On July 16, 2017, SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, hosted a fundraising bash to help finance a new roof for Lupinewood, a majority-trans living, arts, and organizing collective in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Providing sweet-ass sounds that encouraged total abandonment on the dance floor were bands Diva Cup, Paper Bee, and DJ Kobold, aka Andrew Huckins.

Portland, Maine and Greenfield, Massachusetts
Website

The post Taken: Lupinewood’s Fundraiser at SPACE appeared first on Take Magazine.

Poké is the latest food trend sweeping New England, appearing on menus throughout the region and dedicated poké restaurants opening in Massachusetts and Connecticut. It makes sense, then, that foodie-focused Portland, Maine, would be the next place to jump aboard the poké train.

Jimmy and Samantha Liang, who previously owned a Chinese restaurant in Scarborough, opened Big Fin Poké in the Portland suburb of Westbrook in December 2016. Since then, the community’s response to the state’s first poké-only spot has been so great that they’re planning to expand the brand into a network of shops throughout the region.

Jimmy and Samantha Liang, owners of Big Fin Poke in Portland, Maine. Photo by Dominic Perri

Poké is the Hawaiian verb for “to section,” and that’s exactly what poké is: cut-up, deconstructed sushi. A traditional poké bowl consists of rice, furikake (a Japanese seasoning containing seaweed), poké (usually tuna or salmon), cucumbers, avocado, scallions, and sesame.

“I have always eaten sushi,” states Jimmy, “but it started to be a little boring . . . all wasabi and soy.” After trying poké with some Hawaiian friends in California, he “was amazed by the different flavors that were possible.” Once he got back to Maine, Jimmy started experimenting with the different sauces that now form the basis for the restaurant’s menu.

Photo by Dominic Perri

So what’s Big Fin Poké’s most popular poké bowl?

“It’s a toss-up,” says Jimmy, “between the Spicy Tuna and the Hawaiian Original,” the latter of which features tuna, sweet onion, green onion, chili flakes, sesame oil, seaweed, and Hawaiian sea salt.

With seven bowls to choose from—including meat and veggie options—and the ability to build your own, there’s decidedly nothing boring about this sushi.

Big Fin Poké – Jimmy and Samantha Liang, proprietors
Portland, Maine
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

All photography by Dominic Perri

The post Quick Takes: Portland’s Poké Stop appeared first on Take Magazine.

Diana Cherbuliez puts in the work. She can fix anything, from a busted car to a glitchy computer to an infestation of carpenter ants. Labor is her passion and tactile problem solving is her wheelhouse, as evidenced by Diana Cherbuliez works, her new exhibition now on view at the Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine.

The Vinalhaven-based sculptor wanted to find a meaningful way to deal with the impasse she reached after the death of her father, with whom she loved talking about art. “I hit a standstill,” she says. “I got clumsy. I had a complete physical disconnect to everything I was doing. I couldn’t sharpen tools. So I started thinking about that, about how I define myself through work.” That thinking led to pieces like Reclamation and quitting Time, fittingly named and made respectively from wasps and hornets nests, PVA glue, and magnets; her own hair, apple wood, and walnut. (To the latter she laughingly notes she is “desperately allergic.”)

Reclamation, 2017 | wasps and hornets nests, PVA glue, magnets, 6 x 18 ¼ x 9 ¾ in | Photo courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery

None of this art was easy to create, and that’s the point. Cherbuliez enjoys the “torture” some of her work presents, and while she openly admits its persistent diaristic quality, she says she “wanted to not just make work about personal sadness, because it’s always more complex than that.” Multiplicities of meaning and material abound in her art, suffused with accessible wordplay and jokes as it elucidates the strenuous effort required to produce it.

“There’s so much art out there, there’s so much crap out there,” she says. “We all make crap, and I don’t see any need to make it unless it’s unique, unless I alone can make it.” Even though she lightheartedly writes off a lot of her work as “making things out of junk” and a byproduct of “the audacity of an arts education,” it’s hard to imagine anyone else crafting a piece like Cul-de-sac, a scale model of a half-made bed under which lies a naked wooden carving of the sculptor herself.

Cherbuliez speaks with acerbic wit, threading her perspective with humor as freely as she does in her artwork. “This world is so continually troubling,” she laments, describing how the scorched earth policies we’re facing affect her tastes in other kinds of art. “I can listen to some old country, but I’m pretty much unable to listen to anything other than rap and hip hop right now. Someone put on Joni Mitchell the other night, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna strangle that bitch.’”

