Out-there art’s New Hampshire home Wrong Brain, a Dover, New Hampshire, nonprofit, gets a lot right about art. Whether it’s hosting discussions like “Art & Mental Illness” and exhibitions like This Is What TRANS Feels Like, or producing the Wrong Brain Bizaare, an alternative arts and crafts fair, Wrong Brain is an outlet for unconventional and underrepresented artists, writers, and musicians. “It exists to fill a void in the creative community,” says founder Sam Paolini.

Sam Paolini and Adam Gouveia, Get to the Gig, Wrong Brain poster

Paolini founded Wrong Brain as a 15-year-old high school student seeking an alternative outlet to her conventional art education. Meeting at her family’s New Hampshire home, Paolini and other young artists and musicians created zines to showcase their creative talents. After the unexpected death of one of its original members, the group established Wrong Brain as a nonprofit in 2015. “From there, it’s evolved into whatever we felt was lacking in the current community,” explains Paolini.

Sam Paolini and Adam Gouveia, Grand Opening, Wrong Brain poster

Wrong Brain has struck a chord: thousands of area creatives have contributed artistic and musical talents to its efforts, from zines to art exhibits. “There aren’t a lot of opportunities on the New Hampshire Seacoast for people who don’t want to pursue commercial work,” Paolini says. “This really is a labor of love.”

Wrong Brain
Dover, New Hampshire
Website

Top image: detail of a poster created for Wrong Brain’s Spring Bizaare by Sam Paolini

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Artist Ethan Hayes–Chute thinks a lot about the spaces we inhabit and how we experience them. His three-dimensional installations, built from salvaged wood and other materials, reflect his thoughts on self-sufficiency, self-preservation, accumulation, and nature. “I’m enchanted with working in different mediums, at different scales, and offering different entry points for people to encounter my work,” he says. His current work, a photographic series called Beacons, is part of We Might Climb a Tree, at Least, an exhibition celebrating naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (MMPA) through January 27th, 2018.

The photos in Beacons, shot in the woods surrounding Hayes-Chute’s family camp on Lake Sebec in central Maine, juxtapose the familiar (ordinary household lamps) with the ominous (a dark forest). Each lamp, pictured hanging from a tree, creates a small, familiar circle of light. “My inspiration for the series happened by accident,” Hayes-Chute says. “I was working outside at the camp with a lamp and was really taken by the light’s interaction with the leaves against the darkness.”

A builder and maker during his childhood in Freeport, Maine, Hayes-Chute became fascinated constructing small sculptures and miniatures as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. His family (his father, James Chute, is an artist who recommended the Beacons series to MMPA Director Denise Froehlich) and experiences growing up in Maine are reflected in his art. “The settings and similarities I create or recreate from imagination and my family history creep in quite often in my work,” says Hayes-Chute. “I’m always happy to have those moments.”

From the series Beacons, 2015, Digital C-Print, 18 x 27 inches. Photo courtesy of Ethan Hayes-Chute. 

Last year, Hayes-Chute used his maker skills to explore familiarity in a space, building a room-size workshop — complete with with workbench, tools, and assorted odds and ends — in an installation at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. More recently, with collaborator and Finnish performance artist Dafna Maimon, he combined large-scale installation with performance art by creating Camp Solong. It’s an immersive three-day summer camp for adults emphasizing play, community, and the universality of saying “goodbye,” whether to others or to one’s emotional baggage.

Camp Solong, Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016 – (ongoing), as seen in the garden of Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2016 Photo by Mike Terry

Hayes-Chute and Maimon built the camp, a one-walled cabin with a roof, platform, and eight bunk beds with a table and benches, which pops up each summer in different locations, including Finland and Germany (Hayes-Chute hopes to bring it to Maine). “I always wanted to integrate performance in to my work and activate my own structures,” Hayes-Chute notes. “Dafna and I came up with the idea of summer camp through discussions about how people need to learn how to empathize and communicate with each other.”

Hayes-Chute is also experimenting with video. His “New Domestic Woodshop,” a humorous riff on popular do-it-yourself television shows and YouTube videos, was developed for CONGLOMERATE TV, a collaborative project in Berlin. As the host, Eth, Hayes-Chute uses the many materials he has in his workshop to solve minor problems (for example, in this video, how to create a lap desk that enables him to work from bed). His next project is creating an experience around making customized cooking spices, a theme touched on in his installation at the List.

