On Saturday, May 5th we will open the gallery and encourage you to go for a bike exploration and see what you find. Bring it back to SPACE and help contribute to the “blank canvas” that is our gallery exhibit. We will have free coffee from Matt’s and treats from One Fifty Ate for those who contribute. E-mail your photos to jenny@space538.org and we will print them in black and white and pin them to the wall (field recording style).

from the collection of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission

The following Saturday, May 12th from 11AM-2PM we host Betsy Sheintaub of Bobbin Studio and Bobolink, who will teach a bike tool bag workshop. We will provide all the tools you need to design, cut, stitch and take away a custom bag that can hang on your bike and use for whatever you like. Spots for this workshop are limited so reserve your ticket early here!

Later in the afternoon on the 12th, from 3:00-5:00PM we are excited to hear Sam Shupe, a Ph.D. student in the American Studies program at Boston University, talk about Maine’s bicycle history. Sam is a Portland native and daily cyclist who, for his undergraduate thesis at USM, studied turn of the century architect John Calvin Stevens and his love of bicycles. He will present visual ephemera, talk about bicycle club history and give other insights into cycling’s origins in Maine.

from the collection of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission

Pilar Nadal, an M.F.A. candidate at Maine College of Art, is working on a project called The Tired Press, which will debut in early May. The Tired Press is a bicycle that is outfitted with a small relief press, pannier cabinets for supplies, a gallery for exhibition of prints made on the press, as well as a volunteer post office service. This mobile printmaking studio, along with Pilar, will be situated at the Deering Oaks Farmer’s Market on Saturday, May 19th from 9AM-12PM and will be open for visitors to come and make a postcard for free! We hope you will visit Pilar, make some postcards and bring one back to SPACE to add to our exhibition.

Keep your eyes peeled for the Alley Cat Race on May 26th from 2:00-4:00PM, which invites *skilled* riders to race through the streets in a messy, fast paced scavenger hunt across town. Complete with check points, prizes and probably some whipped cream, this race is not for the faint of heart, but will provide a welcome sight for sore eyes. If you’re not up for the race, but still want to get in on the action, come to the after party at 8:00PM, where we will be giving out awards, dancing and debuting a bike themed beer from the newest local brewery, Bunker Brewing Co.

Local artist and designer Emily Walsh keeps herself busy interviewing artists for her blog, designing posters and making prints at Pickwick Independent Press, but was gracious enough to create this awesome image and identity for Bike Month. She will be printing a limited edition silkscreen of this image, which will be for sale at the gallery during May, so grab one while you can, they will go fast!

We hope to see you and your bike at SPACE and out in the streets soon.

For the fifth year, SPACE presents a series of films, talks and activities around food sustainability. Our goal is to think a little bit more about where our food comes from and how it gets to us — and perhaps to be inspired to try some projects at home. Here’s a roundup of what’s happening:

Thursday, April 19: Our friends at the Portland Food Co-op host an open house and screening of the film Locavore.
Friday, April 20: We partner with Maine Migrant Health to screen The Harvest / La Cosecha, examining the lives of child migrant farm workers.
Saturday, April 21: Our Saturday Grow Fair features a variety of activities such as seed-bomb making, gardening consultations, a class in home gardening technique, a class in kombucha making, and a few more surprises.
Saturday, April 21: Screening/talk with Daniel Klein from The Perennial Plate.
Sunday, April 22: Wake up the Farm at Cultivating Community’s Boyd Street Farm.

Ongoing: The Urban Farm Fermentory created a garden window installation, up through May 5.

Big thanks to the many sponsors who help make these programs possible: Bangor Savings Bank, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, Coffee By Design, Rosemont Market and Bakery, Boda, Local Sprouts Cooperative, Maple’s Organic, Peak Organic Brewing Company, Wild Iris Inn, Portland Food Co-op, Cultivating Community, Urban Farm Fermentory, and Maine Migrant Health.

