A book produced by Bowdoin faculty highlighting artistic portrayals of the changing ecology of a Maine island has picked up a prestigious publishing prize.
Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island: The Monhegan Wildlands (Rizzoli Electa, 2024) has been selected as an Honor Book for the 2025 Historic New England Book Prize. The fully illustrated catalogue was produced to accompany an exhibition of the same name, on display at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art earlier this year.
The book and the exhibition were put together by Frank Goodyear, codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, along with plant scientist Barry Logan, who is the Samuel S. Butcher Professor in the Natural Sciences. Also involved was Jennifer Pye, director of the Monhegan Museum of Art & History, where the exhibition was housed after its stint at the Bowdoin museum ended in June. This island exhibit lasted until September 30, 2025.
The interdisciplinary project examined ecological change on the island of Monhegan off the Maine coast and how that change has been represented through artwork, historical documents, and other artifacts.
Located ten miles out to sea—north of Portland and south of Rockland—the island is less than a square mile in size, with a year-round population of only around sixty residents. The island’s small scale has enabled close study by artists and scientists alike, revealing in intimate detail the changes in the ecology of the forest landscape.
Merging art, science, and history, the book (and the exhibition) explores the broad arc of ecological events on the island—the formation and abandonment of pastureland, forest recovery, and the critical importance of land conservation—through their representation in visual art.
The publication is one of two Honor Books selected for the 2025 Historic New England Book Prize. For the past thirty-one years, Historic New England, a nonprofit dedicated to historic preservation, has awarded prizes to books that advance the understanding of life in New England from the past to today by examining the region’s material culture.
In an email to the prize winners, the organization said the Book Prize Committee was extremely impressed by the work, citing its “new scholarship and fresh perspective, the quality of the writing, and the outstanding production values.”
“I’m thrilled for this recognition,” said Professor Barry Logan, speaking on behalf of the three authors/curators. “Jenn, Frank, and I are the more visible figures in an expansive collaboration that brought this book into being.” The wider effort includes those who wrote the foreword, the afterword, authors of the seven featured essays, and the artists who created maps, photographs, and prints, said Logan. “We’re also grateful to the Bowdoin students who designed illustrations or worked in archives and in the field, staff at both sponsoring museums, members of the Monhegan community, friendly and professional editors, and last but certainly not least, our extraordinary designer.”
Funding for the project was provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Peter J. Grua ’76 and Mary G. O’Connell ’76, Steve Marrow ’83 and Dianne Pappas P’21, the Elizabeth B. G. Hamlin Fund, and the Stevens L. Frost Endowment Fund.
