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.

This winter I asked an eighteen year old Burundian, who recently emigrated to the USA and is seeking political asylum, to tell me the story of how he got here. He answered this heavy-handed question in shielded fragments I can’t disclose. I had no idea what’s going on with Burundi’s political parties. Most Americans couldn’t pinpoint the country on a topographical map. But this kid abandoned everything—parents, friends, neighborhood—to seek safety halfway around the world in Portland, Maine, where he refused to commit his life’s big picture to the blank page. And for good reason. So I tried new questions. What’s your favorite sport? Swimming. Where did you swim in Burundi? Lake Tanganyika. Did you swim with friends? Yes. Can you remember a crazy time swimming with your friends?

As if I were slowly helping him turn on a faucet, a story spilled out. He raced with his schoolmates to a rock in a beautiful African lake, hoping to beat them to it and win the prize money waiting on the beach. Then he was sprinting with the same friends toward the same beach to rescue himself from a famous human-eating crocodile named Gustave, who may or may not have been chasing them. At the finish line, they were laughing and tackling each other on the golden sand—a joy-filled scene we excavated together from the unspeakables that shadow his memory of home.

The story glowed, and so did the smile on my student’s face when he saw it in an anthology of young writers, How To Climb Trees, published by The Telling Room, Portland’s nonprofit creative writing center that has been running workshops for youth ages 6 to 18 since 2004. I have given you a mere glimpse of the Telling Room’s award-winning effort to unearth the stories of the Greater Portland community. “Young Writers and Leaders,” a yearlong program of twelve immigrants and refugees from which the above story emerged, is one of The Telling Room’s over 50 writing programs undertaken during the 2010-11 academic calendar. During this time, over 2,000 students (native Mainers and newcomers alike) and nearly 100 volunteers came together in an astounding array of workshops on every literary form under the sun.

Ranging from daylong book-making workshops to yearlong intensive storywriting initiatives, the programs are designed to strengthen literacy, boost young people’s confidence in creative expression, and provide real audiences for student stories through publication and live readings. In the words of Executive Director Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, “When you get kids in the writing zone, the creative zone, they will be more brilliant than they ever knew they could be.” This year alone, the Telling Room published a dozen chapbooks in addition to their annual anthology of the year’s best student work. Each edition tops the charts at Portland’s fantastic indie bookstore, Longfellow Books, which is proof that The Telling Room’s verbal engine of mutual understanding is well underway. This is a community within a community— Portland’s ever-growing nucleus of storytelling and free expression. Now the nonprofit’s rapid growth spurt has garnered two major springtime recognitions.

Fast Company, the progressive business magazine, named The Telling Room 2011’s most innovative company/organization in the state of Maine. Shortly after, The Maine Arts Commission, the Maine Alliance for Arts Education, and the Maine Department of Education recently gave the Telling Room Maine’s “Imagination Intensive Community” award, citing that “The Telling Room has evolved into a community that reaches beyond its own doors to collaborate with a wide variety of local and regional partners, including schools, Portland Public Library, Portland Ovations, and others.” This was the first time the honor went to a community other than a regional school district.

These statewide and national rounds of applause for The Telling Room are much-deserved. But there’s nothing like the rewarding sound of a student reading his or her story in front of a live crowd. Or the news of a former Telling Room rockstar traveling back to his home in Sudan, where he narrowly escaped death, to reunite with childhood friends and help improve education conditions there. A couple months ago that student who is still seeking asylum from Burundi told me he got accepted to the honors program of a top American university. We cherished our high-five’s sweet sting of victory.

If you’re a writer in town, you should visit The Telling Room’s energetic Commercial Street space filled with desks, futons, bean bags, and computers at the ready for young writers’ fingertips. I’m forever thankful to have entered this room’s constant flow of creative community members sharing in the explosion of Portland’s literary imagination—a whole story of stories.

To experience The Telling Room in action, watch this video.

Muchness is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the quality or state of being great in quantity, extent, or degree. — much of a muchness. : very much the same.” And so it is on June 10th in Portland. Not only is AIGA Maine hosting the first Abstract: The Future of Design in Media conference (a much of a muchness itself), but on the same day Kemp Goldberg and GBrittPR are sponsoring the second of their Brand Roundtables, this one on ”The New Definition of Creativity.” Both forums take on what seems to be very abstract topics and render them into examples of constructive actions taken in increasingly complex worlds.

