SPACE is honored to award 11 Project Grants and 1 Research and Development Grant in this year’s cycle of the Kindling Fund, totaling $65,000 in grantmaking! Grantees were juried from a pool of 60 submissions to the Kindling Fund.
The 2026 grantees are:
Amelia MacDougall Fleming (Lincoln), Christian Adame with Cut & Paste ME (Portland/statewide), Edward J Gibbs & Open Systems Studios (Portland), Ian Ellis (Portland/Rockland), James Parker Foley (Portland), Janoah Bailin & Collaborators (Portland/Biddeford), Jo Ophardt (Portland/statewide collaborations), Katie Irwin & Treehouse Film Collective (Portland), Maya Tihtiyas Attean (Hollis/statewide), Shane Charles (Kennebunkport), Tayler Shepherd (Saco), Virginia Lopez-Anido (The coasts of Downeast Maine and the Greater Portland-area).
The Kindling Fund is administered by SPACE Gallery as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. The Kindling Fund supports inventive, artist-organized initiatives that engage the public and the visual arts in new and meaningful ways. This year’s supported projects highlight a range of work amplifying creative community-building, maritime explorations and ecological futures, interdisciplinary thinking, craft-based approaches, queer perspectives, and participatory practice.
The Kindling Fund jury is composed of three individuals — one from the greater Warhol Regranting Program, one past grantee local to Maine, and one art leader who may have opportunity for artists in Maine further afield. This year’s Kindling Fund jury was composed of Grace Whatley (Assemblage Art Fund, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art), Jasper Sanchez (Boston Public Art Triennial, Collective Futures Fund advisory board), and Laura Zorch McDermit (TEMPOArt)
The 2026 Kindling Fund Grantees
Common Thread Hook-Ins
Grantee: Amelia MacDougall Fleming
Common Thread Hook-Ins are a series of free, public rug hooking gatherings designed to make a traditional (and traditionally working-class) art form accessible, social, and intergenerational. Through these series of hook-ins, community members will help create a large collaborative rug depicting the coastal landscape of the St. George peninsula. Rug hooking has deep roots in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, and Common Thread Hook-Ins create a space where anyone from children to older adults, and beginners to artisans, can sit together, share cultural knowledge, and contribute to a shared community piece.
Across Collage with cut + paste maine
Grantee: Christian Adame with cut & paste me
Additional Collaborators: Beatrix Chan, Hayley Farrago, Lorna Stephens
Portland-based collage collective cut + paste maine will expand their monthly collage events with three free gatherings in collaboration with artists, makers, and creatives across different art forms. These events envision new possibilities of collage itself, reassembling and juxtaposing across the culinary arts, textile and fiber arts, and drag performance. Driven by the power of the analog experience, of reimagining simple materials, and fostering community making, these events invite makers throughout the region to see what happens when the medium of collage reimagines conversations that celebrate and connect our region’s diverse voices.
Open Systems Residency: Huichun Yang – Spatial Sound, Handmade Instruments, Collaborative Performance
Grantee: Edward J Gibbs with Open Systems Studios
Additional Collaborators: John Fireman, Grace Bedwell, Zane Kanevky, Sam Seda
Open Systems Studios will host Taiwanese sound artist Huichun Yang for a two week residency in Portland, Maine. Yang works at the intersection of spatial sound, hand-built wooden instruments that become sculptural objects, creative coding, and performance art. During her residency, she will create new work in our quadraphonic performance space, teach workshops on handmade instrument building, and present multiple public multichannel performances, both solo and collaborating with other local artists.
Holdfast!: A Seaweed Exhibition
Grantee: Ian Ellis
Additional Collaborator: Celeste Roberge (co-curator)
Holdfast!: A Seaweed Art Exhibition will be an innovative group show taking place in late summer 2026 in a warehouse space on the working waterfront of Rockland. Maine. It features a diverse group of at least twenty artists stretching from York to Eastport whose work will showcase seaweed as an experimental, sustainable, and unique material and subject matter that resonates with current environmental concerns in Maine. It will engage its audience with challenging visuals and installations, as well as offer insight through its programming into the Maine seaweed industry and the ecological health of these vital species from the perspective of educators, harvesters, aquaculturists and the scientific research community.
