Thanks to the generosity of the sponsors of the 2009 Juice Conference, there are now a further 20 scholarships available to working artists and arts students who wish to attend this creative economy gathering in November.
These scholarships reduce the cost of attendance down to $85; that is less than half price! The last 12 scholarships that were offered were filled in a day, so we advise people considering this opportunity to take advantage of this offer while it lasts. To receive the special code you will need for this offer, please email Darrell Bulmer at darrell.bulmer@maine.gov. Another offer is being made by Bay Chamber Concerts who have a 20 percent discount for Juice attendees who also wish to attend the performance by Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Tickets will now cost $20 for this incredible performance.
The Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship Awards Event was a huge success on Friday. The audience of around 200 witnessed live music, movies, and demonstrations from our 2010 grant recipients. Among the audience was Bob Keyes from the Portland Press Herald, who wrote about the event during the show.
One of the artists that the audience got to meet at this year’s event was David Wolfe. David is this year’s Traditional Arts Fellow and a letterpress printer. We could not bring his machines on stage; not to be deterred we brought a movie of him working to the big screen at the Strand Theatre. For your enjoyment, the movie is below in two parts. We will be putting together highlights of the event that will feature soon on the blog.
The Maine Arts Commission is encouraging high school students around the state to take part in the fifth year of Poetry Out Loud. Teachers who would like to introduce this successful competition to their schools will join the thousands of teachers who have become inspired, had fun and surprising success “making poetry matter” for students!
Maine students have twice progressed to the final 12 at the national finals in Washington, D.C. With 250,000 students competing nationally each year, this is quite an accomplishment.
Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest is a great way to teach poetry and help students with written and oral communication skills. It is designed so that teachers may easily implement this “poetry bee” contest in the classroom. It awards more than $100,000 in prizes to students and schools at the state and national levels and satisfies most of the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) English Language Arts Standards.
Starting at the classroom level, teachers are provided with free multimedia curriculum materials—a poetry anthology, audio guide, Best Performances DVD; teachers’ guide, posters and a comprehensive website, http://www.poetryoutloud.org, all aligned to national standards—to augment their regular poetry curriculum with poetry recitation and a classroom-level competition. School-level recitation champions advance to the regional, state and then national levels. Each winner at the state level will receive $200 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington to compete for the national championship. The state winner’s school will receive a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books. The state runner-up will receive $100, with $200 for his or her school library. Additionally, a total of $50,000 in scholarships and school stipends will be awarded to the winners at the National Finals.
If you would like your high school students to participate in Maine’s competition and to receive the new 2009-2010 Poetry Out Loud Classroom Kit and Teacher’s Guide, please contact Paul Faria at the Maine Arts Commission, 207/287-2790, or paul.faria@maine.gov.
*We must have the registration form filled in and returned no later than December 18, 2009 in order to have your students participate in the state competitions!
Key dates in the timeline you will want to know (specific dates TBA very shortly): Ideally, you should schedule your school competition to take place before MLK Day in January.
September - December Maine Arts Commission mails program materials to schools December 18, 2009 Poetry Out Loud school registration deadline October – January Poetry Out Loud in the schools February 1, 2010 Last date to announce school winner! Early February 2010 Poetry Out Loud Regional Finals March 5, 2010 State of Maine finals, Waterville Opera House April 25 – 27, 2010 Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington, D.C.
National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman delivered a keynote address today to close the 2009 national Grantmakers in the Arts conference: Navigating the Art of Change.
In his remarks, Chairman Landesman laid out the guiding principle that will inform his work at the agency, which can be summed up in two words: “Art works.” Chairman Landesman explained that he means this in three ways:
1. “Art works” is a noun. They are the books, crafts, dances, designs, drawings, films, installations, music, musicals, paintings, plays, performances, poetry, textiles, and sculptures that are the creation of artists.
2. “Art works” is a verb. Art works on and within people to change and inspire them; it addresses the need people have to create, to imagine, to aspire to something more.
