the roof of this building, Ann ...

AC: I had to climb up a ladder. I wouldn’t do that now, now, I have a staircase … Jason Schmidt photographed me up there. He brought his whole crew.

ACG: That’s incredible. And this whole building was such a creative space because, of course, artist David Hammons was in here too.

AC: Yeah. I moved in with artist Josh Smith. We had the second and third floor. And then we rented to David Hammons. And then when the laundromat was moved out, David took the first floor, and he kept this studio until a couple of years ago. So then I started using this space …

ACG: I’m glad to be able to capture that history at this moment, because one of the things that I find so exciting about your moon paintings is that they testify to transition and transit. So it’s exciting to think about that series taking shape here. Imagining the creative energy that was circulating in this place, that is built into that series is really special, and so it is fun to locate it here. And, of course, we’re speaking in New York City, but I know that Maine is another one of those special places that channels so much creative energy for you.

AC: Oh yeah, and the sky in Maine is so different than it is in New York. Here, the sky reflects the colors of Times Square. It reflects the colors of the airport. You can see the changing sky based on a cityscape, so you can feel the energy in terms of color, as well. And then in Maine, it’s a different experience because you can see the sky. In New York, you can’t really see the sky—you can see the moon, but you can’t really see the stars. In Maine you see the stars, and you see the moon, and the clouds can be so active, passing by and getting yellow or red when they pass in front of the moon, it is just incredible for me.

ACG: It’s so much fun to hear you reflect on these two different places. It makes me think about the fact that your first show of moon paintings was 30 years ago.

AC: Yes, in 1995. Wow, so this is a 30-year anniversary, and the church [a deconsecrated Catholic church owned by Craven in Thomaston, Maine] has been serving as an exhibition space for five years. That’s incredible.

ACG: Yes. And then there was this cataclysmic moment in your life, in 1999, when you suffered—

AC: The fire.

ACG: Thank goodness you were not home when it happened, but it represented a total loss of all the work in your studio. I think one of the reasons that I find your moon series so powerful is that it seems to be rooted in resilience. And it also—it may seem like a funny thing to say—but after 30 years, it’s clear that these paintings are something that you have done emphatically, with purpose. And the fact that they continue to go on, three decades later, is amazing.

AC: Can I talk about the power of time? And the conviction of loyalty to a subject, and picking a subject—or not. Needing to figure out what you’re about, as an artist, is the most important thing, or even what you’re about. That’s such a funny statement, but what I mean is that picking a subject that has your interest is very important. And the moon has for me made such sense because it came back the same. Or, it seemed to be the same, but it was completely different—different day, different year, different month, different decade. So, for me, choosing the moon had to do with loss of things that you couldn’t really hold onto, even back then. So there was life and loss, there was what you had in front of you, but then it would go away. The moon [as subject] was, at one point, a kind of an emotional decision, but then it transitioned into a very conceptual practice that stayed really linear.

ACG: That’s really interesting. I love what you say about this transition from something emotional into something conceptual. And we were beginning to talk about the fact that this year represents the three-decade anniversary of your working on this subject, which is amazing. But it’s also very exciting in the sense that you had a re-engagement of sorts with your lunar series about 10 years after you started it in 2006. So there was this disruption caused by the fire, and then this opportunity to return to the moon series in 2006, at which point … well, talk about doing it with emphasis! You ended up creating not just one series of these works, but two. You created a mirror of sorts, of that.

AC: Yes, and I have a photo of it here [fig. 1]. It shows me copying in 2006.[1] Jason Schmidt came to photograph us. And I’m so lucky, I got the spread! And then he came back the next week and photographed me on the roof.

ACG: That’s beautiful. There’s something really interesting going on in this photograph. We see a beautiful series of moon paintings behind you, and we see you looking out the window at night, but we also see a painting on an easel in front of the window. It almost looks like a René Magritte painting![2] Could you reflect a little bit on what’s going on here?

