On Saturday, May 6, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, will open a major exhibition in the museum's Morehouse Wing, entitled Paul Caponigro: The Hidden Presence of Places. The opening will be celebrated at a members-only preview and reception from 6:30 to 8 p.m.  Paul Caponigro: The Hidden Presence of Places will run through October 9, 2011. The primary media sponsor for the exhibition is Maine Home + Design.

Paul Caponigro is one of America's foremost landscape photographers. Emerging from an earlier generation of photographers that included Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, and his early mentor Minor White, Caponigro has, over his fifty-year career, successfully wedded his reverence for nature with a profound commitment to portray the spiritual dimensions of the natural world - what Caponigro himself has described as "the hidden presence of places." He has spent much of his career exploring and depicting scenes of nature and our place in it, often in places he has come to know well.

This exhibition examines bodies of work spanning Caponigro's entire career, focusing on specific locales he has visited, sometimes once, sometimes repeatedly. Among them are ancient and Christian sites in Ireland, natural wonders of the American Southwest, the striking beauty of creeks and snowfalls in rural Connecticut, and his more recent work from Maine, where he has lived since 1993. Drawn almost entirely from the artist's collection, the exhibition includes approximately sixty examples of Caponigro's work, frequently large scale, and some of which have not been seen before. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue by the exhibition organizer, Farnsworth Chief Curator Michael K. Komanecky. This exhibition has been made possible in part through the support of Maine Media Workshops.

The Farnsworth Art Museum celebrates Maine's ongoing role in American art. It offers a nationally recognized collection of works from many of America's greatest artists, with 20,000 square feet of gallery space and over 10,000 works in the collection. The Farnsworth has one of the largest public collections of works by sculptor Louise Nevelson, while its Wyeth Center features works of N.C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. Two National Register historic sites, the Farnsworth Homestead and the Olson House, and Julia's Gallery for Young Artists complete the museum complex. Please visit www.farnsworthmuseum.org for more information on current exhibitions, programs and events.