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

Portland is as dense with ad agencies as it is replete with restaurants and arts venues. So if you’re new to town how do you get a sense of who is doing what in Portland’s creative AdLand? One easy answer is to look at the list of winners of the biennial Broderson Awards—or better yet, to have been at the awards ceremony last Thursday (October 27) at the State Theatre.

That might have helped Pete Shelly, a young copy writer now based on the outskirts of NYC who is hoping to move to Portland, but he visited portland a week too soon. Pete is so gung ho about moving here that he built a very cool little website announcing his trip here and inviting ad creatives to have a cup of coffee (on him) to talk about Portland.

What kind of welcome did Pete receive in Portland? “I had 5 ad agencies in mind, and I had meetings with principles at 4 of them, all based on the premise of ‘hey, let’s grab a cup of coffee.’” Pete says. “They were all pretty open about lending a hand and giving their perspective. I was kind of blown away by the response. Nobody had to let me come into their office, but they did, and they took the time to sit down and listen to my story. I was anxiously awaiting the list of Broderson winners. I had the opportunity to stop by the gallery they had set up next to the State Theatre, and, having talked to creative directors and writers at each of the agencies, I was curious to see how everyone fared. I think that taking a look at the work produced in Maine just this year is a pretty good way to see how much talent is in this city, and that’s pretty attractive to me. I want to be a part of it as well.”

So here, Pete, is a whirlwind tour of Portland’s advertising creatives, courtesy of the Ad Club of Maine:

First off, the Best of Show award went to creative director Don Fibich of Kemp Goldberg Partners for their “Continue the Journey” print campaign for Sea Bags (great Portland agency building a great Portland brand—this is our kind of story). KGP also scored with their Camden National Bank Annual Report and their logo for the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine.

Virtually owning the big budget TV categories, the VIA agency‘s Teddy Stoecklein, Amos Goss, Ron Clayton, Ken Matsubara walked (half a block) home with medals for Samsung, Fairpoint and Klondike. VIA also won for it’s integrated marketing campaign for Samsung’s tablets, digital work for Samsung and Pediacare, environmental design for DuPont and a “Pitched but Ditched” whiskey bottle design for Pendleton.

Garrand‘s chief creative officer Larry Vine chalked up an impressive 12 (mainly print category) wins for national clients like Dunkin’ Donuts, Hood  and United Way and Maine brands like Gorham Savings Bank, Gorgeous Gelato and Maine Jewish Film Festival.

Several strong in-house departments scored as well: Angela Adams, IDEXX Laboratories, CIEE, Maine College of Art, White Rock Distilleries, Inc. and Coastal Enterprises Inc.

Dearest to LiveWork Portland’s heart, perhaps, were wins by independent creatives and small design studios for authentic local brands, like Leslie Evans‘ logo and brochures for Calendar islands Maine Lobster, Taja Dockendorf of Pulp + Wire’s identity and packaging work for Pleasant River Soap Co. and Erica Hebold of E+M Marketing’s design for the Grace Restaurant website.

Will the winners influence where Pete applies for a job? Or will he just move here, find some buddies and set up his own shop? As Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution, “It’s too soon to tell.”

From the VIA Agency (left to right): Teddy Stoecklein, Jessica Fidalgo, John Coleman, Greg Smith, Dan O’Donnell

In a world of uncertainty, why celebrate risk? Why put everything you have into a crazy idea with only the barest beginnings of a plan? Ask that to Corey, Tyler and Seth, above, when they leave Love, The Bus in LA and fly back to Camden to be among the keynote speakers at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden on November 4 and 5th. In the case of Tyler Dunham, Seth Brown, and Corey McLean, these three “lifelong friends, filmmakers, and adventurers from the coastal town of Lincolnville, Maine (pop. 2,042). …[are] brimming with optimistic energy and a desire to accomplish something epic.” So they converted an old schoolbus into a grease-powered, web video road trip mobile and have been travelling around the country raising money to fund projects for community organizations and uploading the results in real time. If they can do all that, what else can they do?

