Writer’s introductory note: Time sequences have been stirred like a pot, full of friends. After a long lifetime, we are “on a first-name basis.” I don’t know what I would have done without these people. That’s a cliché, behind which lies ten thousand days of a life’s...

I had the great joy of attending Anina Porter Fuller's artists’ week on Great Spruce Head Island in Fairfield Porter's summer house. When I returned to Islesboro where I spend my summers, I was bereft because going to the retreat was a one-time deal. So I was...

Building Bridges Through Art and Social Action   “Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.” Grace Lee Boggs   What do the times require of us? This is a question I often use with my students, and I have established a daily...

Whether or not we are cognizant of our place in the teeming, streaming, tangled, living, swelling swampy mass of human evolution/history, we are it. It is us. Community exists. We impact and depend on each other. To thrive we need to learn from one another, our past...

Relational nests are social healing spaces that establish new relationships among living beings and places. Art can bring people together, outside of their realities, to participate in creating a narrative or relational experience. In the spring of 2021, I...

Community is not an inapt word for a group of environmentally-committed artists working together as Gulf of Maine EcoArts. Community describes a larger circle of organizations and individuals whose contributions are helping to realize EcoArts’ vision. And...

Community is something I never thought I was deserving of. I wanted it so bad that I joined places and people I thought were community, and it always ended in heartbreak because structures like white supremacy prevented cross-cultural communication and understanding....

Fostering Maine’s African Diasporic Community in the Arts: Indigo Arts Alliance   Indigo Arts Alliance was founded in 2018, launched in 2019, inspired from years of conversation between artist Daniel Minter and creative director, curator and business specialist...

Community-building is essential to the experience and mission of Running With Scissors Art Studios (RWS). The studios inhabit over 16,000 square feet in a muraled industrial building in the East Bayside neighborhood of Portland, Maine. RWS is a closed-door work space,...

Community as Place: Life-Changing Experience for Artists   When I was asked to write about the Great Spruce Head Island Art Week which I founded and have directed for nearly thirty years, I realized actually how important this event has been both for me and for...

Noisemakers, broccoli headdresses, a baptism, and papier-maché breasts = art and community. Add in some performance art, a pageant, and parade, a baguette with eighty candles—and you have Bern Porter’s eightieth-birthday party in downtown Belfast, Maine on 9...

This afternoon I decided to go for a walk to clear my mind. It’s the same route—a nearly three-mile loop starting in Deer Isle village—that I took during the early days of the pandemic. Just starting out on the road I have a visceral memory of those early spring days...

Growing up northwest of Boston, my first intellectual community was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and the circle of Transcendentalists and abolitionists and suffragists tied into the Concord landscape, so that every stone wall, every reed of grass, every...