Whether it’s video, performance art, or large-scale installations, Hayes-Chute is still tinkering. “I want people to see these collections of objects and have the experience of seeing something familiar,” he says.

Ethan Hayes-Chute, Artist
Freeport, Maine/Berlin, Germany
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Top image: List Projects: Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016, installation view at MIT LIST Visual Arts Center, wood, found objects. Photo by Peter Harris Studio

The post If You Build It appeared first on Take Magazine.

Experimentation and connectivity are the foundation of Jackie Brown’s artistic process. The Maine artist works with malleable materials like clay, plaster, foam, and concrete to create immersive experiences that express her ideas about nature, science, and the interconnection of living systems. Her colorful organic sculptures are part of Materiality: The Matter of Matter, an exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) through February 11, 2018. “Each artist (in the exhibit) engages matter in different ways and examines the relationship between materials,” Brown says. “That’s a huge part of what I do.”

Brown plays with structure, a concept reflected in the synthesis of her work. Her sculptures are imagined biological systems. “I generate a lot of parts that I combine in to larger forms,” she says. “I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of sculpture and 3D. It helps me look at what’s under the surface of things.”

The connections between various living systems have fascinated Brown since she was an undergraduate at Hamilton College, taking classes in biology, philosophy and psychology. “That was the beginning,” she says. “I made connections between different subjects I studied and I really got involved with process and material.” At first she worked on images of the human figure; her art evolved after she discovered the work of neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks, noted for his writing and research about the human brain. “I was really excited about his work,” she says.

Jackie Brown in Mutated Growth installation

Sacks’ writings inspired Brown’s preternatural “Brain Fruit” series, created using, among other materials, plaster molds of wrinkled Osage oranges (the series is part of the installation by Brown in the Materiality exhibition, each with their own visual language but all ultimately united conceptually). The forms are both grotesque and playful. “I was interested in creating something that was otherworldly but also imaginative and playful,” Brown says. “The colors counterbalance the grotesque qualities. It makes you think: is this a healthy growth? Harmful? Benign or ambiguous?”

Brain Fruit

Brown is also an educator. Three years ago, she joined the art faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, as an assistant art professor. She’s on sabbatical this year, combining extended studio time with residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana and at Emmanuel College in Boston. Her new work – “It’s so new I don’t really have a handle on it yet,” she says – is influenced by Maine. “My work is really shifting because of the landscape here and my interest in human interaction with living systems.” She trusts her materials and process to shape the final result.

Jackie Brown, artist
Brunswick, Maine
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Top image: Part of the Mutated Growth series. Photos courtesy of Jackie Brown

The post Playfully Connected appeared first on Take Magazine.

Quilts are tangible records of American life, a tactile method of storytelling. Anna Von Mertens’ bold conceptual quilts tell more than stories: they’re hand-dyed, hand-stitched reflections on existential questions about time and space. “Time plays a key role in my work,” she says. “I’m drawn to existential or time-based scientific data. Looking, observing, quantifying and naming—it’s not dissimilar to the artistic process of looking and seeing.”

Originally a printmaker, Von Mertens, who lives and works in Peterborough, New Hampshire, received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. She stitched her first quilt in college and was transformed. “I just fell in love with the medium,” she says. “There are all these associations with quilts and if you take an idea, then translate it through quilting, you see things in a different way.” Von Mertens explored her passion in the textile department at the California College of the Arts, receiving a master’s degree in fine art.

Marriage and family eventually brought her back to Peterborough and the east coast. She explored the dichotomy between her east coast roots and west coast sensibilities in an early quilt series called North, South, East, West, depicting each region as energy patterns; the east coast was portrayed as a black hole. “I saw the east coast as an introverted landscape and the west coast as extroverted,“ she says, “but it wasn’t meant to be a definitive statement.”

Jupiter Rising, January 7, 1610, Padua, Italy, 2008, hand-stitched, hand-dyed cotton, 54 x 100 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo by Don Tuttle.

Her studio, in a former textile mill in Harrisville, New Hampshire, helps create a sense of place. “It’s a wonderful place to work and the history feels very present,“ she says. “I’m in a section where the textile looms were.”

Von Mertens uses scientific phenomena to interpret events, thorougly researching and immersing herself in a subject before, and while, creating her work. She designs her patterns on a computer, then uses a projector to transfer the patterns to hand-dyed fabric, outlining them in chalk; then she stitches the outlines. Her favorite body of work mapped stars above violent historic events in U.S. history, such as September 11, 2001 and the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. “It links these questions of time and our place and perspective to it,” she says. “I sited the viewer at the act of violence in a way you’re removed from it but in the moment.”

