It’s an old story—repeated from SoHo in New York in the 70s to SoMa in San Francisco in the 90s—the artists move in, the rents go up, the artists move on. But in the last 40 years, cities have learned that there are alternatives to this shell game that gentrifies the avant-garde. Live/work development has been used successfully in many cites as a way of enabling working artists to stay in the neighborhoods that they have helped to revitalize.

“Developing spaces that keep artists and creative people living and working in our downtown is essential to maintaining our city’s appealing character,” says Jennifer Hutchins, executive director of the Creative Portland Corporation and the Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance (PACA). “We know that a vibrant arts scene attracts commercial activity and helps keep our local economy strong.” To this end, Creative Portland has invited representatives from Artspace—a nonprofit based in Minneapolis, Minn. that specializes in the development of artist live/work spaces—for a two-day visit next week to help assess the conditions for such development in Portland. Artspace will meet with everyone from real estate developers, philanthropists and city officials, to community members, artists and cultural institutions to determine the needs and interest in this type of project, and to help frame the issues that would need to be resolved among these parties.

While in Portland, Artspace will also visit three potential development sites: the Portland Public Works garage at 55 Portland Street; the Masonic Temple at 8 Chestnut Street; and a block of properties at the corners of Hampshire Street and Federal Street in the India Street neighborhood. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see what turning one of these underutilized buildings into a live/work development could do both for local artists and for artists looking to relocate here from elsewhere.

A highlight of the Artspace visit will be a free public presentation, on Thursday, September 29, at 6:00 p.m. in the Rines Auditorium of the Portland Public Library. After a 30-45 minute interactive presentation about Artspace’s model for developing artist live/work space and examples of their projects throughout the country, the audience will be invited ask questions, provide feedback and contribute their views on community needs and interest in a live/work project in Portland.

Artspace has a national overview on creating affordable space for the artists and arts organizations, and they’ve been doing it for more than 30 years. Andy Graham, President of Creative Portland, says “I’m happy to have Artspace visit Portland because it gives us an opportunity to talk about what is missing in Portland, to imagine together what Portland needs to be even better.”

Photograph of blueprint mural on Free Street by Corey Tempelton, Portland, Maine

The summer’s other great sequel was not in 3-d multiplexes but right on Congress street in Portland. Ad Age named the VIA Agency, Small Agency of the Year, Gold. Why the Harry Potter motif? “The Via agency is housed in the Baxter building, built in 1888 as the public library of Portland, Maine. The imposing peaks and gables of the stone facade and wooden beam-studded high-ceiling interior led one Via client to dub the building the “Hogwarts of Advertising.” … And if the building is Hogwarts, then CEO and founder John Coleman is its Harry Potter. With similar rounded black-framed glasses, an affable charm and wide-eyed curiosity about everything, Mr. Coleman even seems to have Master Potter’s magic touch — in the advertising industry at least,” reads the lead of the Ad Age piece.

Careful readers of this blog will remember that VIA won silver for the same prive last year, no mean feat for a Portland agency. But the intervening year has been a very good one for VIA and they attribute at least a bit of that good fortune to being located here. ”To live in a smaller town and to go to baseball games and do the grocery shopping and all of that, helps in understanding the broad spectrum of different kinds of people, but I truly believe that what it really does is afford us the opportunity to think,” Mr. Coleman said. “I love New York, but I feel blessed to live in a place like Portland.”

Go to the Portland section of the Via website and the first thing you read is “Portland isn’t just where we are. It’s who we are.” (I wish we had written that!) They then lead you through three iPad swipes of highlights that tell you why it’s great to live in Portland followed by listings for eight (at last count) really great jobs. Talk about brand story! VIA is itself one of the best advertisements for Portland that Portland’s got. And for those of you who like a little wistful bitterness to temper your jubilation, read Chief Creative Officer Greg Smith’s reaction to the award, “So That Didn’t Suck.”

Planning for a volatile future requires either nimbleness or the commitment of resources vast enough to cope with any eventuality. The thing is, though, that developing nimbleness now can save a huge chunk of those vast resources later. Such is the approach of the Portland Society of Architects and the City of Portland to the threat of coastal inundation posed by global warming. Longstanding coastal communities, like Portland, whose boundaries have been defined through generations of tidal fluctuations are in an advantageous position over our southern (and particularly South Asian) counterparts whose unplanned rapid expansion have put them on the front lines of projected rising sea levels in this century. Nonetheless, Portland is confronting the problem head on by bringing together the creative, business and  municipal communities to explore the issue in depth.

