The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly is pleased to be partnering with the statewide initiative Freedom & Captivity to explore alternatives to incarceration. We are humbled by the hard work, vision, passion, and heart of those who are making this initiative happen, and are grateful and honored to play a part.
Artists (both free and captive) can play an important part in re-imagining a future without prisons and jails, as well as a vital role in bringing awareness to the issue, promoting understanding and empathy towards those incarcerated and their families, and offering creative solutions to build a more racially and economically just society.
The first nine articles in the MAJ were created for the Freedom & Captivity project by eight of the thirteen partnering sites: Emery Arts Center, First Amendment Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA+D, SPACE, UMVA Gallery, UNE Art Gallery, and the digital Art on Abolition exhibition. They are introduced in the first essay by Catherine Besteman, Coordinator of Freedom & Captivity.
Elsewhere in the Journal you will find poetry by Maya Williams and Robert Gibbons, a book review by Carl Little, an essay by Stu Kestenbaum, and Union of Maine Visual Artists updates on the Portland chapter, Maine Masters, LumenARRT!, and an essay by Pat and Tony Owens reflecting on UMVA history.
—From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Mads McDonough and Caroline Scarola.
Catherine Besteman – Freedom & Captivity
How do you change the conversation in Maine about incarceration? And what is the role of art and the humanities in that conversation? Freedom & Captivity is a Maine-based initiative during fall 2021 founded to address these two questions, conceived with the...
Geneviève Beaudoin and Catherine Besteman – Freedom & Captivity: Art on Abolition, a digital exhibition
What does abolition look like, sound like, feel like? Freedom & Captivity: Art on Abolition attempts to capture the sensorial qualities of abolitionist feelings, yearnings, visions, and imaginings. If we take abolition to mean liberation, thoughtful and reparative...
Kelsey Halliday Johnson – What Rhymes with Freedom?: Visions of Decarceration at SPACE
By pushing the paradigms of art into uncharted territories, a diverse group of contemporary artists has been directly addressing a call for freedom from the carceral state. Their broad calls for abolitionist change and values span immigrant “detention centers,”...
Hilary Irons – Home Fires
HOME FIRES Freedom & Captivity 22 October 2021–23 January 2022 University of New England Art Gallery, Portland, ME Curated by Hilary Irons Home is the basic concept that has been taken away from those experiencing incarceration. Home, and the chance to connect...
TUG Collective: Gaelyn and Gustavo Aguilar – sea/sky, blood, earth, you
In collaboration with the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, the Maine Coastal Regional Reentry Center, Artivism in Maine, Restorative Art Works, and Helping Incarcerated Individuals Transition At the Emery Community Arts Center in Farmington TUG works rhizomatically,...
Julie Poitras Santos – Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic
Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design 1 October–10 December 2021 Surveillance has become an inescapable part of daily life. Our phones record our every movement, call, and contact; cameras record our passage along the street; online sites...
Deborah Williams – First Freedoms in Captivity (at the First Amendment Museum)
Is there any right more essential than our ability to imagine a better world? The First Amendment to the United States Constitution—which protects our freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition—gives us the blueprint to do just that. These five...
Freedom & Captivity: Prison Art Kits from Waterville Creates
In mid-March of 2020, Waterville Creates—like countless other arts organizations across the country—closed its doors and suspended its in-person programming due to COVID-19. We were still deeply committed to providing accessible arts experiences for our community...
Olivia Hochstadt and Jan Collins – Artmaking in Maine State Prison: “They can take our bodies but not our minds”
Disclaimer: Per Maine Department of Corrections policy, residents will be addressed by their first names only. How do you escape restrictive walls when you are incarcerated? Individuals living at Maine correctional facilities have found that creating art allows their...
Edgar Allen Beem – Freedom & Captivity: The Art of the Incarcerated
In what may be the most ambitious statewide art initiative in years, the prison reform group Freedom & Captivity is mounting fourteen actual and virtual exhibitions related to the experiences of inmates in Maine past and present. The exhibition that first caught...
Véronique Plesch – Graffiti: Captivity and Freedom
At the core of Philip Kaufman’s 2000 movie Quills is a metaphor for the unquenchable drive to write. Based on the 1995 play by Doug Wright (who also wrote the screenplay), most of the movie is set at the Charenton insane asylum during the last months of the Marquis de...
