Maine Arts Commission Fellowship Recipients Announced

The Maine Arts Commission has announced the recipients of the 2011 Artists’ Fellowship Awards – one of the nation's highest awards for individual artists made by a state arts agency. The four recipients will each receive a $13,000 grant award and will be publicly honored during an awards showcase at 6:00pm on Friday, October 29, at the Gracie Theatre in Bangor. This event is free to attend and details can be found on MaineArts.com.

This year’s four Fellows are Theresa Secord from Waterville (Traditional Arts), Ethan Hayes-Chute from Freeport (Visual Arts), Elizabeth Kirschner from Kittery Point (Literary Arts), and Deborah Wing-Sproul from Cape Elizabeth (Performing/Media Arts).

Theresa Secord is a Penobscot basketmaker who began making baskets in the late ‘80s under the guidance of master Penobscot basketmaker Madeline Shay. Secord went on to help found the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, a native run cultural organization whose mission is to preserve traditional ash and sweetgrass basketry among all four tribes in Maine.

Visual Arts Fellow Ethan Hayes-Chute graduated with a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has received recognition through various fellowships and has exhibited his work extensively throughout North America and Europe.


Elizabeth Kirschner, the 2011 Literary Arts Fellow, has published five books of poetry, most recently, My Life as a Doll, brought out by Autumn House in 2008 and nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize. She taught at Boston College, at varying degrees, for seventeen years and has collaborated with many classical composers who have set her poetry to music for both national and international venues.

The 2011 Media and Performing Arts Fellow, Deborah Wing-Sproul, is the co-founder of Portland Film and Video Artists Collective and has taught at Parson‘s School of Design, SUNY New Paltz, Maine College of Art and the University of Maine at Orono. She is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in live performance and performance-based video.

For a comprehensive look at all of this year’s individual artist grantees, or for details of the awards night in Bangor, visit www.MaineArts.com.

Captioned Videos Available Through Maine.Gov

In order to make our programs fully accessible, the Maine Arts Commission provides fully captioned videos of our events through a partnership with Maine.gov. There are currently four captioned videos available on the Maine.gov website highlighting some of the Maine Arts Commissions programs; one of these videos can be viewed below.

Fellowship Showcase Highlights

In October 2009, the Maine Arts Commission presented its 21st Fellowship Showcase at the Strand Theatre in Rockland. This event, that highlights the quality of Maine's individual artists, featured performances and demonstrations from all of the 2010 Individual Arts Fellows and Traditional Arts Masters.

Reporting a Successful Fellowship Awards Event

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.

Old Grey Goose to Perform at Fellowship Showcase

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.

Meet the Maine Arts Commission's 2010 Traditional Arts Masters

The Maine Arts Commission today announced (in a press release)the 2010 Traditional Arts Masters. Greg Boardman, a fiddler from Auburn, Thomas Côté, an Acadian woodcarver from Limestone, Normand Gagnon, a Quebecois accordionist from Rumford, Susan Barrett Merrill, a weaver and spinner from Brooksville, and Paula Thorne, a Penobscot basketmaker from Exeter will each teach their traditional arts to apprentices during the next 12 months.

Every community has cultural traditions worth preserving. Many times those cultural traditions are preserved by someone in the community who has mastered and practices a traditional art. Each year the Maine Arts Commission offers stipends to master traditional artists who are willing to teach an apprentice over a period of 8 to 12 months. The apprenticeships have been used by basket makers, fiddle players, step dancers, ox yoke makers, snowshoe makers, and ballad singers, just to name a few. For their work teaching, the master artist receives a $4000 stipend which is funded through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Folk and Traditional Arts program.


This year’s Traditional Arts Masters will be on stage during a free night of entertainment at the Strand Theatre in Rockland on October 23. Here they will perform and demonstrate their art forms as part of the Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship Showcase. For information about this event, or any of the Maine Arts Commission’s Traditional Arts programs, visit www.MaineArts.com.

Meet Ryan Bennett, the 2010 Performing Arts Fellow

Ryan Bennett, from Pittsfield, is a filmmaker who was born and raised in Maine. He has been making films in and around central Maine since he was 15 years old, and graduated from Vancouver Film School’s 12-month film production program in 2005. He has just completed his first short film for competition, Ramblin’ Round; you can see a trailer for this below.

Ryan is thrilled to be chosen as the 2010 Performing Arts Fellow. “I am very proud to be from a state where the Arts Commission recognizes a motion picture, albeit short, as a piece of art. It is truly the greatest compliment a filmmaker can receive and for it to come from my home means more to me personally than I could ever hope to articulate."

