Part of what makes Portland’s First Friday Art Walks so much fun is that they have no epicenter. As the crowd surges along Congress Street, with smaller group investigating eddies in the Old Port, the Place To Be shifts from one locale to the next. One sure thing: if you stroll enough, and walk through enough doors, wonderful things will happen.

Last night, the December Art Walk that leads up to the holidays, there was an extra energy in the air. You could sense it at Congress Square: on one side, the line snaked into the State Theater for The Fogcutters present Big Band Syndrome (Lauren Wayne posted a video of the finale of the show); the other side of the square featured the Portland Museum of Art (free on Friday nights) and their hypnotic show on classic Shaker artifacts. Meanwhile, in-between, Art Walkers trundled up the stairs of the Flat Iron Gallery, in the pie-slice-shaped Hay Building, to sip and chew and ruminate on Art, Life, and Living in Portland.

Another wonderful thing, as always, took place at Otto Pizza, a few steps down Congress Street. Your correspondent was among the many who stood happily on the sidewalk, waiting in line to purchase a slice of what many consider to be the finest pizza north of Boston (and now Otto is in Harvard Square, too!). When it comes in as ideal and manifold a presentation as Otto offers, pizza can crystallize the creative economy.

Outside Otto, the sidewalk mambo was wending its way down Congress Street to Space Gallery, with many a stop along the way. Inside Space, one of First Friday’s mainstays, there was music, there was art, there was laughter, there was drinking, there were jostling crowds and a buoyant sense of pleasure in the air. There was also an Alternative Gift Market where you could buy donations to a wide range of curated non-profits and deliver them in a selection of limited edition, hand printed cards designed by artists Beth Taylor, Erin Flett and Jacqueline Dubois.

If you prefer your art au plein air, you could step outside of Space onto the sidewalk, where an open-air truck had pulled up to the curb. Just climb the ramp into the truck’s back to observe the paintings hanging within.

The crowd kept surging, now on to the Maine College of Art. Every year, MECA combines their First Friday participation with a huge holiday sale of items by college students and alums. This year, three floors were given over to a cavalcade of holidazzles, and so the crowds were especially strong here. Among the (hundreds of?) tables and booths, there seemed to be a particular emphasis on recycled treasures: playing cards converted into wallets, umbrellas converted into aprons, stamps converted into earrings.

For those who needed to retreat from the gleeful cacophony of MECA, there was quieter contemplation at galleries where one could, for instance, admire scale models, photos, and blueprints celebrating the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Or, upstairs at Cross Jewelers, you could sample “tastings” of various hot cocoas. Then back out into the street and more galleries, more stores, more music.

Until, in the words of Samuel Pepys, one has turned First Friday into First Saturday, “and so to bed.”

Photos by John Spritz

The First Friday Art Walk has entered a new phase in its life cycle as the flagship of Portland’s creative economy. Since July, designer Jennifer S. Muller has been producing a beautiful broadside map and program distributed the previous Thursday in The Portland Press Herald. The way the heavy, uncoated stock of the piece absorbs the ink makes it look more hand made than commercially printed, which is just the right touch for the Art Walk that aims to stoke local commerce through the propagation of fine art.

And building on the uproarious success of the What Cheer? Brigade at the SPACE Gallery Block Party, tonight’s festivities include New York’s Asphalt Orchestra for more street band fun. (Thank you, Portland Ovations) Programs? Marching Bands? And soon food carts? This is beginning to sound like a sporting event for creatives!

Some of tonights highlights include: a performance at 4:30 in Congress Square by The Milkman’s Union presented by the Portland Music Foundation to highlight this year’s Portland entries in the NYC’s CMJ Music Marathon; the opening reception of Good Design is Good Business: The Elements of Branding, the 2011 AIGA Maine Annual Exhibit at the Lewis Gallery, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square; an exhibit of photographs from the Portland Ballet’s “Who’s Your Dancer” project will be  on view at the KeyBank Monument Square branch; and the work of at least one Portland mayoral candidate is on view!

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

When Noah DeFilippis left Maine for San Francisco at the age of 17, he sought a sense of the urbane. In his return to Portland a few years ago, DeFilippis found that cosmopolitanism nestled improbably amongst Maine’s famous Pick-and-Paws and flea markets. DeFilippis and his wife, Amy Teh, started “Pinecone + Chickadee,” a business named for Maine’s state tree and bird in a tip-of-the-cap to Vacationland. Pinecone + Chickadee reflects a modern interpretation of old-school nostalgia, and DeFilippis and Teh have allied themselves with other local artisans to breathe life into events like Portland’s Picnic Music + Arts Festival.

