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Since the mid-1800s, artists have captured Monhegan’s distinctive headlands and its irresistibly picturesque village and harbor, with Manana Island and the broad horizon beyond.

These images are lodged in the public consciousness and draw thousands to the island for day trips every summer. But those who live there, as well as those who have made it a sustained object of study, know that these margins where the land meets the salt water are only part of the story. The branches, shoots, and shadows that tangle together in Barbara Petter Putnam’s woodcuts of the island are not the typical artist’s rendering of the year-round fishing village, tourist destination, and artists’ colony ten nautical miles off midcoast Maine that is Monhegan, but their intertwined stories of art and ecology, of wildness and preservation, characterize this unique place.

The vast majority of Monhegan’s one square mile is a protected wilderness called the Wildlands. Much of that wilderness is old-growth forest known as Cathedral Woods for the way the tall conifers overhead suggest the vaults of a church. The Wildlands are the subject not only of Putnam’s prints but also of ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ biology professor Barry Logan’s research on a parasitic plant called dwarf mistletoe. Logan’s project has set off its own shoots and taken a somewhat unexpected form in Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island, a book and a two-venue exhibition organized jointly by the ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Museum of Art (BCMA) and the Monhegan Museum of Art & History, which tells the story of the changing ecology of the island through a century and a half of art produced there. The story is not a simple one, but, like the knotted-together plant forms in much of the exhibition’s works, the complexities and interrelationships are the point.

Logan, ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ’s Samuel S. Butcher Professor in the Natural Sciences, explains that his awareness of dwarf mistletoe began in Colorado—where it is also part of the native ecology—but he did not begin to study it in earnest until he came to ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ in 1999. Logan had been tagging and tracking trees infected by dwarf mistletoe in various sites throughout the midcoast only to see the trees he was studying lost to development, when William Livingston from the forestry program at the University of Maine suggested that he look into the protected Monhegan Wildlands.

Dwarf mistletoe is fascinating, especially for those of us who have little frame of reference for the high drama of plants. As Logan says, people’s “expectations of what plants can do are so low, it’s a gift how easy it is to blow their minds.” The parasite initially attacks trees—on Monhegan, red and white spruce—from within, stealthily feeding from their vascular system like little vampires. Eventually the mistletoe sends out shoots from the host trees’ branches, and after those shoots flower, seeds are ejected like missiles, traveling as much as several yards through the air to land on another host tree and begin the process again. Unchecked infection causes distorted branch growth—tangled masses colloquially called “witches’ brooms,” highly visible in the Edward Hopper painting on the cover of the exhibition catalogue—and ultimately the tree’s death.

A pivotal moment for Logan came when he visited Monhegan to check on trees that a colleague and a student had tagged some years before. While old-growth red spruce seemed able to manage the infection, he found, many white spruce had died long before their time. After several seasons encountering artists on the trails, he had a growing consciousness of Monhegan’s legacy as an art colony.

“It was precisely at that moment that I became aware of a painting that Rockwell Kent created, which is called Young Spruces,” Logan recalls, and with it came the flash of realization that the adolescent white spruce Kent painted in 1955 were of the same generation as his tagged trees. With that painting, he realized, he was seeing both the beginning and the end of their lives.

Over the course of nearly two centuries, Logan understood, Monhegan artists had—wittingly or not documented environmental change. This opened a new avenue of research for him, one that demanded not only a close study of the artwork but also a fuller understanding of the island’s history. In part through the resources of the Monhegan Museum and its director, Jennifer Pye, Logan learned about the island’s evolution from forestland to sheep pasture to tourist playground to its current slow path to reforestation. Another work by Kent that shows this happening: Kent began Sun, Manana, Monhegan in 1907 and then, after a long time away from the island, reclaimed it from the owner to add, in the foreground, the row of white spruce that had sprung up in his absence.

It was clear that the spruce and the mistletoe were part of a much larger story. This gave Logan an opportunity to practice what he preaches in his popular Science Communication course. Offered as an elective, the class challenges students to explore and implement different modes for communicating science findings, from grant writing, art making, and exhibition development to speaking with the press.

Putnam was a guest lecturer in 2024, leading students through an exercise where they documented a day trip to Monhegan with illustrations made on scratchboard. Previously an artist-in-residence at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center and a lecturer in the art department, Putnam works at the intersections of art and science. “As artists and makers, as scientists, we’re all storytellers,” she says, “but we have very different processes.”