Almost all of these pieces are animated in some way, check out this compilation of some of Mr. Zwanikken’s work from a few years ago.  Two shorts will accompany Convento: Lifelike, a film about a taxidermist at work, and The Meaning of Robots, about a maker of Robots in a tiny New York apartment.

I wanted to ask him a little more about Alan Lomax, in advance of a screening event that will take place here at SPACE on Saturday, April 7.

Nat May: What was your initial interest in Alan Lomax?

Nathan Salsburg: I grew up with folky parents: my dad sang me to sleep with “Railroad Bill” and “Goodnight Irene” and that sort of thing; I got deep into my mom’s Dave Van Ronk and Mississippi John Hurt records in high school. When I moved to NYC in 2000, I got a horrible lunch-time serving shift and wrote the Woody Guthrie Archive, then in Midtown, to see about volunteering. Did some cataloging of song lyrics for a couple afternoons when they told me the Alan Lomax Archive was hiring. I knew the name – knew his connection to Lead Belly and Woody and the Parchman prison recordings – but that was about it. I started working there in October 2000 and have been involved since.

NM: Guthrie was only a few years older than Lomax, did they work together or influence each other?

NS: They did – Alan first met Woody and saw him perform at a benefit concert for the Spanish Republicans in NYC. 1940, I think? He was totally blown away, both by his music and his synthesis of folksiness with deep artistic and political self-awareness. Lomax invited him down to the Library of Congress for a series of recording sessions of music and Woody’s “life story,” embellished as it often was. They became friends for the rest of Woody’s life, collaborating on the People’s Songs “movement” (such as it was) and its support of Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign, as well as other radical political undertakings that ultimately served to shoo Lomax out of the country for most the 1950s when the red-baiting got too hot for him.

NM: In a lot of ways, it seems like Lomax’s work recording and sharing really talented yet mostly unknown artists resonates well with SPACE’s mission to find emerging artists to share with our local community. What impact do you think his recordings had on the musicians?

NS: Lomax was devoted to the notion of “cultural equity,” which he defined as the universal right of people to maintain and promote their traditional means of expression, be it music, visual art, foodways, costume. He was horrified by the increasingly corporatized mass communication and centralized education systems, which were crushing (and, of course, continue to crush) local culture, language, and performance style. So he made a point, when making recordings, to play them back to the performers and their neighbors and kin; he called this “cultural feedback” and told several moving stories of how singers and players who had never heard their music recorded and broadcast, as it were, would realize in that playback that their traditions sounded as good as or better than that mass media delivered to them. There are a number of examples of Lomax’s work as a public folklorist – as a radio host, album curator, impresario, and television producer, among other roles; from Cajun Louisiana to rural Spain to the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica – reinvigorating local artistic communities.

Lomax often said that the problem with modern communication systems is that there are too many receivers and far too few transmitters, which holds more true today than ever, although the Internet goes a small distance in balancing the scales. It’s a thrill to see the comments come in on our YouTube videos edited from Alan’s “American Patchwork” footage; folks who have moved far from their native locales and traditions watch the videos and are filled with pride about who they are, and from whom and whence they came. Like this comment from a clip Lomax and his crew shot of a lining hymn from an Old Regular Baptist church in Mayking, Kentucky:

This is my papaw John Wright lining the song!!!!!! I have been to many of his services and there is nothin in the whole wide world like it!!!! It does my heart such good to see and hear him sing again and he looks so wonderful to me!!!!! Thank You GOD for being able to see him again till i join him!!!!!

Alan would have been overjoyed by this kind of “cultural feedback.”

NM: It’s interesting to think about how Lomax identified Cajun music communities in Louisiana, and Afro-Caribbean communities in Dominica, but these seem like pretty obvious geo-cultural groupings. How might he approach a place like southern Maine in our contemporary culture?