The PSA is sponsoring Sustainable Portland By 2030: Rising Tides, a two-day symposium on sea level rise, on Thursday and Friday next week (May 12-13). There will be a Rising Tides panel and reception hosted by the City of Portland at The Ocean Gateway Terminal (14 Ocean Gateway Pier) on Thursday from 4:30-7:30 pm, followed by a continental breakfast and topic driven ‘What’s Next?’ discussions, hosted by DiMillo’s Floating Restaurant (25 Long Wharf) on Friday from 8:30-11am.

Panelists on Friday will include Sam Merrill, Director, New England Environmental Finance Center, Muskie School of Public Policy; Christophe Tulou, Past Director of the Resilient Coasts Initiative; and Kristina Hill, Chair of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia. They will address potential physical and economic impact of sea level rise in Maine, how governments and industries are responding to sea level rise, and an overview of mitigation strategies around the world. The “What’s Next” event on Friday about will encompass discussions about the challenges and opportunities presented by sea level rise in terms of public policy, infrastructure and design, finance and insurance and (what we’re all about at LiveWork Portland) the cultural implications.

Complete details are on the PSA’s event poster as well.

Photo of The Ocean Gateway Terminal by Kirk Rogers

The opening of Base Camp Gallery last week in Portland was as much about the fact of a new alternative art space as it was about the work that was shown. Everybody there was clearly having a good time and it seemed to me that the real art at play here was social. This is not to diminish the work, much of which could easily be hanging in any number of downtown galleries, but rather to elevate place-making to its rightful place. The place in question is a large warehouse, once used for distributing beer, and now the auxiliary space of a couple of well-established Portland entrepreneurs, a machine shop and an interesting smattering of younger creatives. The entry way looked like an art installation at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, with a lineup of Mercedes and modern furniture mashed up against a sound system and bar (another way of distributing beer). The autos turn out to be part of a bio-diesel conversion project, but no matter, they were fun to look at and added to the cocktail chatter. The overarching theme of the space and the crowd was, in fact, conversational. The artworks to each other, the art to the space, the implicit conversations between the different tenants of the warehouse, and of course, the sizable crowd that came to see what it was all about.

Another kind of conversation will be happening on Tuesday, April 5th. The Maine Center for Creativity will be hosting “From Imagination to Innovation: Maine Participates in Lincoln Center Institute’s Imag’nation Conversation.” This is one of fifty such events that the Lincoln Center Institute has been holding in every state that will culminate in an Imagination Summit in New York this coming July. These conversations are designed to get people talking about “how imagination is a prerequisite for success in the 21st-century global economy [and how] now more than ever, we must teach imagination in our schools and nurture it in our communities.” The keynote speaker for the Maine conversation will be Rockland artist Eric Hopkins, joined by Daniel Bouthot, Habib Dagher, Carol Farrell, Aaron Frederick, Andy Graham and Karen Montanaro, moderated by Patsy Wiggins. The event goes from 4 to 8pm, at Hannaford Hall at the Abromson Center on the USM Portland campus ($20 to attend; $5 for USM students; RSVP is required).

There has been a lot of discussion during the past months (and particularly in the past weeks) about the role of public art in Portland and in the State of Maine in general. The Portland Museum of Art will be holding a free public forum: “Whose Art is It?” on Friday, April 8 from 12-1:30 pm. The discussion will use the removal of the The Maine Labor Mural Cycle in Augusta as a springboard to address the status of public ownership of public art. “Participants will include: Mark Bessire, Director of the Portland Museum of Art; Sharon Corwin, Director and Chief Curator of the Colby College Museum of Art; Christina Bechstein, Sculpture Professor and Director of Public Engagement at Maine College of Art; and Chris O’Neil, Government Relations Consultant for the Portland Community Chamber. Invitations were extended to Governor Paul LePage, who is unable to attend and to artist Judy Taylor [who painted the mural cycle], who has respectfully declined.”

Last fall, proposals for benches for the new Bayside Trail were unveiled to the public to no great acclaim: “Art should be something you feel passion for,” said committee Chairman Jack Soley. “At the end of the day, we felt most of the entries were simply too pedestrian, and we’re not looking for that. We could buy benches from a catalog if that’s what we were looking for.” From what I saw of the proposals, some of them were quite well crafted and others too self-consciously “artistic.” But, to return to the idea we started this post out with, the relevant “creativity” here is not personally expressive, but social. One of the most successful comparable projects in recent years has been the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The seating is indeed functional, but beautifully designed. Most importantly, people use it! The High Line offers many places for people to stop and relax and socialize. The seating has helped to make the space into a place. With luck, this is what the Public Art Committee had in mind when they decided to reissue the challenge: “To Artists, Designers, Landscape Architects, Architects and other interested parties: The Public Art Committee of Portland, Maine has issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) from artists and designers, or teams of artists and designers, to create functional art in the form of seating along the new Bayside Trail in Portland. The RFQ is available for download on the Portland Planning and Urban Development Department web site. The deadline for submission of a qualifications packet is 3:00 p.m., Thursday, April 28th, 2011.” The Public Art Committee also requests that you please forward this post along to other artists or designers who might be interested in submitting qualifications for this project.

