Art galleries, with their white walls and echoey open floors, have never struck me as hot spots for conversation, until I visited The Parsonage. Dr. Aaron Rosen and Rev. Carolyn Rosen have created a nonprofit gallery in the old carriage house of their home in Searsport, where they hope to inspire big-topic conversations, particularly around ecology, spirituality, and creativity. When it comes to things like climate change and religion, “everyone already knows what they think,” Dr. Rosen says over a cup of tea. “We need to have unbounded spaces where people discover things about their thoughts and feelings that they might not have known or admitted before.”
After 20 years away, Dr. Rosen, a writer and academic, returned to his Maine roots in 2020 when Carolyn was appointed Priest-in-Charge of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Ellsworth, Maine. They purchased the historic 1831 parsonage of abolitionist Rev. Stephen Thurston and Clara Thurston, the aunt of Winslow Homer. Homer even sketched cows in the barn. “Art and spirituality were already coded into the fabric of the house”—a perfect fit for their family and gallery dreams. The ecology aspect of their mission evolved as they grew to appreciate Maine’s vulnerability to environmental concerns like acidification and warming waters.
The creative range within these topics is impressive. For their first exhibit in the summer of 2022, artist Ian Trask suspended repurposed waste from the barn’s cathedral ceiling, evoking a solar system of trash. During the opening, children wove in and out, playing amongst the colorful orbs, suggesting creative value in society’s discarded objects. On the day of my visit, mildly haunting music underscored Michael Takeo Magruder’s “Sea Watch,” a new media installation reflecting on the Mediterranean migration crisis.
For spring 2023, artist and poet Summer J. Hart will unfurl gigantic paper cuts sourced from Millinocket’s defunct paper mills, exploring her family’s legacy in the logging industry. This summer, Brian Smith will install a giant kelp forest as a way of exploring queer ecology.
Painting, sketches, and masks spill from the gallery, mixing into the Rosens’ living spaces. Their son Arthur’s plastic dinosaurs and marbles look like an art installation beneath a collection of medieval manuscripts. Arthur is curious about the artists. “What artist is visiting today? Tell the artist that I love them.” For the Rosens, this is art as everyday life. ▪
