Last summer, Anne Buckwalter visited the house where Emily Dickinson once lived in Massachusetts. In a parlor, she studied a painting of the Dickinson children above an ornate fireplace.

She asked herself: “If I were living in this space, who would I want to hang over my fireplace?”

The answer is now on the wall at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. Buckwalter painted an ornate living room similar to the one she visited at the famous poet’s home. But above the fireplace is a portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, a prominent figure in the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Buckwalter’s paintings are full of these little Easter eggs. She uses domestic spaces to explore femininity and sexuality, and the scenes she paints are both everyday and erotic. She developed this body of work in part by visiting the historic homesteads of women who lived in New England in the 19th century, including Dickinson. She then transposed those period details with the fixtures of her own life in the 21st century.

“The house as a framework takes center stage,” said Jaime DeSimone, chief curator at the Farnsworth. “Then there are all these layers of interpretation in subject matter. As you pause and peel back the layers, there’s this slow reveal, should you see it, of Anne’s deep curiosities of gender and sexuality and erotica and public and private space and women’s rights.”

The show, called “Manors,” is on view through Sept. 21. It is also the artist’s first solo exhibit in a museum — a significant step in her career. Last year, the Farnsworth launched a project called Momentum, meant to create opportunities for the next generation of Maine artists.

Buckwalter, who is 37 and lives in Durham, is the second artist selected for Momentum. The first was Emilie Stark-Menneg, a Harpswell painter who showed her fantastical and vibrant work at the Farnsworth last year.

“It has created so much potent energy amongst this beautiful community that the artists in Maine are seen, that they are given this platform, that they’re valued,” Stark-Menneg said. “I feel like it will continue to inspire people in the sense of institutions and artists working closely together to show a range of beautiful, experimental, new art.”

‘A SAFE SPACE’

In 1944, when the Farnsworth was still a young institution, the museum became one of the first to acquire paintings by then-27-year-old Andrew Wyeth. In 1951, the Farnsworth hosted his first museum show in Maine. In 1968, Jamie Wyeth has his own first solo exhibition there.

“There was this ingrained DNA in our archives and exhibition history of artists having solo shows here,” DeSimone said. “We wanted to revive that and inject energy and opportunity into the program.”

The Momentum exhibition stretches through multiple seasons. The museum also pays an honorarium to the artist, produces a catalogue of the show and buys a piece for its collection.

“We want that to be unforgettable, to set the standard for how they’re treated in the art world,” DeSimone said.

Stark-Menneg, 40, said Momentum gave her important firsts — a catalogue, a research trip with a museum. She told DeSimone that she felt inspired by the Unicorn Tapestries, a series of tapestries that date to the late Middle Ages, so DeSimone arranged a visit to the tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. During the trip, DeSimone also took her to see live music that incorporated perfumes during the show. Both experiences shaped the exhibition, which was titled “Thread of Her Scent.”

The artist described her experience at the Farnsworth as “life-changing.”

“They have created a safe space for the artist to really discover something new,” Stark-Menneg said.

MAKING ROOM

Buckwalter grew up in a conservative community in central Pennsylvania.

“Sex and the body were not talked about easily when I was a kid, when I was growing up,” she said. “I grew up with a fair amount of shame and secrecy around those topics. So I’m really interested in using my work to normalize them and desensationalize them.”

She paints scenes that are orderly and even a little old-fashioned. The settings are bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms that could be in any home. But a closer look reveals a scavenger hunt of sorts. Did you find the furry handcuffs on the quilt? How about the tampon in the trashcan?

“In the compositions that I make in these imagined rooms, I’m inviting things that don’t necessarily feel like they go together to live together,” she said. “For me, that’s very much about the fact that we as people are conditioned into lots of different ways of dichotomous thinking, or thinking in terms of binaries. How can we enable more room for gray areas, for things to be complicated and messy?”

