Created on the Bay of Fundy in the tiny town of Eastport, Maine, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art (TIMA) established a wet-foot dry-foot policy early in its inception. All artists would be welcome to show their work and do residencies whether they came from the U.S., from over the border in Canada, from across the mile-wide strait from New Brunswick, or from across the Atlantic Ocean.

That was 15 years ago. Today TIMA and the town of Eastport—population 1,200—are riding high on art and innovation due to the imperative of their locale.

“We developed a Maine and New Brunswick [Canada] task force in 2010 so cultural leaders on both sides of the border could talk and meet. It’s the reason we started the institute,” says Executive Director Hugh French, who is one of TIMA’s founders. “There is too much of a tendency of stopping at the border in the U.S. and Canada while artists are crossing the border. It’s silly not to follow them.”

Interior of TIMA’s 1819 Free Will North Church Project Space with large-scale installation, “Undertow,” by artist, Anna Hepler. Project space has 23-foot high vaulted ceiling and exceptional acoustics. | Photo by Allison Osberg.

Eastport is located on Moose Island and connected to the mainland by a causeway. It sits at the entrance of Passamaquoddy Bay on the border of Canada and is at the most eastern part of the US. It’s a place you might expect to be a little sleepy, at least when it comes to the arts and innovation. But you’d be wrong.

TIMA, whose studio, museum and housing for artist residencies overlook the U.S./Canada boundary, is a beehive of artistic activity. Community renewal, an active residency program, and an aggressively diverse permanent collection are just a few of the parts that make up the institute’s game plan. That diversity is also one reason funding and artists are drawn to the space, French says.

“Early on we felt we had to operate on different interests. Architecture and history, for example,” says French. “Our collection includes painting, photography, architectural elements, a historical collection and a strong interest in contemporary work. We foster new work. That is the reason for our residency program—so contemporary work can be created here.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art| Image courtesy TIMA

Last year’s TIMA’s residency program had nine artists—six from the U.S. and three from abroad. This year the program will host 10-12 artists. This summer a two-year collaboration between Portland, Maine photographer Shoshannah White and Halifax interdisciplinary artist Charley Young will have its premiere in an exhibition in the 1819 church now known as the Free Will North Church Project Space.

TIMA’s main building was the organization’s first regional revitalization effort, a strategy of cross disciplines that began 15 years ago when the organization began. “The long-term effort started with tackling a threatened crippled building in the center of downtown,” says French. “We put $1.2 million to bring the building back. Now we have six buildings.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art New Year’s Eve sardine drop | Image courtesy TIMA

Although Eastport is physically isolated, TIMA and the community are not. The populace comes together every year for “Artsipelago,” an event that includes galleries, chefs, and ferries. To celebrate yet another year of tides, TIMA annually organizes the New Year’s Eve Maple Leaf and Sardine Drop. During that popular event, a giant red maple leaf is lowered at midnight Atlantic time (11pm EST) to commemorate the Canadian new year while a brass band plays “O Canada.” An hour later, when the New Year reaches the States, an 8-foot sardine is lowered as the band plays “Auld Lang Syne.”

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Top image: View from the top of TIMA’s main building with a view of Eastport’s downtown and waterfront – all of the islands in the distance are in Canada. | Image courtesy TIMA

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“Traditional museums are inside out,” says Suzette McAvoy. “They are great temples of art, with formal façades that sit at the top of steps. We break down the barrier and are more welcoming to the community.”

McAvoy, executive director and chief curator of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA), is framed by a backdrop of glass, cement and a jagged, light-emitting roof that mimics the ocean waves two blocks away. After more than five decades in a former firehouse and livery stable, the new CMCA opened this past June, a key component of the current wave of cultural revitalization in Rockland, Maine.

The exterior of the building is galvanized zinc with brushed stainless trim. The exterior glass walls reveal the art inside; there is a courtyard with space for art. Inside, the sightlines are wide enough to really see the art, says Mcvoy. The former space was limited by, “scale and vertical dimensions. Being a 19th Century livery stable, even though renovated, it had structural issues.”

Three contiguous galleries can exhibit the work of three artists or the work of 25 artists, which will be the case this November when CMCA holds its biennial.

McAvoy toured Take just prior to the opening of the new facility.