In light of disturbing world events, Cherbuliez finds comfort in “conversations with strangers who probably have the opposite life experience,” which are doubly special when she has the chance to have such exchanges in galleries. She also likes the “limitless highway and limiting barrier” of the ocean around her. “On Vinalhaven the ferryboat could get canceled. And it gets canceled pretty frequently. It gets taken out of your hands, just like a blizzard will take options out of your hands. And I kind of like that.”

Homemaker (3), 2017 | worn-out Carhartt work pants, thread | 10 x 11 ¾ in | photo courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery

Living on an island requires resourcefulness, a trait the artist can also attribute in part to environmentalist parents and to grandparents who weathered the Great Depression. Worn-down Carhartt pants are one among many salvaged materials Cherbuliez fashions into her work, which inspires frugality and patience in the face of excess. She thinks America’s lust for “prurient thrills” erodes the value placed on intellectual and physical craft. Her work could be considered a reaffirmation of both. “When you slow down your making of something, you invite the slowing down, I hope, of the visual investigation.”

She’s deeply unpretentious already, but New England’s immensely historical landscape gives Cherbuliez further motivation to stay modest. The old buildings, the trees, and the time-straddling isolation of Vinalhaven all inspire a particular humility. “It’s one of those places where I can relish my absolute momentary existence and complete irrelevance. It’s actually freeing. I am not important. I never will be.” Embracing life’s impermanence, Cherbuliez rejects the notion of honing celebrity over craft. “It’s not worth the space, or the materials, or the electricity, or filling up museums.”

As the title of her exhibition clearly underlines, Diana Cherbuliez will always value good work more than ego. “I’m here for a moment. The only thing I feel I really have a right to waste is my own time.”

Diana Cherbuliez—Sculptor
Vinalhaven, Maine
Website

Top image: Cul-de-sac, 2017 (detail) | spruce, scrap walnut, Masonite, tung oil, foam, broadcloth, chicken down, cotton | 10 ½ x 5 ¾ x 16 in.

All images courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery

The post All In A Day’s Work appeared first on Take Magazine.

Maine performance artist Sara Juli makes a point of saying the word vagina at least once a day. “It’s a perfectly lovely word,” Juli says from her home in Portland, Maine, where she in moved in 2014 with her husband and two children after 15 years in Brooklyn.

“It’s not a curse word or an offensive word,” she says. “It’s a body part. How can you empower girls if they can’t say a part of their body? It should be celebrated, not shunned.”

Unfortunately for Juli as a new mother, that vagina gave her a lot of trouble, going into spasms that led to four years of urinary incontinence. Luckily for her as an artist, she found a way to use humor as the basis of a performance piece based on her actual diagnosis of tense vagina, the treatment for it, and the chaotic years of new motherhood.

Sara Juli performing Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis at Asheville Masonic Temple in 2016, photo by Kristofer Alan Thompson

The piece, “Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis,” premiered at the experimental SPACE Gallery in Portland in 2015 and has been touring ever since. “I was quietly suffering,” Juli says. “I assumed that peeing in your pants all the time was part of the experience of having a baby. Women say they suffer their whole life from this. What I love about using humor on a taboo topic is that it allows people to listen to you.”

Treatment for dysfunctional pelvic floor muscles at a pelvic floor rehabilitation center in Portland form the basis of Juli’s piece. At her first visit, she started choreographing her performance. She weaves in what she calls “the underbelly of motherhood, the loneliness in the early years of raising children.”

This hour-long solo uses humor, movement, sounds, songs, text and audience participation, Kegel exercises, and vibrators “in a non-sexualized way,” Juli says. “I think it’s empowering for women to think about their vaginas and what their vaginas need.” In program notes, she includes information about the location of local pelvic floor rehabilitation centers.

A native of Waterford, Connecticut, Juli trained in modern and improvisational dance, graduating from Skidmore College with a degree in dance and anthropology. To Juli, the two fields are related. “Dance is all about connecting with people,” she says, “and anthropology is about connecting with people in all cultures.”

Juli’s work has been performed in New York at such places as Performance Space 122, Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Joe’s Pub as part of the Dancenow/NYC Festival, as well as nationally and internationally. She will perform “Tense Vagina” at Ko Festival of Performance in mid-July in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Juli credits the move to Maine with invigorating her creation of new solo work. “In New York, thousands of voices are similar to yours,” she says. “My career has taken off since I moved to New England. My voice is stronger. The air quality alone makes you feel happy.”

