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.

​​The new opera My Lai, with music by Jonathan Berger and libretto by Connecticut author Harriet Scott Chessman, opens the 2017 Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music. It won’t be the first time that the horrors of the Vietnam War have made their way into the American cultural vision. The musical Hair captured the pain of the era, and the musical Miss Saigon transported the Madama Butterfly story from turn-of-the-century Japan to 1975 Saigon. Playwright David Rabe’s Vietnam War Trilogy—The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers—explored the pain of the period, as did Terrence McNally’s Bringing it All Back Home. My Lai, however, may be the first opera to deal with the Vietnam war to be funded by The National Endowment For The Arts, and commissioned and performed by the Kronos Quartet.

Chessman has spent most of her career writing fiction. Her five novels have made the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books list, and her work has been featured nationally. Writing an opera libretto was not on her radar—until she met Berger.

Chessman met Berger, co-director of the Stanford University Arts Initiative, through her husband. “The idea was Jonathan’s,” says Chessman of writing the libretto. “He had been drawn to the figure of Hugh Thompson (the helicopter pilot who intervened in the My Lai massacre) for many years. Jonathan knew he wanted the opera to have one singer (Thompson), and to take place in a bare room in the VA Hospital in the South, where Hugh lived his last days, sick with cancer. He knew he wanted the opera to be about Thompson’s memory of that morning in South Vietnam.”

They began their collaboration on what became My Lai in 2013. First Chessman wrote the libretto, her first attempt at opera. “Jonathan responded to various drafts of the libretto, for a year and a half, before he started to compose the music,” she says. “Of course, I had Jonathan’s other music, two chamber operas, Theotokia and The War Reporter, in my head as I wrote. I understood the tone and the resonance, the meaning he was going for.”

Chessman and Berger have tweaked My Lai after initial performances at Stanford and Chicago in 2015. “Essentially, though,” says Chessman, “the primary way My Lai is changing is through the beautiful, sharp direction of Mark DeChiazzo, who is also the creator of the videography, and through the growth of the character Hugh Thompson, in Rinde Eckert’s superb performances.”

After the performances September 27-30, The Kronos Quartet will tour My Lai internationally. Chessman, meanwhile, will get to work on a new libretto and a book of short stories.

Chessman and Berger have collaborated on a second work, Death by Drowning, a piece for chamber group and tenor inspired by a Yiddish folk tale. It premieres at Stanford on October 26th, at the Daniel Pearl World Music Days Concert.

Chessman evolved into a New Englander. “Each summer in my childhood we lived in New Hampshire for two months, and the rich, peaceful beauty of that area has always felt like a touchstone for me,” she says, noting she attended school in New England at Northfield Mount Hermon, Wellesley College, and Yale University before settling in Connecticut for almost 30 years. Then, she had a stint in California, but admits she always “felt that New England was home.”

“The peacefulness of the Connecticut shoreline, and the whole landscape of New England: water, meadows, woods, hills, cities, villages inspires me,” she says. “Our house  is in the woods, next to the Guilford Conservation Land Trust, and this spot is rich in the quiet I need for writing. This is home.”

Harriett Scott Chessman
Guilford, Connecticut
Website

Top image: Performance of My Lai, photo by Zoran Orlic.

The post Transitioning from Books to Stage appeared first on Take Magazine.

Don’t mess with the arts. That’s the message behind Ink For The Arts, a new initiative from Cuseum making a bold visual statement to call attention to the attack on federal funding for major American arts and culture programs. Slogans like “The Arts are Our Anchor,” “Art For Life,” and “NEA & NEH Forever” adorn the set of five unique temporary tattoos, which take inspiration from sailor tattoos of the mid-20th century.

“They’re iconic, and they’re visually stimulating, cheeky, and unexpected for this kind of movement,” says Cuseum founder and CEO Brendan Ciecko, who designed all of the tattoos. Cuseum is a museum engagement platform designed to help museums improve their digital engagement with visitors and members. Ink For The Arts is a direct response to the current administration’s proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It’s also a reaction to a longer trend of those in power treating the arts like something disposable.

“Seeing what’s happening politically, and seeing what’s happened to arts funding over the years where it seems it’s always under threat, we felt we needed to do something to speak up and become more active,” says Ciecko. “I feel that a lot of the threats that come into play go off this old stereotype that the arts are sensitive, that artists are sensitive and fragile, and you can mess with them. So we wanted to flip that on its head.” Ciecko and his team thought about an aesthetic treatment and motif that reflected something “fairly rugged, robust, and not what you would mess with or threaten.”

The tattoos cost $1.00 to $1.50 each, and profits from web sales will benefit Americans For the Arts or the American Alliance for Museums, with which Ciecko is actively working to partner “for some deeper initiatives.” Ink For The Arts began by sending out batches of tattoos on its own dime, and has since sold or donated thousands.

Ciecko says “dozens of museums” have ordered 500 tattoos, and that the initiative already has around “3,500 tattoos out and about,” estimating that a total of 10,000 tattoos will be distributed by the end of August. Some museums want to sell the tattoos in their stores; others are considering social media campaigns with their entire staffs, and university museums and arts organizations hope to get the tattoos “out to their students when they return to school this fall.”

The Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Pequot Museum in Connecticut are all on board, as are other institutions around New England and across the country. Ink For The Arts has been active for roughly two weeks according to Ciecko, and efforts will continue at least for the next couple of months. Right now the project is laying a foundation and taking an “iterative approach to see where the most response and action comes from.”

Ink shown by a supporter from the Isabella Gardner Museum, photo courtesy of Isabella Gardner Museum

“Every great advocacy mission or initiative had some sort of bonding badge that holds people together visually or thematically. We’re taking that quite literally. Your badge in being unified to fight for the arts and raise awareness for what’s going on and just show how near and dear the arts are to you—you literally have skin in the game.”

Brendan Ciecko–Cuseum, Founder of Ink For The Arts
Boston, Massachusetts
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Unless noted, tattoo images courtesy of Brendan Ciecko and Ink For The Arts

The post #TakeAction: Getting Skin in the Game appeared first on Take Magazine.