49 Oak

About

*Be Our Valentine*
Pop-up by the Illustration Department, 2023
Photography by Annabelle Collette

49 Oak front windows with vinyl reading "Be our Valentine?" looking into a pop-up shop full of Valentine's Day cards. — *Be Our Valentine*
Pop-up by the Illustration Department, 2023
Photography by Annabelle Collette

As a flexible, experimental space, 49 Oak presents student work and hosts activities tied to classroom projects, from popup shops to exhibitions. Administered by Artists at Work with faculty support, students learn how to curate, install, promote, document, sell, and staff exhibitions. During summer months, programming focuses on work created by the College’s alumni network.

Current & Upcoming

Hauntology: Days of Future Past

October 30 - November 16, 2025

Opening reception November 7, 5-7pm

Hauntology: Days of Future Past is the exploration of third year BFA students in ceramics, metalsmithing, printmaking, textile and fashion, and woodworking and furniture at Maine College of Art & Design as they question societal recycling of past styles and aesthetics leading to a cultural flatness where the new is just a reconfiguration of the old. It also challenges us to recognize the ghosts of the past to confront stagnation and seek genuine progress and innovation for genuine creativity. The phrase "days of future past" asks us for the creation of a new future not predetermined.

The present is haunted by ghosts of the past and unfulfilled promises of the future. This perception of “lost futures” emerged from the writings of Mark Fisher in their 2006 essay Hauntology Now. Fisher writes “The ghosts are swarming at the moment. Hauntology has caught on. It's a zeitgeist.” Now on the cusp of 2026, emerging artists see the apparitions of aesthetic nostalgia everywhere in the cultural landscape.

Memory As Archive, Echo, and Evocation

October 3-22, 2025

Opening reception October 10, 5-7pm

Memory As Archive, Echo, and Evocation forms the thematic locus of this year’s annual third-year collaboration exhibition at Maine College of Art & Design. Developed from individual mind maps in which students articulated the formal and conceptual concerns of their practices, the theme reflects both a shared interest in memory and its multiple modalities of presence in art.

Memory, in this framework, operates as echo, a reverberation that lingers, shifting in tone and intensity as it is recalled or re-imagined. It is also an archive, a structure of preservation and classification, where fragments of the past are collected, ordered, and reinterpreted through artistic form. Finally, it is evocation, a calling forth of what is absent, forgotten, or ephemeral, granting visibility to that which resists documentation.

Through this lens, the collaborative works presented in Co-Lab investigate how memory is materialized, abstracted, and reconfigured in collective practice. Students engaged in negotiation and synthesis, weaving together their distinct approaches into works that activate memory not as a static record but as a living process. The resulting projects reflect the generative possibilities of collaboration, where individual voices resonate within a shared structure, amplifying the very echoes, archives, and evocations that underpin the exhibition.

Presented in conjunction with the Third Year Seminar course, Co-Lab situates collaboration as both a pedagogical strategy and an artistic methodology, foregrounding memory as a connective tissue between diverse practices and as a vital force within contemporary art discourse.