And that’s just the point. The creative economy, the innovation economy, the experience economy—these are all expressions of the fluidity required by this crazy world—call it the improvisation economy. The Juice Conference is dedicated to bringing together a wide range of creative, innovative thinkers who have figured out how to put their ideas into action. Speakers and panelists include Maine heavyweights like Governor Angus King, Eliot Cutler and Roxanne Quimby, art world luminaries like Louisa McCall, Donna McNeil, and Eric Fischl and technological innovators like Kerem Durdag, John Ferland and  Steve Page. Portland’s creative economy is well represented by Ben Sawyer, of Digital Mill, Josh Broder of Tilson Technologies, Paul Dobbins, of Ocean Approved, Stephanie Volo of Planet Dog and Jaime Parker of Portland Trails.

One of the highlights of the conference is the pitch contest with $150,000 in financing to the winning business plans. (The deadline has been extended to Friday, October 28, so there’s still time to apply). If you’re not up for facing the “shark tank” in the pitch contest, they also have a short film contest (the deadline to apply is also now this friday.) Putting business plans and people who think about making business plans in front of investors and experts about those businesses is exactly what Juice is trying to do. And if your plan sounds like a mystery bus ride, what start up these days doesn’t?

Maine is full of smart people doing interesting things, but we may all be a bit too independently minded for our own good. That’s why conferences like Juice (and TEDx Dirigo) and places like Portland are so important. As the innovation economy spreads out through Maine, Portland has a role to play as a place to bring people together, to develop stories, to share a great meals, to cross-pollenate and propagate. Josh Broder of Portland’s Tilson Technology was just named to MaineBiz’s Next List for 2011. In the article he predicts that certain parts of the economy are poised for significant growth, “especially in those industries with strong ties to the creative economy. ‘American centers of innovation are our capital—the companies coming from technology, software and social media,’ he says. ‘All of those new things require significant infrastructure, and we’re the infrastructure provider.’”

And the same could be said of Portland. If risk is the juice of the Maine’s creative economy, Portland is it’s glass.

Photo from Love, The Bus

Getting in and out of Portland by air has always been easy, but with the opening of the new terminal at the Jetport it’s become kind of thrilling. It’s still a short drive to get there with very little traffic and the parking flow and capacity has been improved, but beyond the convenience, the newly expanded airport now feels like a place. The main component of the new structure is a blue, glass-skinned box. The generic “modern-ness” of this form is actually a head fake for the soaring geo-thermally heated space within.

But let’s back up. Even the large, letter spaced sans serif signage on the blue box announce “there are designers here.”  And when you get out of the long hallway that leads from the curbside drop off area to the new terminal, the space opens up dramatically and your eyes naturally go to the ceiling. The ceiling is genius, both as architecture and branding. What you see is an engineered 21st century interpretation of the Maine camp vernacular with massive beams and cross-bracing mixed with some Maine shipbuilding steelwork. All at once it reads as wood and steel, as craftsmanship and design, as tradition and innovation, as technology in the service of comfort. All these things we associate with Maine and with Portland all artfully morticed together in the service of keeping the snow out. The press release from the architectural consultancy Gensler that managed the project provides a lot of detail on the materials used, the upcoming LEED certification and  Voluntary Airport Low Emissions (VALE) grant used to fund the geothermal system.

When you drive away from the airport now at night you see the glowing green light of a massive LED wall sculpture in the main terminal space—another surprise that belies the glass box. If there is any criticism to be leveled about the architecture as experience it would be that it is perhaps a more inspiring experience for departing passengers than for new arrivals who still find themselves exiting through the low-ceilinged older terminal.

So the Jetport has doubled it’s gates and improved its passenger flow, but equally if not more important, they have taken the often generic form of the airport and created a space that feels uniquely like you’re in Portland, like you’re in Maine, and it’s a little different here.

Bonus fact from wikipedia: A survey conducted in June 2011 by travel web site Cheapflights found PWM to be the most affordable airport in the region (beating Manchester and Logan), and the third most affordable in New England (behind Bradley and T. F. Green).