Making places for creativity to happen is just as important as the tangible products of creativity itself. The creation of new places like Base Camp and the Bayside Trail adds to the collective happiness that we feel in Portland.

For a city with as many independent creatives as Portland, coworking is a fact of life. We work in cafés when we need to get out of the house or have a meeting. We collaborate in other people’s homes, offices or studios. But for many freelancers, the idea of renting out professional office space has seemed too expensive, too isolating or not flexible enough for the changing shapes of our work lives and work loads. Enter Peloton Labs, the first purpose built coworking office building in Portland. Picking up on an idea that has bloomed in creative metros from San Francisco to Brooklyn to Berlin, Peloton will have enough space on its two floors for up to 40 workers, with very flexible membership arrangements. You can join for as little as $40 a month for 8 hrs of daytime access or as much as $400 for unlimited 24/7 access with a large dedicated desk and shelf space, and you can change your arrangement month to month. There are a small number of private offices as well at negotiable rates. Members will also have access to conference rooms and high speed wired and wireless internet. The building, located at the former Binga’s Wingas site at Bramhall Square on Congress Street, is striking and modern from the outside, with high ceilings and plenty of natural light within. Innovative real estate developer Peter Bass, who did the iconic East Bayside Studios with Achetype Architects almost a decade ago, has worked with Archetype again to construct an innovative space for what is in fact a creative business solution in itself. Bass, a residential developer, is banking on the fact that by opening up the commercial real estate market lower on the food chain, he can generate more revenue from the space than if he leased it to one or more small companies. Coworking is not new to Portland. SPACE Gallery used to hold regular Jelly coworking events, and Web developer Rob Landry’s office for Pemaquid Communications is currently the anchor for the smaller-scaled Wycwah (When You Can’t Work at Home) coworking space on Maple Street in the Old Port. What will make Peloton more than just a clean and quiet space to work in will be the community that forms there. With that in mind, Peter Bass has been working with crowdsourcing consultant Elizabeth Trice to facilitate the collaborative social processes that will turn the raw space into a place attuned to the needs of its participants. For everyone interested in seeing the space before people start moving in, Peloton will be having an open house on Friday, February 11 from 6-9pm. For more information, contact Elizabeth by email.

Photographer Tonee Harbert just emailed this picture to us, and says, “After the lecture by Jenny Holzer at the Holiday Inn, a crowd of people walked over to see the light projection on the front of the Museum, Holzer had created, entitled For Portland. The words shone from a high-powered projector set up inside the back of a UHaul truck, parked in Congress Square. The words of the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska were projected onto the facade of the Portland Museum of Art. The Poem scrolled for an hour and forty minutes up the side of the museum, and then the program was repeated. A crowd of art lovers and passers-by gathered to read the words which scaled the building.” And here is the word on the street from twitter: John Gjika says, “At the Holiday Inn to celebrate contemporary art and the work of Jenny Holzer. One of the infinite reasons why I love this city.” Chellis Wilson says, “So glad I took Margaret to the Jenny Holzer lecture—incredible. And the projection, the group experience…so powerful.” Rob Gould reports Jenny Holzer saying at the Portland Musuem of Art, “Projections work particularly well when they’re done in places where people naturally gather.” Rob then says, “Portland Museum of Art gets a huge thumbs up.”

The light you will see in the Portland sky on the night of Tuesday, December 7th, will not only be emanating from the heads of the assembled geeks at the TechMaine Annual Conference Dinner near the airport, but from an outdoor projection by New York artist Jenny Holzer, commissioned by the Portland Museum of Art. Holzer will be in town to give a lecture is the centerpiece of the 2010 Nelson Social Justice Fund Program. The Fund is celebrating a decade of programs it has enabled at the Portland Museum of Art honoring artists whose commitment to social justice is manifested in their work. The lecture is free and will be held at the Holiday Inn By the Bay, 88 Spring Street, doors open at 5:30 pm and the program will run from 6-8 pm. The projection, For Portland, is “a one-time-only site-specific projection featuring selections from the poetry of Wisława Szymborska, created by Jenny Holzer for the Portland Museum of Art,” that will be projected on the front of the Museum from 7-10 pm. The Museum recommends viewing it from Congress Square. Portland will join a list of 35 cities around the world from Rome, Oslo and New York to Rio de Janiero and Singapore that have hosted her projections. Through a career of more than 30 years, Jenny Holzer has made the language around us visible—and often in a critical way. She has used the words of Wisława Szymborska, generally considered to be the most important living Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize, in many of her recent projections. It will be a big night in Portland. Don’t miss it.