NS: Lomax was by no means a purist. He was deeply interested in cultural creolization – whether it be in New Orleans, South Philly, Tuscon, or Trinidad. He was a big fan of Michael Jackson and Prince, who he thought synthesized the very best of all the intermingling streams flowing into American music and culture. If he spent time in the region now I think he’d interested in exploring the cultural lives of the refugee communities – the Ethiopians in Portland, the Serbs in Biddeford – and perhaps that of the local Greeks, Italians, etc. This isn’t to say he was a fan of that kind of lowest-common-denominator musical “fusion” stuff, so if that’s going on around here (it certainly is in Louisville, where I live), he wouldn’t be rushing on his tape-recorder to document it, but I think he’d be genuinely interested in the ways in which (relative) newcomers to Maine reconcile their traditions with the dominant culture. And I don’t mean just the so-called traditional culture, all sea chanties and lobster, but the cultural complexities of the tourism industry and the really stark urban-rural divide in Maine. (Lomax did like the chanties, though.)

***
Nathan will be playing a house concert with local musician Matt Rock on Friday, March 30, and will screen selections from the American Patchwork Series at SPACE on Saturday, April 7 at 4:30pm

Recess, an artists’ workspace in Soho that’s  both a studio and exhibition space, had  a project by John Miserendino, who reinterpreted Dan Graham’s original plans for his architectural structures and staged a series of three reenactments inside his Pavilion to translate existing artworks into personal terms.

The Armory show at Pier 94 was too full and crowded to really engage with the artwork, but it was fun people watching and an affirmation that what we show at SPACE is competitive with what art buyers like. Also it seems that its popular to include some kind of mirror in your artwork these days.

The Whitney Biennial had a few gems, and my favorite was the screening room of films and videos by Michael Robinson. I really hoped that the audience would sing along during “Hold Me Now,” Robinson’s  sample of clips from “Little House on the Prairie,” overlaid with the karaoke version of the Thompson Twins’ hit. Say what you will about the biennial phenom–I think people’s expectations are always too high, and no American biennial ever seems to please anyone. If Facebook is any indication, the fake Biennial apology site got more love than the real show.

The Independent Art Fair had more of the kind of work we’d show here at SPACE than the Armory. But it, too, was crowded and cramped. The Moving Image Contemporary Video art fair was a tough visit, too. Imagine a cocktail party full of giant tv screens paired with headphones. But I was glad to see the installation of Martha Wilson’s I have become my own worst fear.

El Museo del Barrio had one of the best outsider art shows I’ve ever seen, called TESTIMONIOS: 100 Years of Popular Expression. I particularly liked the room of paño (handkerchief) drawings, painstakingly elaborated by Chicano inmates in Texas. Go see it before it closes on May 9th.

The Cindy Sherman show at MOMA was a good reminder of the importance of seeing photography printed large in its full majesty. Also while at MOMA, I got to see the final day of the Reanimation Library‘s interactive installation in the education building, where visitors were invited to peruse an odd assortment of books to scan, copy and repurpose into new artwork.

Over in Brooklyn I had great conversation with Jen Rosenblit about her ideas about dance and what happened during her recent residency at Bodega. We talked about the fact that most people don’t have adequate vocabularies for discussing dance and movement and that it’s frustrating to hear someone compare her work to painting or other visual mediums.

The highlight of my trip was an open studio tour of the residency program at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace location, in the financial district. In three short hours I was only able to see about 15 of the 25 studios, because of the great conversations I had with the artists. I was particularly interested in:

• Agathe de Baillencourt‘s text-based landscape drawings
• Bang Geul Han‘s video lexicography of NPR and FOX news
• Jessica Ann Peavy‘s improv-dual actress-narrative performance
• Valerie Hegarty‘s faux-destroyed fine art and furniture
• Amy Whitaker‘s musings on artist as businessperson
• Rob Carter‘s time-lapse videos of plants

I also checked out the New Museum Triennial The Ungovernables (confounding), The Dependent Art Fair (MFA hubris?), a new show at Primetime (all purple) and had a wonderful dinner chat with Yanira Castro, a choreographer with whom we hope to do a project in 2013.

More & Co. w/ Girl Walk All Day

Thanks to our pals at More & Co. for their photos from last night’s Girl Walk // All Day film screening dance party. Check it out: http://blog.alittlemorelikethis.com/?p=2778