Named president in the spring of 2017, the journalist, creative entrepreneur, and world traveler Laura Freid is in her first full semester at the helm of Portland’s Maine College of Art, the state’s sole accredited visual arts institution. The former publisher of Harvard Magazine, who last year ended a 12-year run as CEO of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad project where she traveled for 4,280 days with a troupe of 30 classical musicians, artists, and production staff performing through the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Freid has lived a lot of lives.

As she charts the next path for the private arts institution in the heart of the fast-growing port city, we spoke with her about empathy, political responsibility, and how to get artists and businesspeople to play together.

Take: You have a degree in philosophy of aesthetics, you wrote the narrative for Silkroad’s The Music of Strangers documentary, and you traveled for 12 years with a touring troupe of classical musicians. Do you think of yourself as an academic or an artist?

Laura Freid: I like to illustrate without words what cultural harmony would look like. I feel like once people get attached to something, like an idea, they can’t see another person’s point of view—particularly when using words. Through art or music is how to get people’s hearts engaged. I feel like I’m still a storyteller. I’m very visual, but I have a standard of excellence that’s higher than my mind-hand coordination. Growing up, I was always asking, Why is that? Why does it inspire us? Why is it something that gives us hope? We all need hope. It’s an existential quest.

T: Can you walk us through how you first connected with Yo-Yo Ma?
LF: I wrote an article about Yo-Yo and other thought leaders for Bostonia Magazine. At the end of the interview, I asked, ‘What do you really want to do beyond being the best cellist in the world?’ He said, ‘Y’know, I really want to unite the world through music.’

He had studied anthropology at Harvard and is fascinated by people and cultures. Years later, he called and asked, ‘So, do you wanna do that thing?’ A friend who is an art historian had described the idea as a kind of Silk Road, where people a thousand years ago couldn’t speak the same language but they’d share or trade art along the road. That’s what this is really all about.

So I became the CEO. I’m not a musician; he didn’t need another musician. I worked on the story—what happens when strangers meet, when we look for something in common. We think of classical music as starting in Italy in the 1700s, but in China, Persia, and India, classical music started thousands of years ago. Nobody remembers who the kings were or what the politics were at the time. You remember Beethoven or Mick Jagger or DaVinci. Art is the through-line that connects our cultures.

T: What was it that attracted you to MECA?
LF: The musicians we worked with who were in their twenties when we started were now in their forties, many of them with children of their own now. I realized that I really like that 18-to 24-year-old time period where everything comes together and you become this person you are today. I wanted to get back to student creativity and help artists in this crazy world where the economy doesn’t support creative art makers very well. I started asking, couldn’t we have some creative entrepreneurship? Couldn’t we encourage people who have money and people who are creative to start working together in their twenties and not in their sixties? There were patrons of the arts years ago. And up until recently there was a lot of government support. In our country, art has corporate support, but corporate support started eroding 10 years ago after the financial crisis and it has been a free-for-all since then. I wanted to encourage that creative entrepreneurship.

I got a call about MECA, and I thought their mission statement sounds like mine—artistic excellence, creative entrepreneurship, artists at work. I didn’t even really know about the college. I think people in Maine are really aware that it’s Maine’s only accredited visual arts college, but it would benefit if people beyond Maine knew about it.

I went through orientation with the first-year students. Entering students can decide to take one of six courses. One is “A Field Guide to the New World.” It talks about new ideas and solutions for the changing environment and they read [Rebecca Solnit’s] A Field Guide to Getting Lost. They include fundamental drawing, painting, and bookmaking in their eventual field guide, but start in the environment. Another is called “Slow Fashion: Fibrous Fashion and the Farm.” Just like slow cooking, this is about how to connect fashion close to the fabric and the dyes. Another is “Species of Spaces,” which asks what are the characteristics of the spaces we inhabit? How do our senses affect our experiences with them? Why am I claustrophobic and you’re not? All end results of these courses are drawing and writing and abstract art-making, but it starts with these kinds of essential questions.

Spring Fashion Show at MECA’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), part of the annual MECAmorphosis event celebrating student thesis work. Photo by Kyle Dubay.

T: With Silkroad, you worked on a global scale, forming partnerships with RISD and Harvard Business School. Why?
LF: I really like artist environments. My thought was that we could connect the Harvard campus through the arts. Traditionally, Harvard had not been into the practice of the arts. It’s very theoretical, very academic. It turned out to be a great collaboration, and as I started thinking about the business-art connection, we created a challenge for artists and businesspeople to work together and create new ideas.