Ultraviolet Studio Project
Grantee: James Parker Foley
Ultraviolet Studio Project is an artist residency designed by and for trans artists. The first cohort of seven interdisciplinary artists will come together in Portland in June 2026 to explore their overlapping interests of community care, health, and wellness. Ultraviolet will provide a stipend and access to workspace, the connection of a shared studio practice, studio visits with wellness practitioners, and community housing placements. Artists will share with the extended community through a collective showcase at the conclusion of the program. Through dedicated time for independent work, connection with one another, and an opportunity to engage with the larger community, Ultraviolet Studio Project aims to rewrite what residencies are, who they are built for, and who they serve.
karaokeography: WE dance YOU sing
Grantee: Janoah Bailin
Collaborator: Kristen Stake, Holly Taylor, Jennifer Dignan and Scott McPheeters
Five performers will create, rehearse and perform movement-based performance pieces to 45 minutes of well-known karaoke songs. Videos (with lyrics) will be projected with music, except the vocal tracks are missing. The audience is tasked with singing the words karaoke-style, using provided microphones and projected text. The show will explore queerness through a contemporary/postmodern narrative: instead of concrete story, the piece is intended to evoke an emotional, intellectual and visceral responses through relationships, movement, transitions, costumes, props and other elements. Performers will provide the missing visuals to a popular pastime, while community singers will add the missing vocals. Together they create evenings where performers and audience members joyously amplify the ethos of karaoke: mess, aliveness, community and “just going for it.” Events will take place at both social bars and performance spaces where the artists live and work.
Portland Drawing Survey
Grantee: Jo Ophardt
Portland Drawing Survey is sourced by open call for drawings from anyone in Maine (with a focus on Portland). It acts as an archive of what people are drawing- a medium that rarely makes it into galleries. People of all ages hailing from all neighborhoods of Portland are represented. PDS leans away from artist statement writing and instead asks artists about the physical and material conditions surrounding the creation of a drawing. These interviews cover the time of day people draw, or the time of year, what they sat on, and more! Discussing the material conditions of a drawing connects artists to the physicality of creating a drawing and invites readers to delight in the evasive and magical process of creation.
Queer Film Festival
Research & Development Grantee: Katie Irwin & Treehouse Film Collective
Collaborators: Amelia Keleher, Katie Irwin, Jude Marx, Erica Snyder Drummond, Aubrey Calaway, Maddie King, Hannah Thanhauser, Jeannette, and members of the Treehouse Film Collective
With R&D support from the Kindling Fund, The Treehouse Film Collective (TFC) will pilot a Queer Film Festival event or screening. The future festival is intended to feature films produced by queer filmmakers. Local and regional filmmakers will be prioritized in an effort to cultivate a collaborative Maine film community for queer and nontraditional artists. With their future festival, they also aspire to pilot discussion-based screenings with community organizers and advocates in a public park in downtown Portland and community potlucks.
Does the land remember?
Grantee: Maya Tihtiyas Attean
Does The Land Remember? is a book in process of development, in collaboration with Wych Elm Press. The book, is a 74 page hard cover monograph photo book featuring work from a series of the same name that the artist has created over the past four years. This work is a photographic exploration across Wabanaki land of the deep and complex relationship between land, memory, and identity. This series, anchored in Wabanaki history and culture, investigates the reverberations of colonization, the scars left on both earth and body, and the spirit that persists despite displacement. Through photographic explorations in nature, this project weaves together forgotten truths, energetically-charged land, Wabanaki legends, and personal narratives, engaging with place as both witness and archive.
Redbird: Structural Activation + Community Apprenticeship
Grantee: Shane Charles
Redbird is a structural sculptural system built from hemlock beams, precision-milled steel plates, and cast iron elements that activate through human breath, pressure, and environmental exposure. For the Kindling Fund, the artist will develop a new cycle of Redbird panels alongside a public-facing apprenticeship program (the Echo Fund) that trains emerging artists in joinery, casting, fabrication safety, CNC preparation, and site-responsive installation. The workshops will be grounded in regional material knowledge—wood mills, metal shops, and foundry processes—and influenced by Eastern Woodlands weaving logic, including guidance from ongoing mentorship conversations with Passamaquoddy master basketmaker Jeremy Frey and the artist. The project will culminate in a public open studio activation and structural demonstration, documenting breath-based oxidation and joinery logic as a shared material archive.
Tether Bread
Grantee: Tayler Shepherd
Tether Bread is a mobile modular pretzel cart and community art project that pairs freshly baked bread with zines hot off the Xerox. Rooted in the belief that nourishment and creative expression go hand in hand, Tether brings grassroots print and pretzels to sidewalks, beaches, parks, and markets across Maine. The handcrafted cart will feature rotating one-page zines submitted by the public, alongside free collage kits inviting passerby to pause, create, and contribute. A companion website will host open calls, event listings, and longer form content anchored by a quarterly print zine. Donations in lieu of tips will sustain printing costs and ensure anyone who wants a snack can have one. Tether is an invitation to take part in a joyful, low-barrier art exchange.
Creatures of the Low Tide / Criaturas de la marea baja
Grantee: Virginia Lopez-Anido
Creatures of the Low Tide / Criaturas de la marea baja is a bilingual (Spanish/ English) artist-made workbook where you will learn about creatures living in tide pools like the sea slugs, comb jellies, sea stars, and barnacles. These nonhumans will guide you through reflective questions about life through art making and activities, inviting you to learn more about them, and yourself in the process. This book will focus on tidal pool life in the northwest Atlantic. This book is for all audiences, recommended for ages 10 and up but can also function as a coloring book for younger learners.