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!

While the national—and global—economic picture is decidedly mixed, there are signs that Portland, Maine, may be exceptional in more ways than it’s number of James Beard nominations per capita. This may be highly anecdotal, but in the last few weeks many postings for high-level creative jobs in Portland have moved across my radar. These are not just-out-of-college quasi-paid internships, but well-paying jobs worth moving from Brooklyn, Boston, Berkeley or Austin for. Putney, a veterinary products startup based in Portland, was the highest ranking Maine company on Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest growng small companies with an impressive 291% three year growth rate. Go to the careers page their website and you’ll see they are looking for a director of marketing; If you follow Mediabistro you would have seen a posting for an art director at Kemp Goldberg Partners marketing and advertising agency; and (as I mentioned in a recent post) The Via Agency has 8 positions to be filled.

At a time when all levels of government are talking about how to spur job creation it is great to see that the creative economy (at least here in Portland) is actually doing it. All kinds of non-profits are sharpening their business focus as well in hopes of remaining relevant and positioning themselves as worthy targets for scarce investment dollars. The speakers at the upcoming TEDxDirigo conference receive coaching in how to distill their “ideas worth spreading” into 18 minutes or less and then get a high quality video of their talk to help them spread those ideas further. MaineBiz just did a profile on founder Adam Burk. TEDxDirigo talks are not quite elevator pitches, but they’re a way to give creative social entrepreneurs a leg up on getting attention—and funding.

Art, it must be said, is not business. But there is a lot of business that develops around art. In order for that process to happen there need to be opportunities for artists to find support for their own basic research and let others jump in to find applications. The Maine Arts Commission just released a report on the economic impact of Museum attendance in Maine as a way of demonstrating an aspect of that link. MAC has shown unwavering support for both local arts organizations and individual artists, both crucial components in the growth of the creative economy from which many of the cultural perks of Portland flow.

In a similar vein, Maine AIGA’s annual exhibit this year is entitled, “Good Design is Good Business,” and the focus is on “the elements of branding.” Maine AIGA president, and partner at Portland branding shop Might & Main (formerly Forge), Sean Wilkinson says, ”Well designed presence in the world is what sets one great idea apart from another. It is ‘intelligence made visible.’ Your expertise as a business is only as valuable as people perceive it to be, and hiring a designer is one of the most important steps in shaping that perception. It also keeps good folks like me gainfully employed.”

Good folks, gainfully employed in Portland, Maine—the image of a glass filling…

background photo by Corey Templeton, Portland Daily Photo

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.

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.”

For some reason Portland is possessed of a number of hypertrophied creative communities relative to our population: architecture, culinary arts, literature, music and particularly advertising. I asked Dave Goldberg of Kemp Goldberg how big the agency scene is here. “Between ad agencies, PR firms and digital/interactive marketing firms in greater Portland, there are WAY more companies in this business than an area this size should or deserves to have,” says Dave. “I have 27 bookmarked, but there are more.” I asked him what he thought accounted for the disproportionate numbers and he answered with an anecdote, “I was down in West Hartford recently at my 30th high school reunion. I was talking to a woman I knew from school who does PR. From our discussion my guess is that in greater Hartford, an area larger than greater Portland, they have half as many agencies. Hartford does not have a “creative economy.” It doesn’t attract the creative talent, leadership, investment, etc. We in Portland are different.”

To celebrate that difference, the VIA agency is hosting this year’s Broderson Awards, The Ad Club of Maine‘s “Celebration of Commercial Artists from the State of Maine.” In a recent post on Forbes.com, I talked about Dunbar’s number and the size of cohesive social communities. In the hunter gatherer terms I was considering, our advertising community is one of our few creative enclaves larger than a clan and approaching a tribe. A clan, however, would fit the theme of this year’s competition which (mis)quotes the great (and greatly inebriated) Irish poet Dylan Thomas with the title ”In Our Craft or Sullen Art.” Why a sullen art? For Thomas, the poet’s craft was practiced while others slept so as to earn “the common wages /Of their most secret heart.” Sounds a lot like advertising!