Mer Feero ’23, now working on her master’s at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, speaks powerfully about how the course informed her thinking. In science education, she says, “the burden falls on scientists to be able to communicate with the public” in ways that may push the boundaries of their training.

“Art museums are not the source of scientific content for many people,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be.”

Communication begins with conversation, of course, and Logan did just that, not only by connecting with Pye but also by reaching out to both Putnam and photographer Accra Shepp—who would later be tapped to create a series of monumental photographs for the Monhegan Wildlands project—during their stints at ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ (Shepp was also an artist-in-residence, in 2014). Both marvel at how welcoming Logan and the College’s science community in general were to them as artists.

As the concept of building an exhibition took shape, Logan drew on those conversations to draft a proposal to BCMA codirectors Anne and Frank Goodyear. Within ten days, Logan remembers, Frank had responded favorably but observed, “You need a partner”—an idea that would coalesce into the three-person curatorial team of Logan, Frank Goodyear, and Pye. “This was born in my head,” Logan says, “but the moment that it became a bigger thing, it truly became a shared, collaborative effort.”

The book and the exhibition represent a wide ecosystem of voices—students and scientists, artists and lobstermen. Taking a cue from the sciences, Logan, Goodyear, and Pye coauthored all six main chapters of the book, rather than dividing it up according to their areas of expertise. They also recruited nine additional interlocutors to speak from their perspectives in short essays, including Livingston on Monhegan’s forest health, ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ environmental studies professor Matthew Klingle on its history of conservation, and an afterword by Shepp.

The cumulative result, both in the art of the exhibition and in the pages of the book, is a narrative of Monhegan’s art, history, and ecology, one that has artists, curators, historians, scientists, and museumgoers all seeing this familiar landscape in an entirely new way.

Frank Goodyear describes a central idea of the show as “an opportunity to reflect on a series of human decisions over the course of the last two hundred years that have dramatically impacted the lands.”

One of the first was to introduce sheep as a source of meat, milk, and wool for the year-round community. Having sheep on Monhegan began the deforestation of the wooded island, both from a conscious effort to create pastureland for the sheep and from the fact that the sheep’s grazing kept vegetation in check. In the section of the exhibition Goodyear calls the “firsts wall”—the first bird’s-eye view of Monhegan, the first drawing and painting, the close-to-first photograph—the bare landscape, with views largely unobstructed by trees, shows their impact. Sheep were eliminated in 1896, less because of the deforestation than because the herd was suffering from neglect, but when modernist painter Robert Henri and his students began visiting Monhegan in 1903, they were still seeing an island altered by their presence. The barren, overgrazed headlands they depicted are an enduring image of Monhegan, and these treeless headland landscapes are among the best-known paintings of the island.

Another human decision evolved alongside Monhegan’s growing popularity as a tourist destination and summer community. The influx of summer people led to a housing boom in the early years of the twentieth century. Seeing the wilderness shrink inspired summer visitor Ted Edison, son of famed inventor Thomas Edison, to purchase land with the express idea of preserving it from development. By the 1950s his goal had expanded to protect not only the Wildlands, including the largely untouched Cathedral Woods, but also the year-round community in Monhegan Village and its distinct way of life. Edison is often credited as the mastermind behind Monhegan Associates, the land trust founded in 1954, but both Logan and long-time Monhegan year-rounder and retired lobsterman Doug Boynton stress that it was a fully communal effort. “It wouldn’t have happened without him,” says Boynton, “but it was formed with deep involvement from the community.”

Just as these conversations about protecting the island’s ecology were taking place, islanders made the decision to introduce deer into their previously mammal-free environment—“to amuse tourists and to give locals game to shoot,” as officials said. Six deer rapidly became many more and, just as they do in any garden, they ate what they wanted. This was not only the end of the unfenced flower gardens seen in paintings by Edward Redfield, Constance Cochrane, and Mary Stuart Mason, it also had disastrous effects on the native plants of the Wildlands. Artist Geraldine Tam, who made lush botanical studies of plants on the forest floor, wrote passionately to Edison and the Monhegan Associates in 1969 that the herd’s selective grazing was causing irreversible changes to the Wildlands plant life.

The deer brought another danger. Just as Logan and his colleagues would use Monhegan as a natural laboratory for studying dwarf mistletoe, infectious disease experts found it to be a uniquely well-suited environment for testing mitigation strategies for Lyme disease, which plagued the island before the deer herd was culled in 1997–1999.