Pinecone + Chickadee started when DeFilippis and Teh lived in Brooklyn and attended juried craft fairs like the Brooklyn Renegade Craft Fair, silkscreening cards and clothes with their unique, colorful prints. Upon moving to Portland after the birth of their first son, they noticed that vendor admission to regional craft fairs was granted on a first-come, first-serve basis. While punctuality may be a virtue, it doesn’t always correlate with creation. So DeFilippis and Teh, along with Ron Harrity of Peapod Recordings, Diane Toepfer of Ferdinand, and Sean Wilkinson, co-founder of Might & Main, set about creating the Picnic Music + Arts Festival.

Now in its fourth year, Picnic Music + Arts Festival brings over 120 local creators (with varying records of punctuality, but proven aesthetic juices) to Lincoln Park on Saturday, August 27^th from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m.. Attendees at the free event can peruse vendors’ jewelry, clothes, vintage materials, fine art, photography and more. Bryan Buchman, curator of music blog Hilly Town, culled music from bands with both local and NYC mettle, including Butcher Boy, Weird Children, Toughcats, Sunset Hearts, Bandana Splits, The Outfits, Mouth Washington, Clouder and the always-wonderful Mango Floss. Picnic will also serve up local foods to nosh on while shopping and listening to music.

DeFilippis says that the success of previous years has culminated in the biggest picnic yet. The small town aspect of the city also helps with the process. “Portland is an easy place to organize events,” he notes. “The councilors are pretty approachable, and you can just walk into City Hall to explain what you want.”

In addition to wrangling together Picnic, DeFilippis and Teh have busied themselves opening up Pinecone + Chickadee’s storefront on 6 Free Street. The store boasts the couple’s silkscreen design line as well as vintage finds and the work of local artists, like employee Kris Johnsen. When the two saw the potential storefront, Teh was nine-months pregnant with the couple’s second child. “It was the best and worst timing,” says DeFilippis. “You know what they always say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” With a medley of their creations and others’, and a mind towards refurbishing old treasures in new contexts, DeFilippis and Teh of Pinecone + Chickadee upend notions of Maine while gleaning it for inspiration.

Above photo: Noah DeFilippis, co-owner/designer of Pinecone + Chickadee, poses with nesting dolls from the new storefront on 6 Free Street. DeFilippis and wife Amy Teh, his creative partner, have also been collaborating with other local movers and shakers to bring Picnic Music + Art Festival to Portland.

Earlier in the summer we had a garage sale. Technically it was a yard sale, since we converted our garage into an art studio, but in Maine all the listings for yard sales, stoop sales, tag sales, moving sales etc. are listed under “garage sales,” so be it. We posted on craigslist: “Artist + graphic designer + 3 kids unload lots of cool stuff. Furniture (including mid-century). Lighting. Collectibles. Huge music collection (CDs). Books. Toys.” We drew a very nice crowd and sold a buch of stuff. But the important point was the quality of the customers.

There are two kinds of people who go to garage sales (or flea markets, resale shops, etc.), people looking to get ordinary things really cheap and people looking to get good deals on very particular things. We wrote our ad to appeal to the second sort, and for the most part, that’s who we got. This little insight has important implications for the creative economy—both in terms of supply and demand. Simply put, the creative economy needs the creative consumer.

Obviously, all of our creative ventures require audiences that can appreciate them. In Nicole Mones foodie/romance novel The Last Chinese Chef, cooking is presented as a social art, with the chef only being able to find expression through the refined palate of the diner. The Slow Food people also talk about the participation of the eater, but this is equally true of audiences in music, art, film and theatre, or in the members of a crafter’s Etsy circle.

The other side of the coin is that we have to present wonderful, unique things at prices that our audience is willing to spend. Travel the world and you will find many cities that are filled with bulk commodities and luxury brands with very little in the individually crafted middle. It is more difficult to market these kinds of artisanal things, because they are neither wholly familiar nor global brands, but they are things that if you find them here (and like them) you’ll want to buy because you can’t readily get them elsewhere.