Abstract, in its most concrete terms, is about how designers can thrive in the emerging multiscreen world. It is telling that in this new world of content production, print is just another “screen,” albeit a privileged one with very high-resolution (but low interactivity). The six presenters for the Abstract Conference are all creative directors (or similar) for New York based big media brands, and all got their start (and have lived most of their careers) in print. Florian Bachleda (Fast Company), Dirk Barnett, (Newsweek Daily Beast), Scott Dadich (Condé Nast), Arem DuPlessis (The New York Times Magazine), Luke Hayman (Pentagram) and Gael Towey (Martha Stewart) have all transitioned their charges successfully into the world of websites and apps, and seem to be having a pretty good time juggling them all.

Registration for the conference is still being accepted. The conference will be held at the University of Southern Maine Abromson Center for Continuing Education at 88 Bedford Street in Portland, and will run from 9am-5:30 pm followed by cocktails till whenever.

The “New Definition of Creativity” that Lars Bastholm, chief of creative and digital for Ogilvy & Mather in New York, will talk about also engages with the quantum complexity of  contemporary communications, in this case in the worlds of advertising and marketing. Like the publishers and content creators represented in Abstract, the marketers that Lars will talk about have figured out how to enter the anarchic dialog that their customers engage with daily across multiple communications channels and emerge with their brands intact.

The brand roundtable is free and will include lunch. The event will be held at The Masonic Temple, 415 Congress St. in Portland. Lunch will be served at noon, the presentation will start at 12:30 pm and run until 2pm. RSVP required.

We will be following up with more posts about what the Abstract panelists will bring to Portland. And with local sponsors for the event including VIA, Maine Magazine/Maine Home + Design, Downeast, MaineBiz, USM and Portland Color, there are bound to be more design related events orbiting around the conference that we will report on.

Last Thursday night at Portland, Maine’s SPACE Gallery, Annie Sprinkle guided guests on a slideshow tour of her monumental career, which was a rollercoaster ride to say the least: First a prude. Then a prostitute. Porn star. Filmmaker. Trained photographer. Sex educator. Performance artist. PhD in human sexuality. Author. And through and through, a sex positive feminist who loves her body and isn’t afraid to show it (yes, all who attended are now nipple eyewitnesses of the “bosom ballet”). Sprinkle’s current era is one of ecosexology—a motion to raise awareness about our sexual relationship with Mother Lover Earth and environmentally friendly sexual practices. Seeing her in the flesh, I noticed the glow of a prophet—an activist prophet who continues to herald our unrestrained and humane exploration of sexuality (that behavioral jungle which may never cease to escape its mapmakers).

It’s important to recognize that this San Franciscan prophet of history (or in Sprinkles’ parlance, herstory) was sponsored by the Portland-based sexuality boutique called Nomia, our local torchbearer of Sprinkles’ same mission to “promote sexual literacy.” With sincerest thanks to Nomia, Portland witnessed a biography ranging from Public Cervix Announcements to lavishly nude marriages of Sprinkle and the Earth, Sky, Sun, Sea, Snow and the Sea again for a second time…

I first stumbled upon this hidden gem of a shop last fall in the heart of Exchange Street. To get there, you ascend a staircase to the second floor, a perch that helps ensure customer anonymity. Since opening in 2004, the store has responsibly offered an array of academic and erotic literature, lingerie, hosiery, and first-rate adult sex toys and accessories that cater to all sexes and sexualities. I remember after about an hour poking through their book selection, I felt something in the air heighten my sexual curiosity… Wow, I thought to myself holding a shopping bag in the street, I really just bought a leather riding crop! This purchase (which has been quite a hit—) nicely exemplifies why Nomia is here. Yes, it’s a retail store, but it’s also a resource center, an education initiative, and a progressive sexuality movement helping people realize that they owe it to themselves to explore bodily pleasure on a truly individual-specific level.

