As the year rapidly comes to a close, we need your year-end support to set up 2025 for success! Membership is a cornerstone of SPACE’s model. It keeps ticket prices low, helps support our staff and facilities, and ensures our commitment to artists is strong. Thanks to those who have joined us or already renewed — we’re thrilled to share our organization is finally reaching a membership program with pre-pandemic record numbers! — but 2024’s new economic pressures mean we need more of our audience to join to meet our budget. With just five days left in our fiscal year, can you join us to invest in Portland’s arts, artists, and ideas in 2025?
In a time of heated debate about the future of our city, our staff strives to ensure that SPACE bridges the legacy of “Old Portland” with a vibrant, forward-thinking future, keeping Congress Street alive with curiosity, creativity, affordable nights out, and a touch of the delightfully weird. As a home for bold new ideas and arts-driven nightlife, your membership ensures our vital hub for connection, camaraderie, and exploration thrives.
Institutions like SPACE are essential launchpads, offering platforms and creative homes for the bold ideas that shape our community and future. In times of political division, artists help us navigate big questions, envision a more just world, and escape the noise on the dance floor.
Membership fuels this work (plus comes with perks for you!). Making your donation before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve will go a long way.
All donations to SPACE Gallery, a 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.
As we build the foundation for a strong year, I’m also thinking about the highlights of the year we just completed. Here’s five things I’m cherishing about SPACE’s 2024 as we leap forward into the year ahead.
1- Celebrating artists at all career levels.
From virtuoso giants with careers spanning decades to early opportunities for up-and-coming talents, SPACE has presented an expansive range of artists in 2024. While we revel in the new, SPACE’s 2024 was also marked by opportunities to see generation-defining talents like our 2024 Sun Ra Arkestra and Lonnie Holley concerts; to movies about artists like composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Apartheid-era photographer Ernest Cole, folk-rock icons the Indigo Girls, and musician/iconoclast Genesis P. Orridge; to book talks exploring Stephen King’s Maine. Meanwhile, we are offering dynamic catalyzing project grants to emerging and mid-career Maine artists through the Kindling Fund, and providing regular “first” Maine exhibition opportunities, concerts, and film debuts to artists we want to amplify and celebrate.
2. A fiercely independent film program with some of the year’s buzziest films
With award season upon us, it feels phenomenal to know that our small and mighty film program has been regularly screening some of the year’s most celebrated films. Three documentaries we screened were just shortlisted for Best Feature Documentary for the 2025 Oscars (Union, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, and Queendom), meanwhile the Gothams, Golden Globes, Independent Spirit Awards, Critics Choice Awards, IDA Doc Awards, and more had nominee (and winner!) lists filled with SPACE-screened films from this past year. And while the national accolades are exciting, I’ll still be celebrating selling out multiple screenings of the locally-made charmer Hangdog and local and national shorts in the (what I hope is the first of many) Water Women Film Festivals.
3. Learning more about where we live through an artist’s lens
This year marked the second edition of the site-specific, temporary public art and Portland history-telling initiative we first launched in 2020. The 2024 iteration features artistic interpretation of local histories by artists James Allister Sprang, Maya Tihtiyas Attean, Ashley Page, Rachel Alexandrou, and Ling-Wen Tsai, in collaboration with historians Seth Goldstein and Libby Bischof. From a sound installation at a site on the Underground Railroad, to birdwatching and feasting at the former site of a local brick factory, these artists asked us to spend time reflecting and reveling in important sites that changed Portland’s history forever.
4. Dance can bring us together
Whether you’re watching dance or joining on the dance floor, the ecstatic freedom harnessed by moving bodies is good for the soul and important for community. We’re thrilled to have hosted Maine Mini Fest (a gathering of the local dance community), presented the documentary Ailey, and collaborated on presenting the interdisciplinary and participatory project Liturgy | Order | Bridge with Scapegoat Garden. Meanwhile from Moonshake dance parties, Dyke March Maine after-party, to the Zootz reunion, SPACE has been regularly transformed into a club celebrating freedom, connection, and self-expression.
5. Celebrating the creative hub upstairs in the SPACE Studio building
Some people still don’t know we have 31 artist studios at below-market rents upstairs in our building. As 2025 nears (the 10-year anniversary of our nonprofit buying our building), we’re looking forward to collaborating with the many visionary artists who use our facilities, amplifying their important artistic news, making facilities improvements, and of course, diligently paying down our remaining mortgage. For a taste of the brilliance that is being incubated upstairs, take a look at our window gallery which celebrates 10 years of the Pickwick Independent Press calendar (and a wheat-pasted wallpaper of their riso test prints) in the window gallery, on view through February. We’re letting artists lead the way as we celebrate the rich past of this community and set the tone for the year ahead. Happy new year, and we can’t wait to see you in the year ahead.