Bacchus’ aura, after Caravaggio, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 39 3/4 x 33 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Don Tuttle photo

Her next project is inspired by her daughter’s fascination with phone emojis. “I’m looking at emojis and how they’ve become a language we’re making together,” she says. “My daughter thinks they’re amazing. It’s like a visual art language.”

Von Mertens’ work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, among others. Upcoming shows include Shape/View, the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon, September 6-30, 2017; and Another Time, Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, November 1-December 17, 2017.

Anna Von Mertens–Artist
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Website

Top image: The Duke and Duchess of Urbino’s auras, after Piero della Francesca, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 18 x 13 in. (each). Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo credit Don Tuttle.

The post A Stitch in Time appeared first on Take Magazine.

Portland artist Daniel Minter has many talents: painter, sculptor, illustrator, teacher, community leader. The common thread is his desire to create. “I’ve always considered myself someone who makes things,” he says.

Minter, who is African American, is busy, both as a working artist and illustrator, and as an instructor at Maine College of Art. His paintings and sculptures have been exhibited internationally; his colorful woodcut prints illuminate 11 children’s books (another book, a story about Sojourner Truth, is in the works). He’s also designed two Kwanzaa stamps for the U.S. Postal Service.

But when Minter is not creating art or teaching, he’s an advocate, connecting artists of color and helping preserve the legacy of African-Americans in Maine through his work on the Maine Freedom Trails and the historically significant Abyssinian Meeting House, Maine’s oldest African-American church building, on Portland’s Munjoy Hill.

Fire In the Water

Minter is founding director of the Maine Freedom Trails and the visionary behind the bas relief signage along the Portland Freedom Trail, a walking tour of sites related to the Underground Railroad and the Abolitionist movement. This May, he organized an exhibition called A Distant Holla at the Abyssinian Meeting House, helping bring attention to stalled preservation efforts for the site, an important gathering spot for Portland’s African-American community in the 19th century. The month-long exhibition showcased other works by African-American artists, including David Driskell and Ashley Bryan, ranging from ages 18 to 90.

Bringing together artists of color is the work Minter is most proud of these days. He’s the force behind the Portland-based Black Artist Forum, with particular focus on nurturing and supporting younger artists. “We’re trying to create an artists’ group that can grow and be a resource for artists of color all across Maine,” Minter says. “A Distant Holla was an opportunity to show our art in a context consistent with our own work.”

Waiting for Omolu

Minter, who moved to Maine from Chicago more than a decade ago with his wife and son, also recognizes Portland’s potential as a welcoming community for artists. “I feel like it’s my responsibility to make this a healthy environment for younger artists,” he says. “We need the continuing support of the city and local businesses to support the interests of artists and recognize they’re important to Portland and important to its economy.”

Context and connection are important to Minter. Growing up in Georgia, he was encouraged by a high school art teacher to pursue art in college. He graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta and worked for more than a decade as a graphic designer. He began showing his personal art in the late 1980s, moved to share the context of his cultural experience with others. “It’s my responsibility as an artist to create things for other people in the community just as it is my responsibility as a fine artist to recognize and interpret things I see in the community,” he says.

A pivotal point in Minter’s career was visiting Brazil in the early 1990s, the result of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Minter was already experimenting with images in his art of okra, cotton, and wedding brooms, symbols of the African American experience in the South. He was amazed to discover these same images represented the African and Caribbean experience in South America. “I didn’t realize the significance of the choices I made putting these images in my work,” Minter says. “Brazil gave me context for the spiritual imagery I was searching for and wanted to put into my work.”

Okra

Despite being an African-American artist in a state that’s predominately white, Minter believes the rural aesthetic he employs in his art is similar to that of other Maine artists. “A lot of creativity here is inspired by the natural environment and rural sensibilities and so is my art,” he says. “I don’t see those as so different. The earth is the earth.”

In New England, Daniel Minter’s work can be viewed at Greenhut Galleries in Portland.

Daniel Minter, Artist
Portland, Maine
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Top image, Cotton Trio. All Photos courtesy of Greenhut Galleries.

The post Making Art, Building Connections appeared first on Take Magazine.