T: Did the cross-pollination of artists and businesspeople take off immediately?
LF: Y’know, there’s some natural antipathy toward suits [among artists]. There’s a creative versus business, church-and-state feeling. From business too. I think with any cross-cultural navigation, you have to develop trust. The musicians did some instant concerts, where Silkroad musicians including a bagpiper from Galicia, Spain, a drummer from India, and a sheng player from China would perform on campus, and then we’d have a conversation about it. Turns out a lot of students at the Harvard Business School come from different cultures and were really excited for that conversation. First you have to establish trust, and then have some fun together, get to know each other, and then you can start working together.

T: How do you see MECA students integrating into the community post-graduation?
LF: I think we’re lucky that Jessica Tomlinson and the Artists at Work office here encourages internships and experiences. I’ve been to some campuses that are beautiful, but [students] aren’t near any cities—they’re in a cocoon. That can be a great way to learn, but if you’re an artist learning in an urban environment, you’re interning, you’re performing, you’re doing public art, you’re speaking at the museum.

When I interviewed here, I stayed at the Press Hotel. Erin Hutton [class of ’98; artist and director of special projects at the ICA at MECA] did the typewriter display there. Have you seen it?

T: That’s the most memorable thing about that place!
LF: I used to use one of those typewriters. I wish I still had it. I love to look at edits on old manuscripts and rare books. I miss looking at old drafts in the digital age.

T: I know, there’s just a flattening of experience with computers.
LF: Yeah, the texture of creativity is gone.

T: Yeah. I find that it’s hard to recall information that I process through a computer because I’m always in the same position when I’m consuming it.
LF: There’s some research I just read about that. I googled it, and there’s definitely less retention of information if you’re taking notes on a computer. My first articles were all written by hand in coffee shops. I think it’s a romantic notion, but it actually helps retention, too.

T: I read a distressing thing about how humans are losing their facial empathetic response instinct. Before, when we learned something shocking we’d often be in dialogue with somebody, so we’d have this natural facial reaction to convey that. Now, I’ll read horrifying tweets or something, but there’s nobody I’m expressing anything with my face to, so I’m learning to feel shock while having a blank face.
LF: One of the reasons I love the arts is that our culture has an empathy deficit. Art brings us back to that home button. You see something and immediately feel the empathy you should have felt when you might have felt it [in real time]. I hope more and more students consider a visual arts education, because I don’t know what society is going to look like when you can’t see expressions of empathy. Or facial expressions of any kind.

T: You posted a response to President Trump’s DACA repeal in September. You don’t see a lot of institutional heads doing that.
LF: Well, my first response was that a college is a community. I just wanted people to know that we care about them. I have to say that I’m shocked [in these days] that I have to speak out against things like racism. But once you realize you do, then you must. The students, they’re 18-22; they’re vulnerable. These people were kids during 9/11, then there was an economic crash—it’s already not the sort of world where you can feel very secure. Then you have political power threatening your existence and the existence of your friends. There are things we can do, and what we have to do is note it and stand together.

Laura Freid – president, Maine College of Art
Portland, Maine
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Top image: Laura Freid. Photo by Kyle Dubay.

The post Take Q&A: Laura Freid, MECA President 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.

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Matt Hutton went to art school to be a medical illustrator. He graduated with a BFA in woodworking and furniture design.

“It was not until I took a foundations course in 3D design that I knew I could make things,” says the Portland, Maine woodworker. “I also saw a visiting artist lecture at this time by Tommy Simpson, a renowned furniture artist, and it totally changed my life. I enrolled in woodworking classes after that, and the process just clicked.”

After receiving his BFA, Hutton studied on a grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission suggested by his mentor, Wendy Maruyama. The grant took Hutton to Japan for a semester and brought a Japanese student to San Diego State University, where Hutton was enrolled in graduate school.

“The program is two years long and does not have tuition, but what you make while you are there becomes property of the school,” Hutton says. “In a way, it’s a job as we would know it, but you are trained each day and go through a regimented curriculum, and then leave with a wide skill set in woodworking.”

Hutton came to Portland in 2002, straight out of graduate school, to teach at the Maine College of Art on a one-year contract; that year turned into 14. During that time, Hutton helped create a nationally recognized woodworking and furniture design program at MECA, where he is an associate professor as well as program chairman.

Balancing a full-time teaching career and a full-time studio, while also being a full-time dad, can get hectic. So Hutton built Studio 24b in his backyard. Quick access is a necessity for getting any woodworking done. “I often spend the evening in the studio once our kids have gone to bed,” he says. “My wife jokes that I lead a double life, as I often leave the house each night from 8pm-12am, when everyone else has ended their day.”

Since Hutton’s work varies in size, the number of pieces he creates each year varies as well. Last year, Hutton finished a piece on average every three weeks, which included some large projects such as an elevator bar, a dining set, and a large-scale sculpture.

