Alice Spencer
Butterfly Totem #2, Screen ink on Thai Unryu paper on panel
The repeated form in this work is made from a shadow cast on sun sensitive paper and joined to its mirror image. The form, by chance, resembles a butterfly.
A totem is a vertical wooden pole with carvings of guardians or ancestral beings, usually supernatural, that are revered and respected.
~ Alice Spencer
Born in Colorado in 1944 and raised on the East Coast, Alice Spencer received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and continued her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. For the last 50 years, she has lived and worked in Maine.
Spencer has worked in a variety of media, including watercolor, acrylics, and oils. She is a printmaker and a co-founder of the Peregrine Press, a printmaking cooperative in Portland. She has taught printmaking at the Haystack School of Crafts in Deer Isle, the Maine College of Art Continuing Studies Program and in Mongolia and Tanzania.
Over the last 35 years, Spencer has had 20 solo exhibits. Her work has been shown extensively throughout Maine, New England, and in New York, and has been featured in exhibits at the United States embassies in Chile and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was one of 10 women painters exhibited at the United Nations’ "Ingredients for Peace Celebration". Her paintings and prints are included in numerous museum and corporate collections including the Portland Museum of Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, Simmons College, United Technologies, and the UNUM Corporation. Spencer has served on the Board of the Maine College of Art and chaired the City of Portland's Public Art Committee. She is the founder of TEMPOart, a non-profit in Portland that brings temporary site-specific art installations to the city's public spaces.
In 2009, she received a statewide Award for Leadership in the Arts and, in 2018, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art.