Scott Kelley is an artist who enjoys telling stories. Kelley, who lives and works on Peaks Island, Maine, creates meticulously-detailed watercolor and gouache paintings of animals, birds, and other objects from nature. His work mixes fact with fiction, from woodland animals wearing Native American garb to portraits of children juxtaposed with 19th century whaling images. “I’ve always thought of my gallery exhibits as operas complete with a cast of characters from a libretto,” he says.

Kelley’s “characters” are the often unseen (or forgotten) objects that are emblematic of New England and the shoreline—beach stones, quahog shells, herons, fish. Born in Binghamton, New York, Kelley knew at age five that he wanted to be an artist. Although he was naturally drawn to the style of American realist painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Rockwell Kent, Kelley was schooled in minimalism at The Cooper Union in New York City (he also attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London and did post-graduate work at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston). “Realism was frowned upon when I was in college in the 1980s,” he says, although he believes his minimalist training enables him to add multiple layers of meaning to his work. “I find that my paintings have meanings that aren’t apparent to viewers and I can still tell stories,” he says.

Living on Long Island in the early 1990s, Kelley was inspired by the natural world around him, on the beach and in the water. He created highly detailed, straightforward paintings of rocks and shells. One day, when he and his wife Gail were out sailing, he saw a pair of blue herons and was moved to paint them as well, generating a whole series of works about birds. In 2003, he was artist-in-residence for a month at the Palmer Station in Antarctica, painting penguins and local wildlife.

Diamond Beaver, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 55” x 48”

Concepts for Kelley’s works can take years to develop, shaped by his love of history and nature. Maine, in particular, strongly influences his work. “To me, Maine is a specific mindset,” Kelley says. “It’s a place with a number of personalities that are hard to attach to. It’s intriguing.” The state‘s personality is evident in his whaling series, which started as a group of paintings of whales and morphed into an eight-year project based on the history of American whaling. It includes scrimshaw of whales on reclaimed ivory (old piano keys) and portraits of Peaks Island children in period clothing or holding whaling artifacts.

Chaos Bear, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 22” x 30″

Kelley’s most recent work is Birch, a limited-edition children’s book adapted from a Wabanaki folk tale about a birch tree who protects the forest. The project was inspired by Kelley’s portraits of animals, depicted as Wabanaki tribal elders. “I wanted to create a story the animals in my studio could inhabit,” he says (the book will be released nationally as I Am Birch in spring 2018). “I love places where nature rubs up against modern-day civilization.” It’s a story that, true to Kelley’s inquisitive nature, he’s explored in-depth.

Scott Kelley’s art work is on view at Dowling Walsh Gallery, Sigrid Freundorfer Fine Art, W.M. Brady & Co., and John H. Surovek Gallery.

Scott Kelley, artist
Peaks Island, Maine
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Top image: “Whale,” watercolor and gouache on paper, 57” X 84”, by Scott Kelley. All images courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery.

The post Mixing Fact with Fiction appeared first on Take Magazine.

Exeter, New Hampshire, is only ten miles, yet seemingly worlds away, from Portsmouth—long considered the Seacoast’s creative hub. A picturesque town best known for being home to Phillips Exeter Academy and the state capital during the American Revolution, Exeter is now a destination for artists, musicians, and other creatives priced out of Portsmouth.

“There are people here making a living as artists and musicians, and residents who have never seen or heard their work,” says Scott Ruffner, an Exeter native and local realtor who’s also a musician and an ardent advocate for the town’s artistic culture. The founder of the Arts Industry Alliance and its community initiative TEAM (Town Exeter Arts Music)—nonprofits supporting local independent and emerging artists—Ruffner helps organize the town’s First Friday art and music walks and the Exeter Arts & Music Fest, gathering local talent to perform on Swasey Parkway, a downtown park.

On the west side of town, visitors are discovering Art Up Front Street, an artists’ collective owned by Rose Bryant and her husband, Mal Argondizza. Combining studio and gallery space, it’s the first venture of its kind in the area. “I think creative people in Exeter are starved for someplace to land,” Bryant states.

Not far away, Alan and Joanie Mason are transforming a former turn-of-the-century dance shoe factory into artist studios and industrial workspaces. Painter Bradley Castellanos, who relocated to Exeter from New York City last year, is one of two artists currently renting space.

Established local venues are using art to build community, including Phillips Exeter Academy, whose new center for theater and dance is slated to open in 2018. The school’s Lamont Gallery spotlighted regional artists this summer with the exhibition Neighboring in a temporary space downtown. Audiences are also flocking to live music and spoken-word events at the Word Barn, an intimate performance space inside an antique barn on the outskirts of town.