And that’s what turns a city from a commodity dispenser into a place: a sense of immediacy that you need experience and enjoy—and buy—what you find because it’s rare or one-of-a-kind or just plain better here. And when we talk about Portland as a great food town or great music town we also mean that we have great appreciators of food and music that allow and encourage these and many other arts to find expression through them.

Of all the world-class creative directors alighting on Portland, Maine this Friday for the Abstract: The Future of Design in Media Conference, Gael Towey is perhaps in the best position to “get” Portland. Towey has been the Creative Director for Martha Stewart’s magazines and other omnimedias for the past 20 years. Together, Martha and Gael have made the well-crafted and well-curated life knowable and accessible to a generation of Americans that was losing touch with the basic competencies of their own lifestyles. From heirloom apples to the perfect turkey, Martha Stewart Living has shown and told us what to buy—and more importantly—what to do with what we buy.

So it was serendipity last week, as I was considering how to introduce Gael Towey to Portland, that designer Brook Delorme, of Brook There on Wharf Street, posted a piece on her blog entitled “Artisanal Living.” If Martha Stewart turned the artistry of everyday life into an aspirational pastime, many of us in Portland have turned it into a full-time occupation. Brook begins, ”I understand, in theory, the way to really make money … invent something and then remove your personal body, self and time from the process of building and distribution.” But that, of course, is not what Brook is doing in her design business at all, she’s making things, herself, by hand. “The artisanal approach is limited—by working hours in the day,” she continues. “Artisanal manufacturing; whether it’s bread or pottery or handmade clothing— isn’t very scalable.”

And there you have it, Martha Stewart in New York creating content (at scale) about the joys of doing things by hand and recognizing things well done, and Portland artisans filling the hours of their days practicing, in a sense, what Martha is preaching. There is a bit of a fret underlying all of the emphasis on craft in Portland—are we too artisanal for our own good? But in Portland, which was Brooklyn before Brooklyn was Brooklyn, it is not just the art of the hand-made garment or the perfect baguette that consumes us, but also the art of the community. When Brook muses, ”So, were I to desire to grow this business, I’d need to find someone else to at least do some of the stuff I like doing, and I’d have to spend more time doing things I dislike,” we can echo as well that people live in Portland so they can spend more of their time doing the things they like and less time doing things they dislike. Finally, Brook asks, “Can I reframe this somehow? what am I missing?”

This is the question that Portland is asking and to a certain extent, what the Abstract Conference is answering. The conference grows out of the incredibly dense media community in New York that has spent the last few years battling its own extinction from the pressures of what in the ’90s was quaintly called “new media.” But the strength of the community was such that, with the help of technology, they have led the “old media” print publishing companies into the new world of branded apps, social media and mobile content. These creative directors have all “reframed” their skills and talents in the context of multi-platform publishing. So the promise of the conference to participants is a concentrated glimpse of the way forward for designers and publishers, but in a more concrete sense it is about how a critical mass of talent in one place leads to innovation and the growth of new businesses.

Portland aspires to be such a community of creative innovators, and I think many of us have a sense that we are approaching a tipping point beyond which we will spontaneously begin to emit new products and businesses like strange quarks in a particle accelerator. That is the spirit behind LiveWork Portland and our new networking group 2 Degrees Portland. As Brook Delorme wrote in a post we commented on last year, we think more competition from more creatives will be better for everyone’s business. So we’re trying to connect the dots for people interested in relocating here by hooking them up with volunteers here who can help them find their place in Portland.

I asked all of the Abstract panelists “To the extent that technology allows you to move your life and work to another city, which ones would you consider? And if you didn’t answer Portland, Maine, what factors (other than moving it to Brooklyn!) would make you consider relocating here?” Not surprisingly, Gael replied, “I can’t move to Portland because my husband and kids are in NYC, and I love it too much. However, I am excited to visit Portland. I think technology allows us to travel more and live in other cities besides NY.” So we know that she is not coming to Portland on Friday to scout the location, BUT IF she were, this is the kind of thing that 2 Degrees Portland would do for her:

[If the English language had a subjunctive tense with a connotation that means AS IF, we would switch to that at this point in the post!]

