The Penny Pool Gallery

The Penny Pool Gallery is a conceptual gallery space founded by Striped Canary (Stephen B. Nguyen and Wade Kavanaugh) and Bee Daniel. Inspired by the “leave a penny, take a penny” trays at cash registers, the gallery fosters a chain of artistic support. Artists share proceeds of their work, half as income and half to commission another artist of their choice. This creates a ripple effect of mutual admiration and economic impact. A Kindling Fund grant would seed this initiative, commissioning the first artist and tracking how each dollar multiplies within Maine’s artistic community. The Penny Pool Gallery seeks to highlight the multiplier effect of artists supporting artists, demonstrating the deep value they bring to their communities.

Artist bios

Stephen B. Nguyen (b. Little Falls, MN, 1976) and Wade Kavanaugh (b. Portland, ME, 1979) have collaborated since 2005, creating site-specific installations using paper and wood as their primary media. Their works have been exhibited in international galleries and museums, including Mass MoCA (US) and Museum Rijswijk (Holland). Their collaborations with dance companies have been showcased at prestigious venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Supported by grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Nancy Graves, and Ellis-Beauregard Foundations, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo, they have developed a significant body of work over nearly two decades. Their practice is site responsive, at times evoking layers of earth, an encroaching glacier, and uprooted forest, or the swell of the sea. While their work is sculptural and immersive, their process resembles the iterative nature of drawing. Three key threads have emerged from their practice: 1) Scale – creating a one-to-one relationship between the viewer and the space where the work is created; 2) Juxtaposition – inverting the natural and built environments to blur the lines between real and imagined space; 3) Play – embracing material experimentation to drive the conceptual development of their work. At the core of their practice is collaboration—with project partners, the communities they engage, and fundamentally, with each other.

Bee Daniel

Social media
Striped Canary (Stephen B. Nguyen and Wade Kavanaugh) | Instagram
Bee Daniel | Instagram