SPACE is honored to award fifteen grants in its seventh year of administering the Kindling Fund, ten $5000 Program Support Grants, and five smaller Research and Development Grants across the state of Maine. Excitingly, all of our 2022 grantees are first-time awardees, demonstrating the ongoing proliferation of dynamic collaborative contemporary art throughout the state, even during the pandemic.
The Kindling Fund supports inventive, artist-organized initiatives that engage the public and the visual arts in new and meaningful ways. The funded projects below value risk, experimentation, unconventional engagement, critical dialogue, and sustaining artistic opportunity for creative peers. Each of these projects is making opportunities for more than one artist and is the creative labor of a group of artists beyond the individual grantee listed.
This year’s Program Support Grantees are Sofia Aldinio (South Portland), Hannah Coleman (South Portland), Heather Lyon (Blue Hill), Itzel-Marine Gourmelon (Orland), Genius Black (South Portland), Loquat (Portland), Heather Flor Cron with Presente Maine (Portland/Greene), Ryan and Rachel Adams (Portland), Staycation Collective (Rockland), and Tender Table Maine (Westbrook/Waterville/Statewide); Research and Development grants are being awarded to Amelia Garretson-Persons (South Portland), Gabriel Chalfin-Piney (Waterville), Alejandro Graciano (Saco), Turtle Dance Co-Op (Lubec), and Josie Colt (Portland/statewide).
This year’s jurors were Adriane Herman (2019 Kindling Fund Grantee/ MECA&D Faculty), Ekrem Serdar (Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Arts Center), and Danny Orendorff (Vox Populi Gallery).
Administered by SPACE, The Kindling Fund is one of thirty-two nationwide re-granting programs established by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Program Support Grants
Belonging
Grantee: Sofia Aldinio
Belonging is an interdisciplinary storytelling workshop and exhibition within the immigrant community in Portland, Maine. During the period of four weeks, ten immigrants will use art, photography and writing to explore the concept of home. The participants will walk away with new skills, a renewed sense of belonging while simultaneously using this opportunity to understand what “home” means in a novel community. The program will culminate with an outdoor exhibit as well as engagement events displaying participants’ work within their communities.
Childish Books
Grantee: Hannah Coleman
Childish Books is an independent publishing project dedicated to centering children within the zine and art book world. Childish Books supports artists of all ages interested in making publishing more childish, and prioritizes voices undervalued in corporate markets. Through interviews and reviews, residencies, publishing initiatives, and programming, Childish Books seeks to create, amplify, and archive unique artist books and zine projects which could be enjoyed by a “child audience,” however defined. This work reinforces a belief in the political power of independent publishing to give space to voices often left out of the mainstream, and work to put those books in young hands.
Forcefield
Grantee: Heather Lyon
Forcefield is an outdoor collaborative installation and performance with Maine based cross-disciplinary artists Heather Lyon, Riley Watts, Knate Higgins, Matt Shaw, and Heather Stewart. Using layered video projection and magickal gesture as choreographic material these artists will transform a rural field in Blue Hill into an ethereal phantom realm culminating in at least one public live performance event.
GalaxSea: A Voyage into the Bioluminescent Night
Grantee: Itzel-Marine Gourmelon
Imagine a dark night in Coastal Maine where a galaxy of glowing organisms teaches a young woman to move beyond her fears. A collaborative group of artists and storytellers are creating a short film, “GalaxSea: A Voyage into the Bioluminescent Night,” telling the story of a daydreaming teenager, led by a sea monster, to venture into a sea kayak on dark water. It builds to the final moment where — after becoming overwhelmed by fear and monsters of her own imagination — she connects with reality to reveal a wondrous world of bioluminescent sea creatures, fireflies, and a star-studded night. Mixing genres of a surrealist sci-fi film mixed with documentary, the film’s premiere will be on the docks of Castine harbor, in collaboration with the Maine Maritime Academy, to project the film on the schooner Bowdoin’s majestic sails.
Gem City Movement
Grantee: Jerry ‘Genius Black’ Edwards
The Gem City Movement is currently engaged in a grassroots, cultural campaign to establish “Gem City” as the nickname of Portland, Maine. Although Gem City is the new nickname for Portland, it’s really symbolic of a gateway into Maine’s dense musical and artistic talents. The Gem City movement includes creators from all over the state of Maine – and in multiple genres. The sound of the Gem City Movement has always been accompanied by original visual art. Since the Summer of 2020, Genius Black and Beck Delude have been gathering images and creating/designing a visual palette to be the ‘vibe’ that rides with the original music created by musicians throughout the state.
Loquat
Grantee: Loquat (Jordan Carey and Madison Poitrast-Upton)
Loquat is a fashion and apparel brand focused on empowering marginalized people and causes. The Loquat collaborators have been doing this in a myriad of ways, and are branching out into a video interview series called Roots & Culture. Representation in the Loquat models and motifs is key, but not enough. Therefore, Loquat is using new projects to facilitate deep storytelling from the perspectives of marginalized folks, raise money for different causes or organizations and collaborate with artists in a way that creates space for mutual mentorship and whole relationships.