Pricing for work also varies. Almost everything Hutton makes is a custom piece, so pricing is based on the scale and scope of the project.

While most of Hutton’s work is sold in the Northeast, he has shipped work as far as Austin, Texas. Hutton also participates in shows such as the Architecture Digest Home Design Show and the International Furniture Fair.

Although Hutton’s business is constantly growing, he doesn’t plan to leave Portland or his beloved backyard studio. “It’s a very special building to us,” says Hutton of Studio 24b. “The architecture is large, but not monolithic. Doors and walls pivot to allow flowing access from inside to out, and the building is quietly complicated, similar to my work. I thoroughly love working in that space, and feel very fortunate to have found a home with enough land and space to accommodate it within Portland city limits.”

Matt Hutton – owner of Studio 24b
Portland, Maine
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All photos courtesy Studio 24b

The post The Wonders of Wood appeared first on Take Magazine.

Based in the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine, Portland Brick is a collaboration between storyteller Elise Pepple and me. The project celebrates the everyday stories of the city’s residents. Historic, contemporary, and “future” memories are stamped into bricks that repair sidewalks with the city’s own stories. Instead of commemorating the famous “fathers” of the city, our project highlights the immigrants, the women, the marginalized, the voices that typically are not heard. We aim to rewrite the historical narrative that too often upholds the values of the privileged, rather than telling the real stories of the people who lived there.

An area that boasts the first street settled by Europeans, the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine, was originally mostly residential, before becoming mixed-use (business and residential) and falling into economic decline in the mid-twentieth century. Over the past few years, it has been undergoing massive gentrification, with new, upscale restaurants and luxury condos taking over what were abandoned lots. Historically, it was an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood, home to African Americans and people of Irish, Jewish, Italian and other European heritage, some of whom were involved in antislavery causes.

The challenge for us became how to create a more personal vision of a neighborhood through Tweet-length phrases about human connections. Making stories tangible as physical objects gives them a new life and a new importance. Some stories will shift from being a story told within a family circle to one that inhabits a public space, while others contain long forgotten facts that will be revived from the dead. We hope that the bricks will generate a new cycle of audio stories shared between strangers, friends, families, and visitors.

Through local organizations, online submissions, historical research, and the efforts of Maine College of Art students, Elise collected stories that often came in multiple forms. Fragments of gossip, oral interviews, newspaper clippings, and historical records all contained information that on first impression might seem dry and generalized but was rich in narrative below the surface. Through a storytelling event in the neighborhood, a TEDxDirigo talk, and through social media, we have been able to further connect with residents.

Horie drawing letters using the sgraffito technique | Photo by Ayumi Horie

We walk to work on brick sidewalks, we build our homes beside them, we live our lives on them. I love the alchemy of transforming the ground beneath our feet into the brick beneath our feet. Fifteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, Maine was covered by a glacier. As the ice retreated, it pushed down the coastal shelf, flooding the southern shoreline of Maine and depositing a layer of mud, hundreds of feet thick in some places, above and between bedrock. This layer is what Portland is built on, and it’s a city largely made of brick.

The clay used for this project was saved from the excavation of the land that my new studio was built on, and is commonly called Maine Blue Clay. After the Great Fire of 1866, most of Portland and its sidewalks on the peninsula were rebuilt with this clay. I considered carving the words into clay and the now-common practice of using water jet methods on commemorative bricks, but these techniques felt too harsh and would under-utilize the beautiful plasticity of clay. I wanted to retain the puffiness of soft clay in the fired brick. The appearance of stamped clay, on the other hand, has always reminded me of flesh pressed down by a finger or the shape of a pillow after a head has rested on it. I wanted these bricks to show that they were made by people, full of tiny imperfections and the unevenness of the human hand.

To make a custom stamp for each brick, I first drew letters using the same sgraffito technique that I use on low-fire pots: I poured white slip onto slabs of nearly bone-dry earthenware, then scratched through the slip with a sharpened pin tool. I drew the letters in different sizes, scanned them into Photoshop, and cleaned them up. Next, I typeset each stamp. Sam Richardson, a recent graduate of the New Media department of Maine College of Art, converted the stamp images into 3-D files, then milled and printed them at Engine, a nearby fab lab.

Rochelle Garcia, Molly Spadone, Janine Grant, and several other students helped fabricate the bricks. After slaking the bone-dry clay, they blunged in red grog to help with shrinkage and warping, and then sieved the mixture. Using David Peters’s method of drying slurry in wooden frames lined with bed sheets outside, they wedged the clay. Traditionally, bricks were made using a sand-struck or water-struck method, where soft clay was slapped into wooden molds that then released the clay. After a lot of trial and error, we found that the simplest of methods was the most effective: we threw a ten-pound block of clay into a thick plywood mold reinforced with clamps, and then unscrewed the clamps to pop the brick out.