Gina Rourke is the magician behind Nomia, and she approaches her work from a background in community organizing and time spent studying in an American Civilization PhD program (particularly, women’s labor history and critical theory) at Brown University. Having “gone from public organizing to private organizing,” Rourke keeps a strict a one-on-one approach to the educational side of things. “Sex is a practice through which you express your sexuality,” she said. “And when you think of sex as a language, you understand that there’s a remarkable diversity in terms of people’s experience, and the staff is trained to work with customers very much on an individual level because everyone’s coming at it from a different place.”

Rourke’s work does not end with the store and the training of an extremely informative, judgment-free, and friendly staff. Taking Nomia beyond Exchange Street, she often consults medical practitioners on various topics. In one recent workshop, Rourke helped therapists find the vocabulary they need to speak effectively about the myth-laden subject of pornography with clients who have porn-related issues. Rourke also works to adapt sex toys for therapeutic use by individuals who are physically disabled. As Nomia’s success shows, progressive businesses will find loyal support on the Portland peninsula.

You can explore virtual Nomia here, and to learn more about ecosexologist Annie Sprinkle, take a gander at “www.AnnieSprinkle.org(asm)”

Photo of Annie Sprinkle by Julian Cash

We make community for our pleasure and our comfort, but ultimately for our safety and security. In this increasingly volatile world we need to establish trust and communication about everyday things so that as those things change and become more challenging, we have people to work out solutions with. The arts play a key role in building these casual communities based on shared pleasures and aesthetic affinities. It is often true that people who like the same bands or books share politics as well. So it should not be surprising that Johnathan Cook, a young poster designer that we have profiled before on these pages, is exposing the community that he has helped to build at Mayo Street Arts Center to his thoughts and concerns about that most everyday of things—trash.

Voroism, the title of the show by Johnathan that opens this Friday, May 6th (5-8pm), is an original coinage. My best guess is that it either refers to the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex or a 1958 novel, VOR, by James Blish (best known for his Star Trek books). That range from science to science-fiction is fitting for Cook, a student of both art and political science. The work in the show has the look, perhaps, of abstract expressionist paintings until you realize that the surface is composed solely of melted plastic shopping bags. They are both beautiful and questioning—they give pleasure but also require a response. I asked Johnathan to talk a bit about the back story of these pieces:

People in Portland are mainly familiar with your work through the great posters you have been doing for Mayo Street Arts Center, how does the work in this show relate (or not) to your graphic work?
The work in this show is a departure from my graphic work in that there won’t be a single print in the bunch, however it is steeped in the same concerns I hold as an artist. The primary function of my posters is to promote grassroots events, so my goal is a broad one; to win the battle of information in our visual environment. That is, to combat corporate advertising in order to lure people out of their homes and into the community proper. In contrast, the pieces I’ll be exhibiting at MSA are more to the point—to convey an idea directly to the viewer.

Is the work a metaphor for how people can make use of the waste stream or a forced confrontation with our own excess as a materialist culture? Or both? Do you worry that you might be aestheticizing garbage for some viewers?
My aim with this series is in part to force a confrontation between people and the discarded remnants of their consumption. I am in a sense pulling society’s malaise out of the gutter where it is ignored, and putting it on the wall where it demands recognition. My sincere hope is that people don’t walk away from the show thinking of novel new uses for their crap. This would constitute a failure on my part as such notions would serve to justify one’s materialism, hindering any chance of introspection. I worry about aestheticizing garbage for the same reason, but I understand it to be an inevitability that some viewers won’t comprehend the ugliness of what the images represent. After all, there’s not a piece of art in existence that speaks to everyone the same way.

By making art out of ephemera, you’re working in the shadow of some art historical heavy hitters: Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauchenberg, to name the two most immediate. What are your historical reference points for the work?
I am well aware of the artistic giants who waded through the landfill decades before me. Rauchenberg in particular has been a constant reference in my rolodex of inspirational figures. Many of these artists made brilliant use of ephemera, so much so that their work spawned a new breed of art restorer to preserve materials made to deteriorate. Much of the material I’ve been working with, while being deposable, is anything but ephemeral. Plastic, for example will haunt the earth until an organism eventually evolves to break it down. Most of all, however, I endeavored to create objects that were, to borrow a term from the contemporary photographic artist Chris Jordan, “intolerably beautiful.”