Munay Garden
Grantee: Heather Flor Cron with Presente Maine
Munay Garden is a series of artist-led events held at a medicinal flower garden. Through an open call process, BIPOC are invited to submit their stories of medicinal plants from their culture or homeland. Each flower and plant will be included in the garden at Presente Maine in addition to other sacred plants. Munay Garden is planning to host seven free events taught by an invited BIPOC herbalist, bruja, maker and/or creative on what it means to connect with a land as a diasporic people.
Over Here
Grantee: Ryan Adams
Over Here will be a space for exhibitions and community gathering, within a working studio for artists including Rachel and Ryan Adams. Over Here will strive for an open model, extending welcome to all members of the community to interact and create with the studio artists. The space will also serve as a gallery where artists of all levels will be able to showcase their work. The goal is to give younger members of the community a chance to witness and take part in the lives of working artists, so that they will be able to view it as a viable career option.
Staycation Collective
Grantee: Gus Williams and Nicky Rogers
Staycation Collective is a group of artists and art enthusiasts who seek to encourage and bolster the individuality and imagination of those who reside in areas where artists feel that they are unable to actualize their full potential for creative and artistic expression. Through Staycation’s open submission process, as well as through targeted outreach to individual artists admired by our members, Staycation has sought to stitch together a complex quilt of mediums that represents not only their mission, but embody the passion the collective feels in sharing the stories of fellow creative Mainers.
Tender Table
Grantee: Stacey Tran with Veronica Perez
Tender Table celebrates Black and Brown community in Maine by connecting and honoring identities, traditions, joy, resilience, and fight for collective liberation through storytelling and food. Since 2017, Tender Table has hosted live/in-person storytelling events, poetry readings, dinners, and collaborations with local artists and organizations across the U.S. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Tender Table shifted from hosting in-person events to virtual dinner parties, cooking demos, artist talks, and an outdoor food/poetry/music fair showcasing community members of color in Maine. Stacey Tran and Veronica Perez are the core organizers of Tender Table Maine.
Research and Development Grants
A Tincture of Time
Grantee: Amelia Garretson-Persons
A Tincture of Time is a psychedelic art film that has been in the works since 2019. As a working artist herself, Amelia Garretson-Persans conceived of the film as a way to showcase the work of Maine artists working across a variety of disciplines with a focus on women artists and artists with disabilities. The script, written by Garretson-Persans, imagines the hospital as a magical borderland between life and death, inhabited by practitioners, spirits, and natural forces. Inspired by the visually impactful psychedelic films of the 60s and 70s, A Tincture of Time encourages imaginative, visionary work from its many artist collaborators.
Care-Full Histories
Grantee: Gabriel Chalfin-Piney
Care-Full Histories is a meal-based art residency taking place during the summer months of 2022. CFH seeks to record and preserve the oral histories of Maine based artists while sharing a meal. Gabriel Chalfin-Piney will begin traveling across the state of Maine recording oral histories of working artists. These interviews and the visual contributions by the selected artists will be collected via an online oral history archive and working towards a publication.
Maine Musical Collectivo: Uncovering Traditions of the African Diaspora in Portland, ME
Grantee: Alejandro Graciano
Alejandro Graciano is a Maine-based Afro-Mexican immigrant musician and storyteller. Graciano’s work focuses on exploring divergent musical traditions from Africa and amplifying the voices of underrepresented artists of color. Using multiple collaborators, the group is creating an anthology of original works. The collective proposes support for assisting them with documentation, including work that could columinate in a multi-media exhibition at a gallery.
Turtle Dance Co-Op
Grantee: Rhonda Welcome
Turtle Dance Co-Op’s artists have continued to share their eco-rooted multi-disciplinary works with the public and children of the Lubec community during the pandemic at Turtle Dance Co-Op’s dedicated gallery in Lubec and with public shows (Eastport Art Gallery, Lubec Library) and published Putep’s Tale. The book has recently been aired three times on Maine Public Broadcasting Network. Using puppetry and “sea-junk assemblages” the Co-Op promotes issues of ocean health and beach clean-up for all ages audiences. The Co-Op had previously brought materials and creative instruction to the Maine Discovery Museum, the Lubec Outreach Program, the MOFGA Fair, and sponsored several workshop clinics for children at our shop in Lubec. In the next year the Co-Op’s authors and artists will be collaborating on yet another book for children, with a focus on the spiritual connection between the natural world and children of all cultures, with the extended intent of reawakening that natural communication in the adult reader.
What Can I Do to Feel Better Book Tour
Grantee: Josie Colt
In 2021, collaborator Myles Bullen reached out asking people what they do to feel better, and with their responses he wrote a poem. With that poem, Josie Colt illustrated those suggestions. With those illustrations, they made a book: a coloring book! With this coloring book and Kindling Fund support, the artists are proposing to go on a coloring book tour across Maine, sharing the benefits of mindfulness, art, music, and group activity with the public. Each event will last a few hours where individuals are invited to sit and color a copy of the book in a group setting for however long they wish. These events will take place in parks, youth centers, old folks homes, and with other community partners who invite them. Each event will collaborate with local musicians to provide live music for the group to color to, and mindfulness practitioners in the Portland community to lead meditation.