An important takeaway is that the invasive species were the sheep and the deer—and ultimately the ticks—and not the dwarf mistletoe. Hopper’s painting demonstrates that it has been on Monhegan for at least a century and a quarter. What has become clear to today’s researchers is that a series of human decisions on Monhegan allowed the mistletoe to dominate and crowd out competition, leaving new forest growth (specifically the stands of young white spruce) particularly vulnerable to infection. The deep and enduring artistic record of Monhegan—including the work of contemporary artists—shows the shifting ecological balance over time, communicating not only these complex ideas but also the island’s lasting beauty and resilience.

Just inside the entrance to the exhibition, a pair of objects goes to the very heart of science communication. Molly Holmberg Brown’s twin maps, one of Monhegan around 1890 and the other 2023, make evident the extent to which the island has successfully reforested itself.

This resilience is also an overall message of the project, says Goodyear: the idea that, “if allowed, nature will rebound from even sort of dramatic change.” The maps are a manifestation of how interdisciplinarity and collaboration are woven into the infrastructure of this multilayered project. A trained artist and geographer, Brown is part of a longtime Monhegan family, so she brings deep knowledge of the island to her work. But she also relied on a catalogue of historic images furnished by Goodyear and Pye, on data sourced from Logan’s research, and on fieldwork by Feero, mapping and documenting growth patterns throughout the island, for the final images. Both Feero and Sam Stevenson ’26 spent two months on Monhegan in the summers of 2023 and 2024, respectively—Feero through a paid BCMA internship and Stevenson as a Freedman Summer Research Fellow.

Stevenson says that what stands out for her in this project is “just how many people have collaborated, and how many people care so deeply about it.” She traces that nurturing environment to ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ classrooms, where she has studied with both Logan and Putnam, who encouraged her to further explore intersections between art and science. Along with Feero, Stevenson worked on creating video and soundscapes for the exhibition—a new skill for them both—and Stevenson also created a geolocated walking tour that compares historical views by artists to the same sites today.

Shepp touches on something similar in his photographs. Long engaged with an ongoing series called “Islands of New York,” Shepp came to the Monhegan project with no knowledge about the island. Goodyear explains that this was very much intentional. “We wanted to identify somebody who’d actually never been to Monhegan before and didn’t have all of these associations, all this nostalgia for this incredible place.” Shepp says that the curators gave him wide-ranging support—including on-site help from Feero and others—but very little direction in terms of what to photograph. Ultimately, he said, “what I was interested in seeing was what they were interested in seeing.”

Take Barry’s Trees, for instance: five different captures montaged in Shepp’s distinctive way that show a site Logan frequently teaches from because it includes key elements of his botanical research. “I really wanted that little inlet where the water comes in and you have the banding in the sky,” he says, but at the same time, “I was aware that there were a certain variety of trees that Barry was interested in.” “Barry’s trees” was the field note he made on the negatives, just to organize them, and like the trees themselves, the words proved lasting—becoming not just the title for the art but also, organically, a kind of place name on the island, not unlike Cathedral Woods.

Everyone who takes a snapshot on Monhegan is part of the lineage of image-makers there.

But Shepp’s traditional methods and 4x5 camera have a particular resonance with earlier island photographers. He remembers that Pye called his attention to a specific view of Monhegan from Manana Island, across the harbor, that was retaken every few decades in panoramic photographs, all composites, all taken from the same spot. Getting to Manana, whose dock had blown down in a storm, was not easy, but once there, Shepp says, “I came upon this rock . . . and it was like it all snapped into focus.” He left the terrain of Manana uncropped in the foreground and took a more expansive view of Monhegan to show not just the harbor but the full outline of the island—but his photograph nevertheless “gets to participate in that historical dialogue, where we see Monhegan changing over the decades.”

Shepp’s portraits of islanders and his photograph Trap Day with Margaret reflect how people are part of the island’s ecosystem. Trap Day is October 1, the official start of Monhegan’s lobstering season, which since 1907 islanders have voluntarily limited to preserve stocks and manage marine traffic. Margaret is Margaret Chioffi, a full-time islander who acted as a sort of unofficial guide (“We would never have made it to Manana without Margaret,” says Shepp); she is also Pye’s daughter and a member of ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ’s class of 2028.

