Reception for Eric Stark: A Sabbatical Year Through Weaving in the Charles Danforth Gallery

Please join us January 29 at 4 p.m. to celebrate “Eric Stark: A Sabbatical Year Through Weaving” in the Charles Danforth Gallery. Professor Eric Stark is an artist and architect who has taught at UMA for 20 years, building UMA’s Architecture program into a five-year accredited degree that graduates design professionals each year who shape the physical and conceptual landscape of Maine and beyond. In the past decade, Professor Stark has become a highly skilled and sought-after basket weaver, bringing his profound understanding of design and structure together with making himself a student of a craft that, as the works in the gallery attest, marries tradition, function, history, concept, aesthetic, and ecology.

Teaching and learning are at the core of Professor Stark’s life and work as a design professional. During his 2024-25 sabbatical, he demonstrated his love of teaching by becoming a student, studying his chosen artistic medium, basketweaving, under a remarkable community of fellow maker-teachers.

Eric Stark: A Sabbatical Year Through Weaving is organized around the processes of teaching and learning, including the teachers who enriched his artistic practice during his year of studio practice and research. Three sections: Learning from Others; Learning from Making; and Learning from Materials offer insight into the ways Professor Stark’s practice of weaving evolved over his sabbatical through the revolutionary intellectual and creative practice of learning.