AC: Well, I had to stay true to myself … So I had to put the original painting on an easel, near the window, so it acted like the real moon.

ACG: Why did it matter if it was near the window?

AC: I wanted it to breathe. I wanted it to have air. It could have been right beside me, but I needed it to be far away. Or far enough that there was distance between the original and the copy.

ACG: Is that the beginning of the lunar laboratory?

AC: That was part of it. … Those boxes were scattered all around, and they were filled with the original paintings. And I would pull one out, and copy it, and put it on the wall, so it had a rhythm. So here were the boxes that [are now part of] the laboratory.

ACG: And so, Ann, would you consider 2006 to be the beginning of the lunar laboratory, or would you back that date up earlier?

AC: 2006. You’re right, but I had to take in all the 1995 paintings. And then I painted [the moon] again in 2000, for a show, and then I don’t know where those paintings are. And then, in 2006, I had the guts to do it again, to go back to my roots: seeing the moon as both a conceptual project and a reset button for my need to paint from life. The moon has always acted—forever for me—as a reset button. When you reset, it’s because you’re too far out there, or something’s wrong, or something’s broken. So the moon helped me to remember my roots in painting from life. The larger works are no longer about looking out at the night sky… I have to rely on what I painted, and the memory in the painting, and the actual painting in front of me, to make the larger work. But these smaller works became the laboratory of my ideas because they were so raw, and so honestly there.

ACG: I love what you said earlier about the way in which the series, over time, transitioned from being motivated primarily by an emotional connection to something to a more conceptual approach. I’d enjoy hearing you expand on that, and I wondered if this moment in 2006, is pivotal, in that regard?

AC: Absolutely. It is pivotal in that regard because I allowed myself the expansion of an idea, whereas before it was still painting the moon, because I really wanted to paint the moon. … I really needed to use the moon as an emotional sort of—not a resting place—but a safe space, safe for me to paint. And it was weird enough that I could get away with it, but at the same time, it was the right subject matter to paint because of my interest in  repeated ideas, notions, repeated cyclical things coming back again. And for what, I don’t know. I mean, it must be my Italian upbringing … a very strong upbringing, with a feminist grandmother, and a feminist mother, with the Catholic Church—but going to church with them was really fun!—and seeing this ritual. So in a way, the moon was a ritual for me— and I owned it.

ACG: I love that idea of a ritual. And I also love the idea that spirituality always exceeds our grasp. And it’s something, in a sense, that we can only understand through some kind of metaphorical associative process.

AC: Yes. Because a lot of times, you can’t really give into it. You just have to stay in the moment. And so that was the other part about this project. I allowed myself to stay in a mode in which I was almost devouring myself, because I wanted to preserve something so outlandishly huge, four hundred moon paintings that I had started …

ACG: It’s a huge number... It makes me think of Kant’s idea of the sublime. For Kant the sublime is something that exceeds our ability to fathom, so the sublime can overwhelm us, whereas the beautiful is something that we can enjoy in peace because, in a sense, we can control it. One of the things that I have thought a good deal about, in looking at your paintings, is this idea of the sublime, and how the sublime may be a good way of understanding what you’re doing. Four hundred is an overwhelming number. One can say the number, but it’s huge. Especially when one thinks about the labor to do each one of those canvases again, and again. It’s a phenomenal thing.

AC: From life, too. I stopped at 400, because 400 was absurd.

ACG: Were these all done in Maine, originally, or was the first batch done in Maine?

AC: I started the majority in Maine, because some of the paintings from [my first solo show in] 1995 were preserved.[3] People who had purchased them from the 1995 show gave me moons back, because all the paintings in my studio burned in the fire. From the 101 moon paintings, I had 10. So that started the first 10 paintings of the 400. So it goes from 1995 to 2006... but there’s a lot of space in between. And so I had to stop at 400, because 101 was absurd enough in 1995. In 2006, 400 was doubling again, the show-

ACG: Yes, a double doubling--quadrupling it.