We enter the empty building via the loading dock and face a long highly polished concrete floor. We are joined by McAvoy’s daughter, Elizabeth, who is home from the Rhode Island School of Design. She once sat for Alex Katz who painted her portrait in his studio in Lincolnville. She was just a kid at the time.

McAvoy motions to a curving front desk leading to a large expanse of wall space. “We’re making art front and center rather than wasting the space with information about the gallery,” she says. The gift shop is tucked away like a Murphy bed.

CMCA executive director Suzette McAvoy | Photo by Amy Wilson

This isn’t your father’s or mother’s art museum. CMCA is an American Kunsthalle, a German term for a building that hosts art exhibitions.

“It makes us nimble,” says McAvoy. “As an exhibition space, we can take a chance on artists, which is what CMCA has always done – and it always works out.” McAvoy ticks off additional benefits to being an exhibition space rather than a museum.

“First of all, museums have permanent collections,” she says. “They require time, effort and expense.”

We walk into the large gallery space and watch the light play on the bare white walls.

“Second,” says McAvoy, “there is the cost and the work of conservation. Then there is the effort to acquire the gifts. And there is the storage, of course.”

We move from one gallery space to another observing through the skylights, a 20-foot sign that says “EAT” in giant letters. It is Robert Indiana’s piece originally created for the 1966 World’s Fair and now on the roof of the Farnsworth Museum next door.

Architect Toshiko Mori designed the CMCA building to capture the light of Penobscot Bay and bestow it on Maine, and Maine-connected, artists who will show there. The new building on Winter Street came into being due to a large bequest by Nellie Taft, descendant of two presidents, a board member of the Whitney and also a painter.

The town of Rockland itself is experiencing a revival. As of six years ago, the little working-class community on the coast was known for sardine processing, but the plant closed and galleries began to migrate north from Portland, 75 miles to the south. There are 25 art galleries in Rockland and three art-making spaces. New restaurants, coffee roasters, a bakery or two, and consignment shops compete for business a block from the waterfront. New boutique hotels opened over the summer, constructed by boat builders. Another new hotel acts as a gallery, catering to the type of clientele that might be inclined to purchase a five figure painting, it has art for sale as well as rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the bay.

“The final thing to fall into place was the availability of a piece of property right next to the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland,” says McAvoy.  She expects foot traffic to improve now CMCA is in the heart of what is beginning to look like the new center for art in Maine.

Prior to her engagement with CMCA in 2010, McAvoy was head curator of the Farnsworth Museum, which specializes in art related to Maine and to the art of the Wyeth family.

“I gave Jamie a little tour earlier this week,” she said of the surviving member of the art dynasty. “He thought it was wonderful.”

Artists are a natural resource in a state where paintings have been made from points along the coasts by the likes of Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer and NC, Andrew and Jamie Wyeth.

Along the craggy coastline of Maine there are pocket beaches where stones get caught within the embrace of bedrock. Time and the tide polish the stones to a deep luster. Some stones are veined with white quartz.

These objects of beauty are prized by jewelry makers and have even been confiscated at airports by officials. Protected from jewelry-making predators, the stones are considered natural resources, like Maine’s painters. Year after year artists return for the Maine light to paint. Their work gains luster; the artists sometimes gain fame.

First to exhibit in CMCA’s main gallery was an artist who lives and works in Maine but had never shown in the state before. Jonathan Borofsky is a busy man on the international art circuit in Berlin, Korea, the Beijing Olympics. He agreed to create work for the new CMCA building’s inaugural show when he had a look at the looming main gallery space with 26-foot ceilings. The 50′ x 52′ space is the exact size of his studio in Ogunquit and the light from the vertical windows in the sawtooth roof brought back memories.

Interior CMCA | artist Jonathan Borofsky | Photo by Amy Wilson

“It was exactly like the kunsthalle in Basel,” he says, referring to an installation in Switzerland called Dreams 1973-81. Borofsky is best known for his series of massive site-specific sculptures “Hammering Man” in Frankfort and “Molecule Man” in Berlin.

The sculptor’s work is sometimes towering totems of abstracted figures in galvanized steel and polished aluminum, sometimes painted, sometimes not.