3. “Art works” is a declarative sentence: arts jobs are real jobs that are part of the real economy. Art workers pay taxes, and art contributes to economic growth, neighborhood revitalization, and the livability of American towns and cities.
Chairman Landesman announced that he will spend the next six months learning and highlighting the ways that art works in neighborhoods and towns across America. You can read the entire release on the NEA website.
The Maine Arts Commission currently has five Percent for Art competitions open to Maine artists. These five competitions offer a combined total of $147,500 to commission work for various sites around the state. For full details of these competitions, visit MaineArts.com and click on the links for each site. Please share these opportunities with your friends.
The organizers of Juice 2.0 are making a call for business plans after an anonymous donor has provided $30,000 to the conference. This anonymous donor asks that these funds be invested on behalf of Midcoast Magnet into innovative Maine businesses.
“One of the most exciting elements of the conference is the pitch session,” says Skip Bates, Board President of conference producer Midcoast Magnet and Vice President of Business Banking at conference sponsor Bangor Savings. “We are looking to introduce start-ups and businesses that are expanding to potential investors and banks. Not only will the conference be a great opportunity to network, we now actually have some money to put to work.”
Collaborating on the pitch session will be Jayme Okma Lee and John Burns of the Small Enterprise Growth Fund, who will organize the pitch session. SEGF has significant expertise in advising and investing in high growth companies. A $9 million ‘evergreen fund’, SEGF is a professionally managed venture capital fund that invests exclusively in Maine companies that demonstrate a potential for high growth and public benefit.
“Investing in Maine companies is essential to the growth of our economy,” says John Burns, SEGF Fund Manager. “For every dollar that SEGF invests, another $9 is invested alongside by individuals and other venture funds. We’ve helped to catalyze over $90 million in investments, creating jobs at an annual rate of 5% in our portfolio companies, compared to just 1% for the state’s economy overall.” “Successful entrepreneurship is rooted in collaboration, the free flow of information, and the availability of capital,” says Bates, “Our goal is to develop relationships between creative entrepreneurs and investors.”
Interested entrepreneurs should register for the conference and contact Skip Bates for more information. Business plans must be received by November 1st. Participants in the pitch session will have an opportunity to explain their business plan in a confidential setting. Reviewers will include Susan Snowden, Bangor Savings Bank; John Burns, SEGF; Mark Kaplan, CEI Ventures; and Michael Gurau, Clear Venture Partners. The top rated entrepreneurs will then receive an opportunity to pitch their ideas to an expanded audience of investment professionals. $25,000 investment will be invested in the winning business and two runners up will receive $2,500 each.
Amy Franceschini will speak at the Maine College of Art on Wednesday as part of the Maine Arts Commission's Public Art Lecture Series. This event is free and open to the public. The talk begins,in Osher Hall, at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, October 21.
Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists. In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Free Soil has exhibited internationally and received funding from the Danish Arts Council, and Zero One, San Jose to create temporary public art projects. Amy’s solo and collaborative work have been exhibited internationally at ZKM, Whitney Museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University and her MFA from Stanford University. Amy is a professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting artist at California College of the Arts Fine Arts Graduate program.
Full details of this talk and the entire series are available on MaineArts.com.
Old Grey Goose will be guest perfomers at the 2010 Artist Fellowship Award Showcase. Old Grey Goose, an American folk music and dance band hailing from Albion Maine, will take the stage on Friday, October 23rd 2009, during the 21st annual Artist Fellowship showcase (as seen in the press), starting at 6:30 PM at the Strand Theatre in Rockland. The members of Old Grey Goose are well known in the Maine Arts community, and world wide. Doug Prostik was a former traditional arts master, recognized by the Maine Arts Commission in 2007. Doug plays the fiddle, piano and accordion. Jeff “Smokey” McKeen, a former commission member of the Maine Arts Commission, helped to promote a more prevalent traditional arts community here in Maine. Jeff plays the accordion, guitar and “The Bones”. Carter Newell, an accomplished fiddle player and marine biologist, completes this trio of musicians. The aquaculturalist, Carter, spends his time, when not raising oysters, by playing downeast style with his Old Grey Goose compatriots. Old Grey Goose has enjoyed world wide notoriety, performing in Poland, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan among others. Their message is one of respect and harmony through the sharing of cultural music. The band will provide a sampling of the traditional American Folk music they love and have had the honor of sharing on a global scale. Ours will be the benefit of listening to such enthusiastically performed and meaningful music.