AC: ... or quadrupling it, yeah. And then copying it again.

ACG: And you, Josh [Smith], and David [Hammons] must have been comparing notes on your work the whole time you had studios in the same building?

AC: Yeah, David would give us his opinion. He only liked my moons. He said, “I don’t know about the birds,” but he loved my moons. And this is a piece by his wife [Chie Hasegawa].

ACG: You mean the words in the windows? (Figure 2)

AC: It’s a Breatharian restaurant. They don’t eat food, they just breathe air...

ACG: It’s interesting in light of your comment about letting the moons breathe … even as you were doing copies of them.

AC: Yeah, and it helped me too... The absurd, again, back to the absurd. David taught me a lot about the absurd... and really absorbing the absurd.

ACG: The notion of the absurd and its connection to Surrealism makes me think of the formal relationship between Magritte’s Le Banquet paintings [including the version at the BCMA, viewable here], and your Purple Beech paintings (Figure 3). Was that a deliberate echo, or is that one of these things that creeps in?

AC: It creeped in... It was in my mind’s eye somewhere. But in Maine, that juxtaposition happened literally in front of my eyes. It was natural; it happened.

ACG: It’s so interesting what you say about it being natural. But I mention it in connection with the echo of Magritte in the photograph of you standing in front of an open window in front of a canvas, making a copy (see figure 1). In a playful way, one can imagine that there is an element of the absurd about it. And that’s what Magritte was capitalizing on, too. He was courting this idea of absurdity. On some level that’s what all the Surrealists are doing: pushing us to break through our idea of what is real, and this idea of what is constructed. And, of course, it ends up becoming so revealing. Do you know the artist Accra Shepp? In a gallery talk [on April 10] at the BCMA he made a poignant observation along the lines of, “The important thing about fiction is that it’s honest.” And there is this way in which he really kind of cut through ideas of true and false, and instead got at this idea of honesty. And, by extension, at authenticity, as being that breakthrough moment that really matters, in terms of human connection.

AC: Yes. Fiction is like a painting... and it’s never the reality, or it’s never exactly. It’s somebody’s interpretation of their life, or their moment. These moons aren’t narrative, and they’re not fictional. They’re documentary. They’re recording. I’m recording the recording of the moon. So it’s in-between where the fiction is, because my brushstroke isn’t real, but I was there. But there is a fiction to it. Yeah, absolutely, a fiction.

ACG: I also love your allusion to the interval between brushstrokes. One of the things that was deeply moving to me in your recent interview with Jay Sanders was your description of being a little girl.[4] I love thinking of you listening to Johnny Cash, and other singers that your mom would be playing, and I love that she really encouraged you to listen to the pause between their breaths.

AC: Yes.

ACG: Something that you’ve helped make me aware of in your painting is your attentiveness to intervals. And I feel like there is an almost musical quality to your paintings, in that sense, in the same way that music frames silences. And I wonder, could you say a little bit about that idea of the interval? I also feel like you hold space with your use of parentheses in your titles. There just seems to be a special sensitivity to this idea, quite literally, of holding space in your work.

AC: So interesting. The brackets are the descriptions in [the structure of] my titles. First it’s the moon, and then within the brackets are the what, where, and when, and then the year follows at the end. But the breathing, listening to Johnny Cash, my mom saying, “Did you get it? Did you hear it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it again. Let’s listen again. Did you hear him? Did you hear him breathe?” And, “Did you hear him breathe in? Listen to that. Listen to that.” Also, you can play a song again and again and it’s the same song. In a way it’s like a prayer, again. It’s another mantra. It’s another devotion to listening. But the breathing, my mother taught me to look at the in-between.

