Inspired by nature: Liberty Graphics’ blend of art and ecology fits Maine to a tee
Liberty Graphics Outlet Store in Liberty is the place to find one-of-a-kind bargains. The company also has shops in Portland, Freeport and Camden.
By Amy Paradysz
Courtesy photos
THE WALDO COUNTY small town of Liberty was celebrating its 150-year anniversary in 1977 when local resident Tom Opper decided to print celebratory T-shirts. Mustard yellow, with green ink proclaiming, “150 years of Liberty … and still going strong,” they would have been nothing special—except for what happened next.
Opper and his girlfriend back then—artist Beverly Kocenko— had some creative friends, who started gathering in Opper’s kitchen on Thursday nights to sketch shirt designs. The couple began printing shirts by hand in a trailer on the property where Liberty Graphics Co. still operates a half-century later in a town of fewer of a thousand people.
Insects We Trust, a design created for anyone eager to learn about the fascinating world of bugs, was designed by Liberty Graphics co-founder Beverly Kocenko in 1994.
At the heart of the Liberty Graphics’ online catalog is a design emphasis on the natural world, with hundreds of designs of amphibians and reptiles, birds, celestial bodies, dinosaurs, fish, flowers and plants, insects, mammals, marine life and pollinators. Whatever says “Maine” to you—lobster, puffins, lupines, moose, strawberries, Hearts of Pine, blackfly jokes— they’ve got a shirt for that. And a Blueberries for Sal onesie, too.
“We’ve always tried to start with good art,” says Erik Perkins, who joined the company when he was in high school in the early ’90s and has been “a permanent fixture” since the early 2000s. “We pay royalties to our artists, many of whom are local—real people making real art. There’s a nostalgia for the Maine of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, and a lot of our most popular designs are ones we’ve brought back. But we’re always adding new artists and new designs, too. The colors are bright because of our color separation process. We custom-mix ink for each color in the shirt design to better replicate the art.”
Liberty Graphics’ artist roster is a who’s who in Maine illustration, including Robert McCloskey, Dahlov Ipcar, Chris Van Dusen, Holly Berry, Jada Fitch, Milton Christenson, Ieva Tatarsky and Matt Patterson, among others. You may not be familiar with the name Mark McCollough, but you know his work—he drew the chickadee and loons on Maine license plates.
For decades, Liberty Graphics has been printing the Common Ground Country Fair T-shirts, with up to 20,000 of each year’s design. And because the fair is the signature event of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), when they were looking for a T-shirt supplier, only organic shirts will do. Liberty Graphics—which was also one of the first printers to use water-based inks—was the perfect fit. For years, fairgoers would rummage through a Liberty Graphics seconds bin for fun finds like shirts printed on both sides. But today you’ll have to go to the outlet store on Main Street in Liberty and dig through their 15 to 20 bins for one-of-a-kind wonders. Sometimes they end up on eBay.
“Mushrooms” by Ieva Tatarsky. Originally printed in 1993, it was out of print for many years until 2017 and is now a best seller.
“Seaweeds” by Downeast illustrator Jada Fitch.
The ’90s-era design “Wild Maine Blueberries” by Ieva Tatarsky is still going strong.
Although Opper stays connected with the company he founded, he sold it to the Liberty Graphics Employee Cooperative in 2021. More than half of the forty-something employees are “owners.”
“We have a voice in how the company is run,” says Perkins, who serves as board president. “We have ambitious goals—that everyone makes a living wage, that we support local artists, and that we preserve and protect the environment. We also have a philanthropic commitment, giving products, services and thousands of dollars annually, mostly to environmental causes.”
The company’s philanthropic commitment—and printing and shipping capacity—were all put to the test last fall. Sales representative Olivia Walker was scrolling through Instagram on a Saturday morning when she saw a promotional clip for Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl. What the pop star was wearing—a T-shirt with an illustration of two otters floating on their backs—made Walker’s heart skip a beat.
“We have past prints hung up around the building, and I knew I’d seen that shirt before,” Walker says. “The biggest pop star of our generation was wearing a Liberty Graphics shirt.”
The design was for a vintage Monterey Bay Aquarium otter conservation T-shirt that hadn’t been printed in roughly 32 years. It was part of the catalog that Liberty Graphics acquired from Harborside Graphics in the late 1990s when that Belfast-based screen printing company went out of business.
Liberty Graphics didn’t even know who had drawn those adorable otters. What they did know was that demand for the shirt was high—like nothing they’d ever seen. The number of people contacting the aquarium to ask about the shirt within a day of The Life of a Showgirl release was estimated to be in the thousands.
After Taylor Swift wore a ’90s-era T-shirt designed by Liberty Graphics, there was swift demand (pun intended) for 18,000 of them.
During that first week after Swift’s October 4, 2025 promotional post, Liberty Graphics identified the artist—Chris Van Dusen, the Camden-based author/illustrator of The Circus Ship and other children’s books—and negotiated agreements with both him and aquarium.
Inspired by Swift’s favorite number, 13, the aquarium launched a campaign to raise $1.3 million for its otter conservation program. Anyone who donated $65.13 to the aquarium’s program to help injured and orphan otters would receive a shirt. Liberty Graphics committed to print and ship 6,000 sea otter tees.
But the mood at Liberty Graphics turned from excitement to apprehension the day the aquarium promotion launched, as the print shop watched the number of sea otter orders skyrocket to six times their 6,000-shirt commitment before the aquarium capped online sales.
“We had two months when every week we had a day or two dedicated to just printing sea otter shirts,” said social media director Matt Enos. “We checked with the local post office here in Liberty to see if they could handle this many packages, or if they wanted us to go to a larger facility, and they were up to the challenge.”
Taylor Swift, who has an estimated 280 million followers on social media, wore a vintage tee on camera. No one seems to know where Taylor got a shirt that was printed before she enrolled in kindergarten, though her partner Travis Kelce talked about his love for sea otter videos in an interview with TMZ in August 2025. Regardless, the “Taylor Swift effect” was such that the Monterey Bay Aquarium raised $2.3 million to care for injured and orphaned sea otters, Van Dusen got an unexpected windfall, and the little Liberty post office has a whopping tale to tell.
Liberty Graphics got more than a passing surge in work: They also got national exposure and new customers interested in a lot more than otters. “The online store ticked up tremendously,” McCormac says. “Like, we heard from a woman in Texas who was part of the aquarium fundraiser and loves our shark shirts.”
Here in Maine, though, we’ve known and loved Liberty Graphics long before Taylor came along.