And where do you get your trash, anyway?
Believe it or not, trash is not hard to find. Over the course of history every culture has used whatever materials were abundantly available to them to make art; the Greeks had marble and we have styrofoam. All I had to do was ask a few people and I soon had more than I could handle. And yes, some of it was mine. We all play a role in the madness of capitalism.

Where would you like to go with your work and is living and working in Portland helping you get there?
I’m not exactly sure where I’d like to go with my work, I usually go where it takes me. I do know that if I had a budget and a crew, I would have made some of my pieces monumental. Perhaps installation work will be my next step. Wherever I’m heading, the artistic community in Portland is helping me get there. I just received a scholarship to Peregrine Press, so I’ll have access to printmaking equipment for the next twelve months. This will facilitate future design work and allow me to experiment with new techniques. There are a lot of opportunities here for young artists and I’m doing my best to seize every one of them.

I encourage everyone to seize the opportunity and go see Johnathan’s work in the (pertochemical) flesh.

Daniel Fuller, the new director at The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, has learned a lot about how to get things to happen in Portland in a very short time. Read Bob Keyes’ story about how Daniel got MECA and the Portland Pirates to collaborate on screening brief artist-made hockey-themed videos on the scoreboard over center ice before three games last month. This month he’s clear-cut the ICA’s normal exhibition schedule to debut an interdisciplinary and intergenerational arboretum of artistic activity. “The FOREST is an opportunity to transform the ICA at MECA into a hive of activity, an open space for dialogues between working artists and students, creators and appreciators,” Fuller says, “each bringing their individual experiences and expertise to the table and simultaneously teaching and learning. The inspiration and aspiration of the space is to create a temporary town square where ideas are considered and discussed.” Visual and performing artists will develop hands-on programs and activities to engage students and the public in unconventional and imaginative ways. FOREST started this Tuesday, April 19, and will run through Friday, April 22, culminating in a forest themed dance party, with prizes for best costume provided by Rogues Gallery. Go to meca.edu/ica for the full schedule and all the up to the minute Forest news.

Still from “Silent Film of a Tree Falling in the Forest” by Mungo Thompson

Glitterati, the glitter-themed literary ball that took place last week at The Port City Music Hall in downtown Portland, Maine, offered guests a chance to wine and dine with some of the city’s major authors. As a young writer who moved here just last summer, I was amped to mingle with Portland’s literary greats, and I deeply enjoyed witnessing how friendly and approachable they turned out to be. One author I spoke with was Melissa Coleman, whose memoir about growing up on her family’s farm at the front of Maine’s back-to-the-land movement, This Life Is In Your Hands (Harper 2011), was released on April 12 to a fanfare in the New York Times Book Review, among other major reviews.

I remember first meeting Coleman last fall, but I was oblivious to her forthcoming publication with one of the country’s top publishers. We had a stimulating conversation about web design, author websites, and the exciting frontier of online book marketing. When This Life Is In Your Hands came out and I saw Coleman’s picture on the book jacket, I was humbled to realize that such a talented author had engaged with me as a peer. This down-to-earth attitude toward fellow writers pervaded Glitterati, where guests had the opportunity to speak with many acclaimed Portland writers such as Michael Paterniti, Sara Corbett, Susan Conley, Lily King, and Monica Wood.

Coleman lives nearby in Freeport, and she says Portland’s “artistic vibrancy” plays a key role in her career. She writes columns for Portland-based Maine Magazine and Maine Home & Design. She also serves as a board member for The Telling Room, a local creative writing center for youth that was cofounded by Conley, Corbett, and Paterniti, all previously featured on this site (Conley, Corbett, Paterniti). The city’s limited distractions and peaceful absence of sensory overload allow her to “hunker down and get her work done.” But on the flip side, “Writing is a lonely thing,” Coleman said. “When I go into town I can always go into one of those offices and have a water-cooler conversation—which you don’t often get as a writer.”