Thank you so much for reminding me of this, and the time it takes to listen to a breath—as the air flows in and is released. This next sound is incredible. Visually listening to the air, breathing in, breathing out. And I know the moon has everything to do with my mom’s devotion to making sure that I felt comfortable with whatever I painted. And by giving me these conceptual, fun play times as a child—listening to the air breathing, listening to the breath of Johnny Cash, and Dean Martin—made me feel, I think, that I could paint whatever I wanted, but with the idea that you have to commit to something. But the moon did shape that idea, and now I’m thinking of my grandfather, the roofer, who would shingle a roof with the same repetition, all the time.

ACG: Right.

AC: And again, another notion of listening, or hearing patterns, hearing repetition. Just talking about it, I’m listening, and hearing the nails. Then there was always respect for that. It’s like a dash, as well.

ACG: Exactly, it’s the dash. You are making me think about the act of hearing somebody breathe, and as you say, the fact that one has to pause in one’s own life to perceive that interval. There is a certain kind of intimacy that exists when we have that experience of being cognizant of the interval. And I feel like maybe there’s even a way in which that interval is the moment where connection is possible, which intrigues me, especially when I also think about these four hundred paintings as being an intermingling of sorts between 1995 and 2006. Between being in New York—and being in Maine—between these different states of being that are Ann Craven.

AC: And it is time. The dash holds so much between the things that we think about. It’s even your life, on a gravestone, the dash... represents life.

ACG: That’s stunning. Oftentimes water is included in your landscapes, and oftentimes, there are lines on the water. But there may also be spiral lines in the sky, or there may be …

AC: Crazy eights (Figure 4).

ACG: Crazy eights. Do you feel like those lines in the water or in the sky have something of the significance of the dash?

AC: Oh, absolutely, because I would be painting a second one, right beside it, if I had the energy. So that rippling into the next painting is the time it takes to get from one painting to the next, which is literally time, brushstrokes. The brushstrokes tell the time. It’s almost like a drum... because you hit the water the same way the moon hits the water. So you have to capture that same rhythm, and that same natural nature, without worry, without any kind of...

ACG: Trepidation.

AC: Yeah.

ACG: It’s also interesting that you use the term “dash,” because it makes me think about written language. I use dashes all the time in my writing, but people often edit them out. But it is natural to me to use those dashes. And it was natural to Alfred Stieglitz, it was natural to Georgia O’Keeffe.[5]

AC: They had a lot of dashes.

ACG: All the time, dashes.

AC: Didn’t you and I talk about dashes early on?

ACG: I think we did. Coming back to it now, it makes me think about your sensitivity, not only to visual structures, but also to structures of language. I am interested in the fact that in your paintings’ titles you are sensitive, not only to words, but also to how words appear. You attend carefully to their sequence and to your use of brackets (or parenthetical clauses) and dashes to frame them.

AC: Wow … Yeah, [the dash] allows the time that wasn’t captured—or was captured—to be there. It’s the time in between—like my mother’s death. —And now, that's ten years. Sorry, twenty years.— It allows us to see time in a way that is absurd.

Anne Collins Goodyear
Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

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[1] See “Ann Craven: Moonlighting” in “Work in Progress,” photography by Jason Schmidt, V Magazine 45 (Spring Preview 2007), 52-53.

[2] Between 1933 and 1945, René Magritte created four works (three paintings and a drawing) entitled La condition humaine (The Human Condition). Each plays with the idea of a canvas placed in front of a window, and raises profound questions about the nature of the “original” and the “copy.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(Magritte) [accessed April 27, 2025].

[3] Ann Craven’s first solo show consisted of 101 paintings of moons and took place in 1995 at the Lauren Wittels Gallery in New York.

[4] Jay Sanders and Ann Craven, “Inner Sight Seeing,” in Ann Craven: Night (New York: Karma, 2024), 11.

[5] On the correspondence of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe please see Sarah Greenough, ed. My Far Away One: Selected Letters of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Vol. 1, 1915 – 1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).