“Viva la State.” That’s how Lauren Wayne ends her auto-reply email apologizing for not returning messages right away because… she’s got a theater to open! The landmark State Theatre, vacant for four years and now thoroughly renovated (see photo gallery from HillyTown), will open its doors again Friday for a sold-out performance by My Morning Jacket. Wayne is a pivotal figure in the Portland music scene, a nexus for national and local bands, with the experience to tell the good from the great. She will manage about 80 shows a year at the State and continue to book acts for Port City Music Hall. The State, at around 1,500 seats, fits a niche between the larger, more formal Merrill Auditorium and smaller venues like Port City, Empire Dine and Dance and SPACE Gallery, and will attract bands that might otherwise skip Portland. Some examples from this Fall’s lineup are Josh Ritter, Goo Goo Dolls and Michael Franti & Spearhead. The centrally located theater will also be another anchor for the arts district and an important showcase for the Portland Music Foundation, which is holding a free open house this Sunday (October 17) from 1 to 9 pm. There will be performances by local bands Darien Brahms, Jacob and the House of Fire, Brenda, Sidecar Radio, Atomik and Grand Hotel: “The open house will also serve as the annual launch event and membership drive for your favorite neighborhood local non-profit organization, the Portland Music Foundation, which, as you know, aims to educate, inspire, and incite musicians and music professionals throughout the Portland area and help the entire local music industry grow and prosper.” In keeping with it’s history, there will also be big screen entertainment at the State. On Saturday, October 30th, there will be a participatory showing of the cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show guided by The Dirty Dishes Burlesque Review, and Friday, December 3rd, will be 1930s Night, featuring Depression-level ticket prices ($5), a special screening of the The Wizard of Oz and a pre-show performance by local vaudevillians Over A Cardboard Sea. So good luck Lauren, break a leg and Viva la State!

photos by Bryan Bruchman, HillyTown

Who says you can’t win ‘em all? The creative economy seems to have its own rules. Case in point: the new offices of the VIA Group advertising and marketing agency in the historic Baxter Library building. In one decisive gesture, VIA and Portland have scored a triple win. #1: VIA’s business is expanding into all things digital and they have chosen to relocate, not to New York or Boston, not to South Portland or Westbrook, but from the periphery to the heart of the Downtown Arts District on Congress Street. #2: the new location will also give VIA, and their contribution to the creative economy, a much higher profile in Portland—and Portland’s creative economy, in turn, will gain increased national visibility through VIA’s growth. And #3: the renovation of the Baxter Building itself is an urban preservationist dream—and green to boot. VIA describes how everything has come together in a web site they made about the building: “Northland Enterprises, LLC, of Portland, Maine, acquired the Baxter Library Building from MECA in 2008, and is overseeing the complete renovation of the building. The project is a Historic Renovation project that is approved and monitored by the National Park Service. It is one of the first commercial uses of the new Maine State Historic Tax Credit, which has been instrumental in moving the project forward. The almost 25,000-square-foot building will be energy efficient and apply for LEED silver certification when the work is done.” There’s a lot more to growing a successful business than architecture, of course, but when public policy can help match a unique work space with a unique company in a unique city, it’s a win-win-win for everyone.

Modern architecture is alive and well and living in Maine. That is the message of the storefront for architecture maine, which “seeks to present a fresh view of contemporary architecture to the Maine community to forward and inspire an understanding of, an appreciation for, and a connection with an architecture of our time: the present.” The storefront, located on the first floor of the Clapp Building, 443 Congress Street, will open this week as part of the First Friday Art Walk with their inaugural exhibition “maine modern: fifty years of modern architecture in maine.” A big part of the opening celebration will be the announcement of the winner of the  first Maine Prize for Architecture: “a biennial award that acknowledges an architect, individual, or organization that has added significantly to the legacy of Maine building and to the Maine community by creating innovative, exciting, and humane spaces in the belief that architecture plays a meaningful part in our lives. The recipient of the award receives $10,000 and the Maine Prize medallion.” The show runs from October 1 through 31, and the storefront is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon until 6:00 pm and by appointment. Architecture in Maine—it’s more than shingles.