A Portland Brick freshly stamped | Photo by Ayumi Horie

We wanted each statement to refer to contemporary digital culture. We wanted our stories to be as brief as a Tweet and as succinct as an Instagram caption, so that they would read like poetry—and fit within the bricks. Using hashtags was a way to insert more information and sum up the phrase, and we liked their playfulness. Of course, the bricks’ hashtags would not work as hyperlinks, but they could be Googled, because the full phrases are also on our website. For instance, the sentence “On this spot in 1911, mothers could pick up free fresh milk for their babies. #pasteurization” provides just enough information to pique curiosity about the history of public health and the importance of pasteurization. The hashtag also connects our brick to every other online reference to pasteurization. Other hashtags include #torrone and #panettone (Italian sweets) #redhotdogs, a classic Mainer food, and #newmainer, a term that’s intentionally inclusive. One bilingual brick reads, “On this spot in 1898, Jun Sing operated one of the first Chinese laundries #goldmountain #金山”. In this instance, the hashtag works from an insider’s point of view, being the moniker that Chinese immigrants gave to America in the nineteenth century.

Rather than use the stuffy, formal language endemic to traditional monuments, we chose to use vernacular wording more in line with those we want to honor and the contemporary audience that we want to affect. With the sentence, “On this spot in 1956, Priscilla and Loretta’s shoes could be heard click-clacking on their way to church,” we hoped to evoke a specific image and a second sense in order to paint a more holistic picture of the neighborhood. (India Street was a fairly noisy neighborhood because of the nearby railroad tracks and the Crosby Laughlin Foundry, which manufactured heavy marine equipment.) “On this spot in 2014, 1 snowy owl took up residence #grandtrunkrrblg #pigeonsupper” reads another brick, the number “1” being a less formal, more appropriate solution than “one.” Composed in the great tradition of Twitter and Instagram, #pigeonsupper connotes a well-fed owl.

Composing each phrase was a linguistic challenge that Elise and I worked on. Which word would stand alone, which word or words made large? What might catch someone’s eye as they walked down the street? Among the largest words are “lost,” “elephants,” and #celebrates.” Who wouldn’t stop to find out more? Our intention was for the bricks to function like shiny coins noticed out of the corner of one’s eye, or twenty-dollar bills found on a sidewalk, turning a so-so day into a lucky and thoughtful one. Some people will come across the bricks as visitors to the city; others will come to regard the bricks as reliable old friends who age and weather with each winter that passes.

Installed Portland Brick Project bricks in the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine | Photo by Ayumi Horie

The largest cluster of bricks is installed at the intersection of India and Commercial Streets. At one time, India Street ended on a point of land that jutted out between two coves, but in the 1850s, the coves were filled in to accommodate rail lines, and Commercial Street was constructed. Long ago immigrants disembarked from ships docked in the harbor, and walked up India Street; today, this spot serves as a gateway to the city for the thousands of visitors from cruise ships every summer.

The bricks are numbered, with the first one reading, “All of these spots are on Wabanaki land,” a pivotal and too-often-forgotten fact about whose place this first was. Given all the recent political jockeying around issues concerning immigrants and refugees, we rarely look back far enough in our country’s history to see the shakiness of our own entitlement to citizenship.

All the other phrases begin with, “On this spot in . . .” or “On this spot every. . .” This introductory phrase sits perpendicular to the rest of the sentence and to the building fronts, so that the words can be caught from either direction. It’s no coincidence that the second numbered brick reads, “On this spot, every year, Ghassan Hassoon celebrates becoming a U.S. citizen #newmainer.” We live on layers and layers of history. Through this project, we underscore the diversity of Portland and how meaningful this neighborhood is to all the individuals and groups of people who have lived here for more than four hundred years.

We hope the Portland Brick Project will be reimagined and replicated in other cities as anti-monumental monuments to everyday citizens. As a potter, I feel that the transformation of clay to brick adds a crucial layer of complexity to the project. The humor, poignancy, and specificity of the stories make it successful and highlight what we love about our city.

Installed Portland Brick Project bricks in the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine | Photo by Ayumi Horie

This article originally ran in Studio Potter, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2016, “Function/Architecture”, a publication dedicated to connecting potters and strengthening the dialogue within the pottery community.

Top photo Ayumi Horie works on “Portland” bricks in her studio. | Photograph by Janine Grant

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