Last Year’s Forgotten Harvest will focus on Dine’s portraits of others, but will include a self-portrait completed in 2023. Self-Portrait, 2023, charcoal on paper, 11 1/4 x 11 1/8 in. (28.5 x 22 cm). Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Gift of the Jim Dine Art Trust.
The exhibition, Jim Dine: Last Year’s Forgotten Harvest, includes drawings of those who’ve been closest to Dine over the past sixty-five years, including his three sons—Nick, Matt, and Jeremy—their mother, Nancy Dine; his wife, Diana Michener; and other artists, poets, and intellectuals.
Dine, who is eighty-eight, traveled to Brunswick in October with two assistants—Daniel Clarke and Olympe Racana-Weiler, both of whom appear as portrait subjects in the show—to meet with Museum staff and to help plan the show.
He mentioned that he’s looking forward to seeing all of the artworks together—the older with the more recent pieces. Over the decades, he’s kept many drawings nearby, storing them in his studios in Walla Walla, Washington, and in Paris, France, and never or rarely showing them publicly. “They all come from different times, but they are all about one thing—intimate drawings of friends or acquaintances,” he said.
Museum codirector Anne Collins Goodyear said that the body of work in Last Year’s Forgotten Harvest, now part of the Museum of Art’s permanent collection‚ “represents a circle of figures formative for Jim, and helps us understand the larger network of individuals of which Dine is a part, fleshing out our sense of how Dine became Dine and who continues to influence him.”