The best writing requires hours of alone time. For writers seeking an environment that actually encourages people to carve such time out of the daily grind, Portland’s attainable personal space and friendly literary community offer an ideal balance. “That’s why so many writers live in Maine,” said Coleman.

You can read an excerpt from This Life Is In Your Hands in O, The Oprah Magazine.

Photo by Corey Michael.
Pictured above (left to right): writers Lily King, Sara Corbett, Melissa Coleman and Monica Wood, at the Glitterati Ball.

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.

The creative economy is more about ideas than stuff. In many cases it’s about ideas about stuff. Whatever the case, one of the main factories for the creative idea is  conversation. And coming up in the next week, Portland will be filled with the kind of discussions and disputations that fuel our creative industry. Unsurprisingly, most of this talking happens at SPACE Gallery and some just down the block at the ICA, and all the events but one are free. Tonight, Thursday, March 10, at SPACE is the sixth annual Slow Food Portland Writers Night. Timed to coincide with Maine Restaurant Week “to further the Maine culinary experience. Writers Night is an evening filled with delicious local foods and engaging readings from authors near and far.” (Doors open at 6:00 pm, starts at 6:30 pm, $25, $20 for Slow Food members, All Ages) Tomorrow night, Friday, March 11, MECA Visiting Artist Ellen Driscoll will give a free pubic lecture at 6pm in the ICA at MECA. “Driscoll’s sculptures, drawings, and installations explore resource consumption and material lineage. Her latest multi-part, multi-year project, FASTFORWARDFOSSIL highlights the relationship between water and oil consumption” She is currently the head of the sculpture department at Rhode Island School of Design. Next week, on Tuesday, March 15, at SPACE, will be the first Creative Conversation of the Spring season. Sponsored by Portland Arts & Cultural Alliance and SPACE, Creative Conversations are “mediated discussions about the Arts from a personal, local, and regional perspective.” Part 1 – Rethinking the Gallery in the Digital Age, asks the questions, “Are galleries still relevant in the age of Etsy, Facebook, and other digital ways to connect artists with collectors? Does the experience of art have the same impact when mediated by a screen? And what about galleries as an intermediary between private studios and large institutions like museums? This discussion will examine the changing nature of the white cube as well as the commodofication of art.” Panelists will include Dan Kany, Bridget McAlonan and Andy Verzosa. (doors open at 6:30 PM, starts at 7:00 PM, Free, All Ages). And two days later at SPACE, on Thursday, March 17, there will be “A Conversation in Writing” between Portland writers Susan Conley and Lily King. “Portland-based writer Susan Conley celebrates the publication of her new memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune, in conversation with award-winning Maine novelist Lily King. The authors will trace their writing process as they share notes on their new books and their friendship and the things they can’t stop writing about. Join us and The Telling Room and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance as we fete these two talented members of our local creative community.” (Doors open at 7:00 pm, starts at 7:30 pm, free, All Ages) My head is bursting just thinking about it all.

Photo by Dennis Stein/SPACE Gallery

Last week, the Obama administration announced a new initiative called Startup America. In a clever video, White House policy wonk  Austan Goolsbee described how this program will help entrepreneurs build a bridge over “the valley of death” that foils the success of many new businesses. And through a miracle of coincidental timing (you think?) the following week is National Entrepreneurship Week, sponsored by the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education, whose motto is, “The Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow… Are in Our Schools Today!” Maine Entrepreneurship Week is in full swing with programs that address meeting the needs of all kinds of startup businesses. Today’s events focus on the creative economy and on supporting and inspiring our young entrepreneurs. The Maine Center for Creativity is hosting a networking event for creative entrepreneurs at Angela Adams, 273 Congress Street, from 5-6:30 pm. Maine entrepreneur Kerem Durdag and the USM College of Science, Technology and Health are holding an event at USM’s Gorham Campus tonight at 6:30 for young entrepreneurs called CreateMaine (more info on their Facebook page). Presenters include Portland creative entrepreneurs Becky McKinnell of iBecCreative, William Sulinski of AccelGolf, Jeff Shaw of Maine Academy of Modern Music and Jason Cianchette of Liquid Wireless. They didn’t wait for the White House, though. They already leaped the valley.