As the creative community grows, so does downtown Exeter, with its quaint nineteenth-century storefronts and restaurants. Dining options run the gamut, including savory quinoa bowls at Laney & Lu Café; lattes at D2 Java; burgers and pizza at Station 19; and local seafood at Otis, located in a former jewelry store.

To Ruffner, the changes confirm his sense that the town is on the edge of something big. “Exeter is on the cusp of something. We’re ready to shake things up a bit.”

Exeter, New Hampshire
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Top illustration by Rachel Sumpter

The post Take Place: Enter Exeter appeared first on Take Magazine.

Bradley Castellanos’ meticulously layered, cinematic landscapes are comparable to the romantic images painted by famed Hudson River School artists—with a twist. Like the 19th century painters whose landscapes reflected concepts of sublime and beauty, Castellanos is fascinated by people’s effect on the landscape. But his thought-provoking, collaged landscapes are more abstract than idyllic. “My work is about celebrating the landscape and what’s unique about it,” he says.

Nature has always been part of Castellanos’ identity so it’s no surprise that the natural world is reflected in his art. Born in Connecticut, he grew up on Florida’s east coast. He trained as a painter, first at Skidmore College and later he received a master’s in fine art from New York City’s School of Visual Arts. In 2016, after living and working in Brooklyn for many years, he and his wife, artist Allison Hawkins, moved with their two daughters to Exeter, New Hampshire. His white-walled, spacious studio, located in a low-slung industrial building, is less distracting than the hustle-bustle of New York City. “The quiet and focus I have here is new,” he says.

Blue Moon, 2016, Acrylic and photo collage on paper mounted on panel 45” x 36”, photo courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE NY 2017.

Castellanos researches and photographs landscapes and structures that interest him; he stages his scene and shoots with a digital camera, using it like a sketching tool. The images are digitally manipulated and collaged, then artfully cut with an X-Acto blade and glued on wood. He then further re-works the image with oil or acrylic paint. The result is a series of highly textured and layered abstractions, both familiar and imagined. “My images may be inspired by the neighborhood, or coming upon something bizarre in the landscape,” Castellanos says. “They’re a play between abstraction and landscape.”

Castellanos’ early work captures desolate, even apocalyptic, images of New York City and the Northeast United States. His urban cityscapes and industrial landscapes were shot using a large format camera. He’s since transitioned to creating more lush, evocative landscapes, reflected in his most recent solo exhibition, Sunshine State, at Manhattan’s Ryan Lee Gallery this past June.

Hunting is Painting, 2017, Oil, acrylic, and photo collage on panel, 47.25” x 60.25”, photo courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE NY, 2017

Although he’s only been in New Hampshire a year, the state’s forested landscape and historic architecture has already impacted his work. Castellanos’ family has vacationed on Lake Winnipesaukee for generations and their lakeside cabin has inspired several paintings. He’s currently creating a series of figurative works. “I think I’m producing the tightest and most technical work now,” he says. “My latest work is always, to me, my most exciting work.”

Bradley Castellanos–artist
Exeter, New Hampshire
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Top image installation view of Sunshine State at RYAN LEE, NY, 2017. All images courtesy the artist and RYAN LEE, NY.

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The stairway leading up to Margery Thomas-Mueller’s light-filled studio is lined with sketches: people, animals, plants. Most are by the artist; a few are by her grandchildren. Thomas-Mueller calls them a visual diary. “Until the last few years, I never had the consistency of creating art every day,” she says. “I wanted continuity and that’s how I came up with the idea of doing a sketch a day.”

Continuity is a major theme in Thomas-Mueller’s large, atmospheric landscape paintings. Her work reflects her life experiences: a successful Jewish businesswoman, wife, mother, and grandmother who’s lived in 18 different places. “All of my life is in my drawings,” she says. “I feel the traversing of life.”

Broken Landscape 2, Margery Thomas-Mueller

Thomas-Mueller grew up on Long Island. As a child, she was fascinated by nature, spending hours lying under, and observing, a pear tree in her family’s yard (she later created a series of pear paintings). “Landscape always represented who I was as a child and nature has always centered me,” she says. So did art. Her high school art teacher told her father she was a talented artist. “And that was it: my father said ‘Margie will be an artist’,” Thomas-Mueller says. She took art classes at New York City”s prestigious Art Students League, majored in painting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and later studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Art in Italy.