2 Degrees Portland coordinator Laura Burden would receive an email from Gael through the 2 Degrees website or Facebook page. Since she would have just read the “Artisanal Living” post, Brook would immediately spring to mind as a good “connector” for Gael. [To become a connector for 2 Degrees Portland, just fill out this short form.] Laura would email Brook and ask her if she would be willing to talk to Gael on the phone or meet with her on her next trip to Portland. Brook would say, ”Sounds like fun! and thank you for thinking of me ” Perhaps Brook would invite Gael to her workshop on Wharf Street and tell her about starting a lifestyle brand in Portland. Then maybe they would walk over to Custom House Wharf for a hands-on stitching demonstration at Sea Bags and then to 2 Note Perfumery on Moulton Street to pick out a gift for Martha. in parting, Brook would wish her luck, ask her to keep in touch and pass on a list of places she thinks Gael would enjoy:

a short list in portland!

my favorites:
fore street <—favorite nice restaurant because it’s relaxed
boda <—-only thai food in portland that’s actually like food in thailand
rosemont market <—they make the best hummous in portland, & competitively price their excellent quality produce
micucci’s <—-luna bread-  the best bread in portland
arabica, bard, hilltop  <—I can’t take sides, I love them all, but almost every day I get a latte from arabica.
quimby colony <—Roxanne Quimby’s exciting and emerging artist colony, with a focus on design
bar lola <—Our artisanal version of “Everyday Food”

granted, most of my list is food-related…but that’s what portland’s about, right?

Switching out of the subjunctive, Gael, even if you’re not going to HQ your own multimedia empire here, we hope you enjoy Portland. If you have the time, Brook would be happy to meet you, Sea Bags really would make a photogenic how-to story for the iPad, 2 Note is great for gifts and the food really is as good as everyone says.

Portlanders cultivate authenticity in everything we do. But as anyone in the fashion or accessories business knows, as soon as you create something really new, low-cost knockoffs begin showing up in the mall. Sea Bags makes one of a kind tote bags from upcycled sail cloth, “born of the sea,” as they like to say and stitched right on Custom House Wharf in Portland, Maine. They have been written up in the New Yorker and collaborated on a line of bags with Angela Adams for J. Crew. Their business has been growing at a healthy clip and they seem to have found their (sea) legs. But how to differentiate their genuine, unique article from all the imitators? This was the challenge they brought to Kemp Goldberg Partners—the other big ad agency in Portland. In a visually rich and conceptually economical way, Kemp Goldberg’s print campaign for Sea Bags located their creation story in the middle of the open ocean, most strikingly off the coast of Greenland, above. The copy merely delivers the place and the time of the image and the messages “Every Sea Bag has a story,” and, “Continue the Journey.” The campaign works because the target audience is nautically identified and feels, in the ads, the ancestral pull of the sea. Kemp Goldberg are also “developing a fully integrated campaign based on the unique brand positioning and story to include a QR code/video for the bag tag, a cause marketing campaign to reinforce and communicate the values that are central to the company, as well as other social media and interactive tactics.” Sounds like a plan. Made in Portland, marketed in Portland, sold to discerning customers everywhere.

Portland is vital both because of the creative individuals who make this their base of operations and the local businesses that support their endeavors. Portland native Jocelyn Kahn has her feet in both of these worlds. By day, she manages Caravan Beads on Forest Avenue, and by night and weekend turns her flea market obsession with vintage dominoes into earings, necklaces and pendants that she sells on her Iceleen etsy shop, at local stores and at Picnic Portland events. I asked Jocelyn about being a fixture in the crafting community in Portland.

As a crafter, what is it like for you living and working in Portland?
I love working and crafting in Portland because there are so many other creative people working here too. Its easy to get inspired when you see so many beautiful objects being made by those around you, and working in a creative environment certainly helps.

What made you choose Portland?
I grew up in Portland so it felt natural to move back here after college. We have such a great food and art scene for such a small city. Caravan Beads is my families’ business and I like being part of a small, creative, local company.

It seems you like being a resource to local artisans. Do you also feel supported in your own work?
I think Portland is a great place for people making and selling arts and crafts. There are wonderful shops that really go out of their way to carry locally made items.
I really admire all the master minds of Picnic Portland. They do such an awesome job of promoting and organizing the shows.

Do you think this is an easy town to move into?
I personally found it pretty welcoming but I studied at MECA and then Massart so coming back I already knew people in the arts community.  I hope people who move here find it welcoming. I think if you are someone who wants to become involved there are plenty of was to do so, and events like First Friday help put us out there for people visiting Portland. I’ve definitely met people who have never been here but know we have this reputation for being a cool little city.