The Farnsworth Art Museum honored painter/printmaker Will Barnet as the recipient of the 2008 Maine in America award. The award honors an individual or group who has made an outstanding contribution to the understanding of Maine’s role in American art. Barnet is recognized as one of the world’s foremost artists in his genres and his work appears in more than 200 museum collections worldwide, including the Farnsworth, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim and Whitney museums in New York, the National Gallery, Corcoran Gallery and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Vatican Museum in Vatican City and the British Museum in London.

Previous winners of the award were John Wilmerding (2006) and Andrew Wyeth (2007).