Thomas-Mueller’s first husband, Nathan, was an architect who introduced her to interior design, the occupation she would pursue professionally for 40 years. She built a successful career in residential and commercial interior design, eventually launching Margery Thomas and Associates in New York City and raising three daughters. She didn’t have time to paint regularly. Then, in the late 2000s, she met and married Bob Mueller, a former Bank of New York executive. In 2012, she shuttered her design business and the couple moved to New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where Bob had a home.

It took a while to find her footing—“I went from ringing phones to complete quiet,” Thomas-Mueller says—but she now paints full-time from her studio in a red, barn-style building that houses Bob’s antique boat collection on the first floor. In 2013, the first exhibition of her work appeared at the Works Gallery in Manhattan. She’s subsequently had several solo shows and been accepted into national and international juried shows and sold her work to private clients.

Diptych 1, Margery Thomas-Mueller

True to her childhood inspiration, Thomas-Mueller creates evocative, abstracted landscapes. She works primarily in India ink and graphite on YUPO, a plastic paper that has no tooth (she uses wax to finish each work). “YUPO has amazing texture and is flexible,” she says. “You can work on it with any medium and wipe it clean. It’s not permanent and, to me, that’s a statement. It’s like our constantly evolving landscape and the lack of permanence in the world today.”

Thomas-Mueller’s paintings are large: many are  50” x 100” and larger. Works in progress hang on her studio wall; she paints standing on a rolling ladder. She recently started adding people to her landscapes, which she’s described as “the thickets we stumble through to find a path.” She’s excited about her work’s future path. “I knew my work would change over the years,” she says. “Part of the excitement is wondering where I’m going. It’s energizing.”

Margery Thomas-Mueller’s art work is on view at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery.

Margery Thomas-Mueller
Alton, New Hampshire
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Top image, Six Pieces, courtesy of Margery Thomas-Mueller

The post Life as Art appeared first on Take Magazine.

If he’d been a better baseball player, Junichi Fukuda might never have discovered dance.
Fukuda, whose fluid, athletic style characterizes his interpretative performances, is a dancer, choreographer, and founder of Fukudance, a contemporary dance company based in Boston, Massachusetts. He’s performed nationally and internationally with prestigious choreographers like Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, and Jacqulyn Buglisi, and danced with companies from Boston to San Francisco. Currently, he’s interested in bringing more contemporary dance performance to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. To that end, this summer Fukuda is featured in the “Second Eye” series at 3S Artspace, which invites visitors to experience Fukuda’s interpretation—through dance—of the gallery’s current art exhibit.

As a teen, Fukuda played competitive baseball in his native Japan. “I was the third-best player on the team. I didn’t think I had a chance, so I quit,” Fukuda says. Instead, he became intrigued with breakdancing, which was sweeping 1990s Japan. “My friends and I started mimicking the videos and commercials we saw,” he says. “Then we started looking for outdoor spaces to dance in.”

Junichi Fukuda, photo by Nikki Carrara

His curiosity about the genre ultimately led him to the U.S. After graduating from the Boston Conservatory, he played with a variety of dance styles, from classical ballet and Baroque to contemporary. As a member of Ballet Tech/NY, Fukuda worked with famed choreographer Eliot Feld, whose distinctive style melding ballet and contemporary dance later influenced his own performances. “His style is ballet-based, but in his own way,” says Fukuda. “He taught me how to get deeper into my performance. He was always looking for something new.”

Fukuda moved to Portsmouth with his wife and son several years ago. He keeps a full schedule. This summer, he was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, pursuing a master’s degree in choreography with Jacksonville University.

His performances at 3S Artspace, which continue through September, take interpretive dance to another level. He uses art work to inspire a short dance and then welcomes the audience to share their feelings about what they watched. Then Fukuda reviews the comments and dances again. “It enables the audience to witness process and how perception and context influence a dancer’s expression,” he says. “I’m trying to get audiences familiarized with contemporary dance.”

Ultimately, Fukuda hopes to cultivate that audience. “I’m interested in exploring movement in new ways,” he muses. “I’m trying to craft dances as an outsider looking in.” Time will tell if Fukuda’s hit a home run.

Junichi Fukuda–dancer/choreographer
Portsmouth, New Hampshire/Boston, Massachusetts
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Top image by Nikki Carrara

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