Looking at the Trap Day photograph, Shepp and Pye share different memories. Shepp recalls how he had planned to take the photograph the day before, when lobstermen were bringing their gear down to the docks to get ready, but held back when he perceived their anxiety about a difficult season ahead. Pye remembers that Margaret would otherwise have been at boarding school, as is the norm for high-school-aged Monhegan kids, but she’d returned home after contracting COVID, and that Trap Day was her first day out of quarantine.

That these parallel stories emerge from the same image seems to echo a central idea behind the exhibition project: every image of Monhegan conveys a wealth and variety of history and experience that is expansive and changeable, contingent on whether the viewer is looking for sunsets, dying spruce, or something else entirely. Accordingly, the exhibition staged at the Monhegan Museum in the summer of 2025 will adapt to a different audience, Pye says. “For people who have already made the journey to Monhegan . . . you don’t need to communicate on the same level how wild and remote this is and what it took for these early artists to get here.”

She sees it as the museum’s responsibility to tell Monhegan’s local stories as part of its presentation. There will be more works by painter and conservationist Elena Jahn as well as contributions from Joanne Scott, a former president of Monhegan Associates, and Teco Slagboom, one of its original incorporators. True to the museum’s longstanding policy, however, it will not display the work of living artists, with the exception of Brown’s maps and Shepp’s photographs, specifically commissioned for the exhibition.

The Trap Day stories underscore Boynton’s observation that Monhegan is “an incredibly difficult place to live” year-round. “Even the littlest things are hard,” he says. Pye agrees that being a permanent resident “has to be intentional” and suggests this may partly explain why Monhegan has historically been somewhat more welcoming to people “from away” than other rural Maine communities. As Boynton explains it, “for the people that really get into it, they have to really commit themselves. . . .[You] go through a lot to get a foothold out here.” That effort earns respect.

That said, Boynton would prefer it to be not quite so challenging to put down roots on Monhegan. Today, one of the biggest threats to an ongoing year-round community is the lack of affordable housing. Boynton led the effort to found, in 2002, the Monhegan Island Sustainable Community Association (MISCA), which buys existing homes or buildable lots and sells them to residents at affordable prices, maintaining ownership of the land in perpetuity so they can only be sold to year-round residents.

MISCA has worked closely with Monhegan Associates to align their respective goals of preserving wilderness while expanding housing. The two might seem to be in conflict, but Boynton points out that protecting the year-round community has always been a priority and that “the Wildlands wouldn’t be a sustainable situation out there if it didn’t have buy-in from the whole community.” One could not exist without the other.

That the Wildlands are magical was recognized by artists early on, from photographers Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott and Oliver Watts to Henri and his students, including George Bellows. A seldom-seen pastel by Henri and a newly rediscovered and never-before-published oil by Bellows are highlights of the Cathedral Woods section of BCMA’s show.

While the harbor and headlands are still popular among artists, the woods have held their own as a subject, seen in works by Frances Kornbluth, Lynne Drexler, and Steve Budington, among others. Shepp rhapsodizes about shooting on Evergreen Trail late on a rainy October day, where the dense canopy created a kind of dark, protected sanctuary. Putnam thinks of it as a kind of museum or school, with scientists and artists alike hauling their equipment along the trails. Feero observes that “there’s something poetic about you all being on the same path, all capturing the same things, but from different perspectives and sometimes for similar goals.”

Boynton says that he thinks Monhegan’s ability to attract great people is one of its “special powers,” an idea he elaborates on in his essay for the book. He is self-effacing about his contribution, calling himself “very peripheral” to the larger project, but it’s clear that he, himself, is one of those great people, along with Edison and Pye and all the artists and lobstermen and others who have been his neighbors.

Of the artists, Boynton says, “it wasn’t like they were a separate community; they were just your friends.” The relative absence on Monhegan of the kinds of bright dividing lines that might be drawn in other places has perhaps helped to foster the marvelous tangle of disciplines we see in the Monhegan Wildlands research project, exhibitions, and book, with artists, scientists, historians, and islanders working in tandem to observe, record, and communicate.

“When you’re on an island, your resources are limited,” Boynton explains, “and if you screw it up, you don’t get a second chance; you can’t move down the road.”

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Jessica Skwire Routhier ’94 is the managing editor of Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and is a regular contributor to Antiques and The Arts Weekly. She is also a freelance copy editor, specializing in art history, for several museums and academic presses. An art history major and studio art minor at ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ, she earned her MA in art history from Tufts University.

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This story first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Magazine website.