DeSimone described the paintings as meticulous and maximalist, with clean lines and colorful patterns. Buckwalter sometimes includes figures, often self-portraits, but they are glimpsed through a window or a doorway or a computer screen. The curator said the work is a thoughtful way to introduce ideas about femininity, queerness and identity.

“Anne and I have had many conversations about sex and the act of painting sex, and what does that mean?” DeSimone said. “There’s often a stigma about the fact that society doesn’t talk about it, and why don’t we? And so how can we use art as a way to make it accessible or comfortable?”

A PILGRIMAGE

To make the imagined rooms in this show, Buckwalter visited real ones.

The museum collection includes the Farnsworth Homestead — the 1850 Greek Revival home where Lucy Copeland Farnsworth lived until she died in 1935 at age 96. In her will, she left $1.3 million for a library and art museum in memory of her father. She also directed that her family home would be open to the public as part of the museum campus in Rockland.

Buckwalter had taken a virtual tour of the house on the Farnsworth website. The Victorian interiors interested her, as did the fact that Farnsworth owned the home at a time when few women had property. She ultimately visited the homestead in person, and then traveled to four more across Maine and Massachusetts.

One was the Emily Dickinson Museum. In Maine, she visited to Farmington for the family home of famous opera singer Lillian Nordica and to Newcastle for the homestead of Frances Perkins, a chief architect of Social Security and other programs that helped transform the country during the Great Depression. She also traveled to the Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick. Steepletop, where writer Edna St. Vincent Millay lived in New York, was closed for renovation at the time, but an archivist shared images of the interior.

On her visits, Buckwalter felt drawn to objects that have sentimental or romantic stories. Jewett, a novelist and short story writer, lived for years with another woman, and their love letters are part of the collection in South Berwick. A tour guide brought Buckwalter to the library at the Dickinson House where the poet would spend time with her sister-in-law, whom some scholars believe was also her lover.

Still, the paintings are not direct representations of these homes. Instead, the aesthetic details are sprinkled throughout the scenes she created.

“It was less about the details of the biographies of these women,” Buckwalter said. “It was more about the act of pilgrimage, of going to these homes and paying visitation and communing with them through the spaces that they lived in and decorated and inhabited.”

In “Guest Bedroom,” the bedroom has a fireplace, a rocking chair, a vintage tea cup and old-fashioned floral wallpaper. But the scene also contains a pair of Crocs, an iPhone, a jar of peanut butter and a T-shirt with a slogan in support of abortion rights.

“There’s this play between past and present going on, a lot of conversations that are very timely and in our political space,” DeSimone said.

AN INVITATION

Buckwalter has also infused the exhibition with a touch of her own space. She got her MFA at Maine College of Art and Design in 2012, and has lived in Portland and Philadelphia since then. She and her partner most recently moved back to Maine two years ago, and bought a house in Durham last summer.

The artist works there, but the walls themselves have also become her canvas. DeSimone noticed the hand-painted patterns during a studio visit.

“I showed her since moving into this home, I’ve been playing around with muraling the walls with wallpaper patterns,” Buckwalter said. “We looked at those together and started churning out some ideas.”

So Buckwalter has also created designs for two walls of the gallery, executed with the help of Portland muralist Ryan Adams.

“That is an invitation and an experience for the view to almost live inside one of these domestic interiors,” DeSimone said. “We’re entering into her world in many ways.”

Come in, they say, and make yourself at home.

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IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Anne Buckwalter: Manors”

WHERE: Farnsworth Art Museum, 16 Museum Street, Rockland

WHEN: Through Sept. 21

HOURS: Right now, the museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Hours will change May 26. The Farnsworth Homestead is currently closed for the season.

HOW MUCH: Admission is $20 for adults, $18 for seniors and $10 for students 17 and older. Members, Rockland residents and children under 16 get in free.

INFO: For more information, visit farnsworthmuseum.org or call 207-596-6457.

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