“The reason for this show at the new CMCA is for people to look at great art,” says Borofsky. “Not to show it or sell it.”

Borofsky says his work is of a spiritual nature. His initial inspiration was Gauguin. “When I first saw the Gauguin painting “Where do we come from? What are we doing? Where are we going?” as a kid, I realized I could do that, I could find out the answers to those questions. Gauguin gave me permission.”

The other two exhibitors to open CMCA were Alex Katz and Rollin Leonard, both Maine summer residents. Katz exhibited a series of “direct” paintings, a first pass at his 9” x 12” oil portraits in oil and Leonard, a virtual unknown, exhibited a multi-media work called “Vernal Pond.”

Programming for CMCA also includes ArtLab, which focuses on the local community, with classes and workshops for students and adults.

“The exhibits support the programming,” says McAvoy. “We exhibit to serve the educational programming. That exposes people to art who wouldn’t normally have access to shows of this work.”

When asked if the light is really what draws artists to Maine, McAvoy responds that it is the light and also the affordability of the wilds of Maine. And one other thing.

“Painters come here because of the light but also because of the isolation,” she said. “Maine is where the work gets done.”

Top Image: Installation of Particle Soul-014, 2016 | CMCA courtyard | (From L to R) executive director Suzette McAvoy, artist Jonathan Borofsky  | Photo by Amy Wilton

The post An American Kunsthall appeared first on Take Magazine.

The scene inside Mezze Bistro + Bar in Williamstown, Massachusetts at 9:45 p.m. is a lively one. Inside the high-ceilinged room where everybody seems to know one another, a woman with an air of Kim Gordon cool offers wine to a couple camped out in a corner banquette. She is Mezze co-owner Nancy Thomas, and her next stop is the table of five where the patriarch holding forth is Kim Wells, the farmer responsible for the evening’s pork belly special.

Seated at the bar is a guy who raised the cow that provided the milk for one of the night’s cheese selections, Maggie’s Reserve. It was his father, a Williams College economics professor, who in the 1990s took sophomore Bo Peabody, Mezze’s future co-owner, under his wing. Together they created Tripod, an early social-networking startup that would sell several years later in a deal that made Peabody a very wealthy 26-year-old.

Like many tech titans, Peabody existed on take-out. Unlike many tech titans, however, he decided to open a food enterprise in the Berkshires that was a pioneer of farm-to-table dining in the region. In partnership with restaurateur Thomas, his focus on local food back in 1996 was something that the tech world would call an early-adopter play. Today, Mezze Restaurant Group operates the Bistro as well as Allium Restaurant + Bar in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in addition to a catering and event-planning business.

Pork belly, lentils, sprouts, apple cider and watercress at Mezze Bistro + Bar | Photo by Nicholas Moulton

“It’s nice to be in a business where you get to witness customer satisfaction in a real and immediate way,” Peabody says. “In the technology business, it’s all so virtual, and the gratification is often delayed.” He still launches successful technology enterprises as a partner in the venture capital firms Greycroft Partners and Village Ventures, of which he is also a co-founder.

Farm-to-table, nose-to-tail dining – with its inherent high food costs for organic produce and pasture-raised animals, and the skill level required to work with both – isn’t for the faint of heart. There is blight. There are uneven seasons.
Thomas takes it in stride. “I like to say I was a punk-rock kid who is scrappy and enjoys guerrilla survival tactics,” she says.

On March 9, it was showtime for the Mezze Restaurant Group, which presented “Berkshires’ First Taste of Spring Dinner” – fittingly after one of the worst New England winters ever – at the esteemed James Beard House in New York City. There was no room for error, and Thomas’ team was ready. The microgreens were “living” – still planted in their flat from Mill River Farm – and snipped to order on site. The lamb for “Lila’s Mountain Lamb, Quince and Fennel Marmellata” was raised especially for the meal.

James Beard, chef and champion of American cuisine, once famously said, “The only thing that will make a soufflé fall is if it knows you’re afraid of it.” Thomas and her team, led by Mezze chef Nicholas Moulton and Allium chef Daire Rooney, were not afraid.

“Our two kitchen teams came together to share space, cooked their hearts out, and celebrated the moment,” Thomas recalls. “It was a night to remember shared by family, friends, and farmers.”

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