Focused mainly on postproduction, Ryan has worked as a dailies colorist collaborating with some of the industry’s most talented cinematographers in Bojan Bazelli (The Ring, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and John Toll (Braveheart, It’s Complicated). He has also colored commercials for advertising agencies from BBDO to Crispin Porter.


Ryan is currently developing his first feature film, Ramblin’ Round, a feature version of the aforementioned short. When asked to explain his passion for filmmaking, Ryan was happy to explain, “Filmmaking is all the art forms rolled up into one, and due to this, the art of filmmaking is in many ways a catch-22 for artists. It’s the modern day art; it can demand more out of the individual artist than any other art form.”

Ryan’s movie short, Ramblin’ Round, will be shown as part of the awards showcase at the Strand Theatre on October 23. Ryan will also be on stage that night to provide insight into his work.

Meet Lee Sharkey, the 2010 Literary Arts Fellow

Lee Sharkey, the 2010 Literary Arts Fellow, has shares a common background with this year's Traditional Arts Fellow.

It was in 1974 when Lee Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type, and produced over the course of a Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Under the imprint South Solon Press, she printed two more chapbooks of her own poetry and portfolios of other poets’ work. Since then, she has continued to work as a writer and editor. Her publications include three full-length volumes: A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2008); To A Vanished World (Puckerbrush Press, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust; and farmwife (Puckerbrush Press, 1977).



In 2006, Lee received the Maryanne Hartman Award for her contributions to the arts and civic life in Maine. In 1997 she received the Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché. Since 2003 she has co-edited the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl writes of A Darker, Sweeter String that "If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they'd wake us up to the urgency of our times."

Meet Lauren Fensterstock, the 2010 Visual Arts Fellow

“I am both humbled and honored to receive this fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission. It is an incredible affirmation that means so much to me. This fellowship will help me to realize my dream of working on a larger, more significant and more confident scale. For the first time, I will be able to invest the time and purchase the materials necessary to bring my ideas into being in their fullest and uncompromised form."
- Lauren Fensterstock

Image above is from the Parterre installation at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Lauren Fensterstock is an artist and curator based in Portland, Maine. Her work has been featured broadly across the US including recent shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Kohler Art Center, Portland Museum of Art, DUMBO Art Center, Boston Center for the Arts, MASS Art Gallery, and Albany Airport. Lauren holds degrees from The Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997) and SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000). Outside the studio, Lauren is currently Interim Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. Recent freelance curatorial projects include AFI: Upside Down which will debut at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece in April 2009.




Lauren will be on stage with all of this year's fellows, and Traditional Arts Masters, at the Strand Theatre in Rockland on October 23. This event is free and open to the public.

Maine Arts Commission Fellows Announced

The Maine Arts Commission is proud to announce the recipients of the 2010 Artists’ Fellowship Awards – one of the nation's highest awards for individual artists made by a state arts agency. The four recipients will each receive a $13,000 grant award, and will be publicly honored during an awards showcase on Friday, October 23, at the Strand Theatre in Rockland.

This year’s four Fellows are David C. Wolfe from Portland (Traditional Arts), Lauren Fensterstock from Portland (Visual Arts), Lee Sharkey from Vienna (Literary Arts), and Ryan Bennett from Pittsfield (Performing Arts).

In the coming days we will take a closer look at all of this year's fellows, so stay tuned to this blog.

Grant Deadlines Approaching Rapidly

The Maine Arts Commission receives more applications for the June deadlines of the artists’ grants than for all of our other grant programs put together.
The $13,000 fellowship grants have a deadline for the Performing, Literary, Visual and Traditional Arts Fellowships of June 12. The Traditional Arts Apprenticeship program shares the same deadline.

To ensure a completely impartial review process the staff of the Maine Arts Commission is currently undergoing their annual task of preparing panelist reviews that consist of experts in the relative fields from outside of Maine. The agency is thankful for the many visitors to the state in the summer, including those in residency.

This year will be even busier than the last as we review grants for the Maine Arts Commission’s stimulus funding. The deadline for that grant is May 29.

Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship Awards

In November of 2008, the Maine Arts Commission presented a show celebrating 20 years of the agency’s fellowship awards.
Fellowship awardees Alison Chase, Don Roy, Penelope Schwartz Robinson and Randy Regier were the star attractions on stage.
Also appearing on stage before a full house in Bangor were traditional arts masters and apprentices. To read more about these artists or the Maine Arts Commission, visit www.MaineArts.com.