Veronica Cross – Sheldon Scott’s Ruminations on Blackness in Capital, Captivity, and Catharsis: Portrait, number 1 man (day clean ta sun down), 2018
Space and time collapse as artist Sheldon Scott revisits his enslaved ancestor’s trauma of labor in his video Portrait, number 1 man (day clean ta sun down), 2018. Rock singer-songwriter and composer Tamar-kali scores the video’s evocative soundtrack and filmmaker and...
Jeane Cohen – Freedom & Captivity
A question at the heart of the matter, posed by an educator and program manager who worked at both the Yale and Bard Prison Initiatives, has lingered with me long after we had coffee. It was just before my first and only semester teaching college-credit Art...
Norajean Ferris – Abolition: Rendered Through the Practice of Art
Throughout the history of America, the systemic practice of discrimination toward people of color has been one of the dominating issues of our country’s politics. Due to the fact, our nation...
ARRT! Fall 2021 Update
We are sharing a slide show of images that address issues of Freedom and Captivity in different ways. As a project of the UMVA, ARRT! creates images for progressive non-profits throughout the state. ARRT! provides a visual voice for groups that need assistance getting...
Artists’ Showcase: Judy Glickman Lauder, Natasha Mayers, and John Ripton
Judy Glickman Lauder "Arbeit macht frei" were the words placed on the gates of many forced labor and extermination camps during the Holocaust. These words meant “work makes one free,” but the horrific intention of these camps was the total annihilation of the Jewish...
Artists’ Showcase: Susanne Slavick, Mildred Bachrach, and Leslie Woods
Susanne Slavick Demands for walls loom large in many nations today. Greece just completed a wall against migrants entering through Turkey. Walls and fences also interrupt our southern border, initiated and halted depending on who is president. A solid wall has loomed...
Artists’ Showcase: Kenny Cole, Andrew Ellis Johnson, and Mary Becker Weiss
Kenny Cole My “Prisoner” series really began as a subset of a general series of works that explores men or people in suits, uniforms, or costumes. Additionally, I’ve explored animals of “black & white” coloration, like killer whales, skunks, and penguins. All of...
Maya Williams – Poetry
In "'Commit' in Relation to Suicide on Trial," Maya Williams, Portland’s new Poet Laureate, in a sense puts suicide on trial—not the person who might be so distressed and troubled, but the act itself or some of the thought processes involved, as if they could be tried...
Robert Gibbons – Poetry
In the following poem, Robert Gibbons not only looks at David Driskell’s painting, he also thinks about it, draws on a deeper knowledge of the artist’s work and thought, and his own experience of confronting the challenge of American history and distortion. Robert...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Choosing Words
If I stand in front of the small dock and face Little Spencer Mountain, I can get a weak cell signal—just enough to text or make a phone call. Anywhere else on the shore of Spencer Pond, my phone is searching, or better yet, it’s turned off. I like it that way. I’ve...
Carl Little – “In accord with my heartsong”: Reading Stephen Petroff
Stephen Petroff’s marvelously titled new collection of writings, Philosophosphorescence (Red Tea Books, 2021, 234 pp., paper), kicks off with a few pages of testimonials. Poet Gary Lawless, paying tribute to Petroff, offers this line from his friend: “When we are...
Maine Masters Fall 2021 Update
The Maine Masters project has delighted audiences everywhere for 20 years, celebrating the art and lives of Maine artists through film. This year the creativity and visibility abounds with multiple films and many events. A UMVA project, we support Maine Masters and...
LumenARRT! Fall 2021 Update
LumenARRT! is a project of the Artists' Rapid Response Team (ARRT!). We work through the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), a members’ organization that advocates for artists and furthers the work of progressive non-profits in the state of Maine. Our video...
Tony and Pat Owen – From the Archives Or . . . The Box Inside My Head
At times I sit and struggle with the routine. The day-to-day. How to get along in the pandemic and still stay in touch with what I remember as normal. I have silent rituals that I perform. These rituals go unnoticed; they have no load-bearing functions on life itself....
UMVA Portland Chapter Fall 2021 Update
The members' Open Show in June was a significant success. It had a few hundred visitors, as did most of UMVA Gallery's online shows. Amy Bellezza organized and curated the exhibition. The July show, organized and curated by David Estey and Greg Burns, exhibited work...
Theme and Invitation for Winter 2022: Interview — Inner View
Here's your chance to interview a Maine visual artist and ask the questions you've been dying to ask, or you may do an "inner view" and interview yourself, answering the questions you've always wanted and/or the ones you have avoided asking yourself. Please submit a...