As part of the Maine Arts Commission's Public Art Lecture Series, internationally known street artist Swoon will be at Portland’s SPACE Gallery at 2:00 pm on Saturday, October 17 to discuss her public installations and interventions, from cut paper paste-ups to collaborative public events. She’ll discuss the importance of engaging artists and her audience in these projects, and the value of creating a culture of participation in art. Swoon has been covering the streets of New York with her signature cutouts for over six years. Often found in states of decay, her wheat-pasted figures “collaborate” with the street to create a time-based public artwork. In conjunction with her collective TOYSHOP, she has executed projects ranging from billboard alterations and poster campaigns, to street parties and sculptural installations. Her work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. SPACE will also host a collaborative gallery installation by Swoon and other members of her collective, October 15 – December, 2009.
The Maine Arts Commission is proud to announce that Liz Lerman, the founding artistic director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, will be doing double duty at the 2009 Juice Conference in Camden this November. She will be speaking on the morning of Saturday, November 14; the title of her speech is Dance as Dialogue, Crafting a Sense of Place. At 7:00 pm the same day, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange will be performing on stage at the Camden Opera House.
Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator, and speaker. Described by the Washington Post as “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,” her dance/theater works have been seen throughout the United States and abroad. Her aesthetic approach spans the range from abstract to personal to political, while her working process emphasizes research, translation between artistic media, and intensive collaboration with dancers and communities. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976, and has cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble, with dancers whose ages span five decades, into a leading force in contemporary dance.
The Juice conference will bring together 500 of Maine's most creative people to plot the future of Maine's economy. To find out more about this conference, or Liz Lerman visit the Juice blog.
As we look ahead to the November Juice Conference, it is worth looking back at some of the highlights from the 2007 conference. Here John Rohman (Maine Arts Commission Chair) highlights the impact that the creative economy had on downtown Bangor.
Young artists from schools across the state of Maine are heading to the Blaine House today, where they will meet Maine’s first lady and receive recognition for their participation in an art exhibition that has been on display throughout Maine’s capitol since June. Thirty Eight students from Palermo Consolidated School; Wiscasset High School; Boothbay Region High School; Readfield Elementary School; Waterville High School; Bangor’s Fruit Street School; and Danforth’s East Grand School will all be honored for their part in the Maine Youth Excellence in Art program. These young artists, who have brightened Maine’s corridors of power in recent months, will receive certificates of excellence and medallions from First Lady Karen Baldacci honoring their achievement.
This is an ongoing exhibit and the next group of works will be put on display at the end of October, 2009. Art teachers of all grade levels are welcome to submit student art for this exhibition. For more information, including more detailed guidelines and schedule for exhibitions visit www.mainearts.com, or contact Paul Faria at the Maine Arts Commission, 207/287-2790, paul.faria@maine.gov.
Images: MYEIA Group: First Lady, Karen Baldacci, honors young art students at the Blaine House. Hannah Peacock: Hannah is all smiles after meeting with Maine’s First Lady, Hannah is from Burnham Village School Student work currently on exhibit features,Nicole Tibbetts, Portraits, Study of Dark & Light, Grade 11, Teacher: Manon Lewis, Boothbay Region High School. Maya DeGroote, Hands of Peace, Grade 10, Teacher: Manon Lewis, Boothbay Region High School
Another offer is being made by Bay Chamber Concerts who have a 20 percent discount for Juice attendees who also wish to attend the performance by Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Tickets will now cost $20 for this incredible performance.
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