Free Visiting Artist Lectures in Portland

Portland’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) and Maine College of Art will serve as venues for a free lecture series in April with a whole host of free events.

Those interested can begin with a lecture by Charles Simonds, who will be at ICA on Thursday, April 5 at 6:30 pm.

Charles Simonds has created an entirely imaginary civilization, which he calls Little People, complete with its own history, belief system, and way of life. The people themselves are never seen; we know them only through the architecture they leave behind. Like Native Americans, whose architecture their structures resemble, the Little People’s lives are centered around nature and the land. Their buildings are made of clay, which comes from the earth, and other natural elements such as twigs, bones, or sand.

In evoking a past time, Simonds guides viewers to think about the present. The structures of the Little People are not intended as an escape from reality, but to encourage us to think about our society today: what we create, what we destroy, what we value, what we believe, and what we will leave behind as our ruins.

On Saturday, April 7 at 6:00pm, Lisi Raskin will be at Osher Hall in the Maine College of Art.

In 2005 Lisi Raskin spent an entire month looking for nuclear submarines in Scotland. Since then she has traveled to the Arctic Circle, former East German Atomic bunkers, and through the American west while researching remnants of the Cold War. Raskin has exhibited her artwork internationally at institutions including the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, and the Blanton Museum of Art. Raskin has participated in the Athens, Istanbul, and Singapore Biennales and currently has a solo exhibition at Churner and Churner, in New York City.

This summer Lisi will have a major (mobile) installation as part of her solo exhibition for the ICA @ MECA.

For more details of these and other lectures, visit the Maine College of Art website today!

Amy Franceschini Will Speak at MECA Wednesday

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.

Artist Residency and Prominent Panel Discussion Presented by Tides Institute

A weeklong series of workshops and discussions is set to be hosted by the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport. Sue Clifford, co-founder of Common Ground in England, will be sharing information on “Parish Maps,” essentially community distinctiveness and identity maps, championing community identity.

Clifford will participate in panel discussions covering such topics as, Public Art and Sense of Place. Other panel participants include; Lucy Lippard, a critic and activist; Hamish Fulton, internationally known walking artist; and Ron Shuebrook, artist and arts educator.

This will be the first time the Parish Maps Project will have been brought to the United States. The Parish Maps Project is an innovative community building process which involves visualizing locally distinctive aspects of a place/town/city (or parish in England). The process has a wide following in England and Europe where it has impacted local and regional community planning. A Parish Map needn’t be cartographically correct and may illustrate emotive responses as well as physical features of the location. When a community identifies what is important to it, planning is considered from a different perspective.

Admission is free to the general public though reservations are recommended and can be made by contacting the Institute at (207) 853-4047 or by email: tides@tidesinstitute.org.

The public is invited to attend the free community workshops scheduled for:
• Lubec: Aug. 9, 2 pm at Lubec Memorial Library, 55 Water Street
• Calais: Aug. 10, 7 pm at the Holmestead, 527 Main Street
• St. Andrews, New Brunswick: Aug. 11, 7 pm at Kingsbrae Gardens, 220 King Street
• Pembroke: Aug. 12, 1 pm at Pembroke Elementary, Route 1
• Dennysville: Aug. 14, 7 pm at Lincoln Memorial Library, King Street

Public Art Lecture Series Video

Here is the latest from the Maine Arts Commission's video library that shows some highlights of this year's public art lecture series.

To create this video the agency worked with the wonderful people at Portland's Community Television Network. Community television centers are a wonderful resource for artists and arts organizations. The Maine Arts Commission is currently exploring this resource and will present our findings here on the blog.

You can see all of the Maine Arts Commission videos on YouTube.

Part Two of Public Art Lecture Series

Jean Shin makes art out of other people’s trash. The New York-based artist told a crowd at SPACE Gallery in Portland that she has also asked people for their sports trophies, dinner plates, lottery scratch cards, even the clothes off their backs. Shin’s talk, sponsored by Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance, was part of the Public Art Event Series celebrating 30 years of public art in Maine, funded by the Maine Arts Commission. Shin’s work involves the tactility of everyday objects that are often discarded or go unnoticed. She collects these elements, then deconstructs and repurposes them to offer a new perspective. For Celadon Remnants, a public art piece installed at the MTA station in Flushing, Queens, New York, she collected three tons of pottery shards from Korea (more trash), and created multiple mosaics that reflect the fragmentation and rejoining of Korean immigrants in the United States. About the public’s response, the artist said, “The conversation in the community really is the meaning of the piece for me.”
A 1999 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Shin currently has a one-woman show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.

Arts for Transit

It could be New Year’s Eve revelers, veins of a maple leaf, one hundred ravens on a fence or a stack of suitcases; these are all images incorporated into public art you might see while riding the subway in New York City.
Amy Hausmann, the assistant director of the MTA’s Arts for Transit Program, elaborated on these and many other works on Friday night to a good crowd at SPACE Gallery in Portland.
Hausmann’s lively talk was the inaugural event in the Maine Arts Commission’s Public Art Series that celebrates 30 years of the Percent for Art Program. Maine has been funding public art installations at most publicly-funded constructions for thirty years, a few years longer than either the MTA or the City of New York.
It was exciting to see all the possibilities that public art can offer. For more, don’t miss the next lecture, also brought to us by the Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance. Jean Shin, New York-based artist who was commissioned by the MTA for a work, Celadon Remnants, will be speaking Saturday, June 6, at 6 PM at SPACE Gallery.
And for even more, check out the rest of the series!
Photo:Cara Slifka

Join the Festivities as Maine Celebrates 30 Years of Public Art

In celebration of 30 years of Maine’s Percent for Art program, the Maine Arts Commission announces a series of free public art events that feature world renowned artists, such as Jean Shin, Swoon and Liz Lerman. This series, highlighting successful and innovative public art, will take place at venues throughout the state beginning May 29 in Portland and ending at the Juice Conference on the creative economy in Camden, November 13.

Full details of the entire series

Getting ready for 2009

Happy Holidays!
You might think things would wind down at the end of the year, but that is certainly not the case. The agency is getting ready to review grants for New Media, Visibility, Capacity and the SMART program. This means building 4 review committees of qualified professional and holding a meeting before the end of January. If the Winter holidays don't make conflicts the snow storms likely will.

A big project on the horizon is the 2009 Public Art Lecture Series and Sculpture Grant. The Lecture series has funded five Maine arts organizations to host speakers in the field of pubic art within the 2009 calendar year. Coinciding with that program is the Public Art Sculpture Grant which will fund public art sculpture projects between $1,000 and $20,000 dollars in 2009. Additional funding that would be applied to public art support may become available in 2009, growing the year long public art extravaganza even further, but we'll have to have it come through first.