In the words of VIA creative director, Teddy Stoecklein, ”To outsiders Maine, let alone Portland or Bangor, is usually just vacationland. Our Fine Art community is often overshadowed by bigger cities like Boston, New York, Providence, even Montreal. The same is true of our Commercial Art community, yet we have some of the most talented people in the nation, right here. The Broderson Awards is hosted by the Maine Ad Club to reward the very best in Maine. But it’s more than just a pat on the back or a trophy. It’s also an acknowledgment that our craft is indeed a Fine Art. It’s both a showcase and a moment of inspiration.” To make that acknowledgement stick, they have lined up some first rate judges: Nina DiSesa, Former Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of McCann Erickson, New York; Rupal Parekh, Agency Editor of Advertising Age; and Peter Friedman Former Executive Producer at Wieden + Kennedy and McCann Erickson, New York.

The deadline for all entries is next Friday, July 1, 2011 at 5 p.m. Late entries will not be accepted. See the Broderson site to find out more.

Like this month’s Abstract conference that created an intersection between the design communities of New York and Portland, the Broderson’s in October will do the same for advertising. But whereas the designers convened in the very nice but clan sized Hannaford Hall at USM, the ad tribe will take over the 2,500 seat State Theatre. In honor of Dylan Thomas, sullenness will not be banished, drinks will be served!

Lately I’ve noticed innovators across many fields working in the art of circumstance. These are people working with situations as the medium. They write scripts of chance. They orchestrate the action so that one audience member’s potential interaction with another becomes an underlying creative force. Theatergoers become actors. Tourists become attractions. And in the case of an upcoming conference in Portland, Maine, audience members can have the impact of keynote speakers.

TEDxDirigo, inaugurated last year at the Frontier Cafe in Brunswick, is a day devoted to Maine “ideas worth spreading.” This year’s conference, on Saturday, September 10, will take over the more spacious Portland Stage Company. The participants’ exchanges are as central to the day’s success as their attendance at a series of stimulating talks. This is not a conference on a single issue—the goal is to generate interdisciplinary connective tissue. TEDxDirigo gathers over a dozen members of the Maine community with wildly diverse achievements (from beekeepers to musicians, nurses to thinkers on sustainable development). All are asked to give “the talk of their life,” said Jen Boggs, a TEDxDirigo representative. In the words of Executive Director Adam Burk, the speakers give “high impact TED talks that evoke contagious emotion,” following the format of the nationally renowned TED conferences. No two speakers from even remotely similar field will speak back to back. The ordering of talks is designed to generate maximum friction for the audience’s inspired conversations, and Boggs compares structuring the day’s schedule to putting together “a big puzzle.”

The even bigger puzzle, is the audience. The secret ingredient to TEDxDirigo’s art of circumstance begins with the selective application process to attend. Burk relished in this notion of a curated audience, saying “We put a lot of care into building a diverse program for a diverse audience, because you never know who is going to connect with what idea or what person. This is part of the magic, the synchronicity of life. There are other events that focus on single issues or fields. If someone is worried about the depth and breadth of our event, then perhaps it’s not for them.”

Then who, specifically, is this event geared toward? Burk said, “people with a track record of engaging in the power of ideas, such as product developers, social innovators, philanthropists, researchers, entrepreneurs, performance artists, musicians, visual artists, etc.” Selecting a crowd of our community’s most proactive thinkers ensures that the ample breaktime provided in the wake of each talk (as well as top-quality Maine cuisine) will spur attendees to self-organize and move projects forward through collaboration.

Speakers include: singer/songwriter Emilia Dahlin; Executive Director of the Center for Preventing Hate and civil rights activist Steve Wessler; and founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI), Roger Doiron. Videos of all of last year’s talks are listed on the speakers page as well. If you are interested in being an audience member (just like the main TED conference, only much, much less expensive) you can apply to attend here. It won’t be the same without you.