When she is not working on new performance projects, Juli is building a fundraising consulting practice, Surala Consulting. In the practice, she advises national artists and non-profits on strategic fundraising solutions. “The arts are threatened in a major way,” she says, “and making sure that artists have a diverse fundraising profile is critical.”

Sara Juli–performance artist
Portland, Maine
Website
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Top Image Sara Juli performing Tense Vagina: an Actual Diagnosis at American Dance Festival 2016, photo by Grant Halverson

The post Vagina Matters appeared first on Take Magazine.

“I’m 19,” says Dylan Rhode, one of the three frontmen of Flower Shop, a music and arts collective based in Portland, Maine. Dylan drifted around New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey through his upbringing, finally settling down in the Greater Portland area he now calls home. “It all kind of happened organically,” says Rhode, who goes by the moniker Monk, of the advent of Flower Shop. “We didn’t have anything else to do except get in trouble and do stupid shit, so turning this common interest into a business seemed like the most productive use of our passion.” In nine months, that passion has flourished into a hip-hop collective, studded with rappers, vocal artists, producers, videographers, beat-smiths, and musical magicians—most of them under 21—who are pushing out unique content by the day. A quick visit to their Soundcloud gives a sense of their musical range.

Mhon Griot & Monk | Photo by Justin Hardesty

Passion doesn’t always express itself in a pleasant way. “It’s different up here,” Monk explains. “It’s cold, everyone has seasonal depression, and the summer is fleeting. The summer is almost like a feeling as opposed to a time. It’s a different culture—everyone is collectively sad. We’re trying to bring the essence of that culture to our music.” Since August of last year, Monk and the other two frontmen, Trevor Tucker (THT) and Mhondoro Richards (Mhon Griot), have been pushing out masterful products of visionary talent steeped in sadness. However, this tripod of hip-hop wunderkinds couldn’t stand without a thriving community of audiovisual colleagues to lift them out of the perpetual sludge. The most powerful manifestation of that is their first music video for their track, FACES, which features the work of many talented collaborators.

The concept for the music video was dreamt of and engineered by Flower Shop visual artists, Dillan Hodak and Charlie ‘Buckets’ Mayforth. The Champlain College senior and SCAD graduate, respectively, pursued futures in visual media and connected with the collective through Flower Shop’s multi-talented booking manager and graphic designer, Tim Dubois. “They really liked the song and we wanted to do a project together,” says Monk. “They have all the equipment and happen to be incredibly nice at what they do.”

The Flower Shop crew whipped up an audiovisual gem in a single day. “One of our sets was in Tim’s little Burlington apartment. We had so many kids jumping up and down in the room with all this heavy equipment, the downstairs neighbors came up and said their ceiling was flexing in. They said, ‘The song’s really cool, but we’re afraid you’re going to collapse our ceiling!'” says Monk. While they claim the video was “thrown together,” the polished outcome can only be credited to expert work. Note the spray-paint jumpsuits that make appearances throughout the video, created late night on a whim by Mayforth. Talk about whacking it out of the park on your first try.

THT | Photo by Justin Hardesty

The Flower Shop members are not without pleasure nor plight. “Living in Maine has shaped my art because people think that a rapper has to come from a hard place and a crooked, dangerous city,” THT says, “and when people hear about rappers from Maine, they think the worst. They call us soft, but it doesn’t mean a thing—we all have been through a lot. But ah well, that’s just another person we have to prove wrong.”

FACES | Still shot by Dillan Hodak

Flower Shop – Music and Arts Collective
Portland, Maine
Website
Soundcloud
Instagram

Monk
Soundcloud
Instagram
Twitter

THT
Soundcloud
Instagram
Twitter

Mhon Griot
Soundcloud
Instagram

The post Maine’s Hip Hop Flower Shop appeared first on Take Magazine.

Maine artist Stacy Howe is an artistic alchemist. Her drawings meld Surrealistic and Victorian themes, from dreams and dark humor to elements from the natural world and other seemingly random ideas. She calls her largely black and white works “sanguinary assemblages on paper.” No matter how they’re described, they’re compelling and, perhaps, a little menacing.

“I’m inspired by many things,” Howe says. “I’m very interested in nature, our fear of nature, as well as Victorian material culture. I love the Gothic tropes, moody atmosphere and psychology of the era.”

Howe builds three-dimensional models constructed of paper and objects she wants to draw. She then cuts and layers the images to create a finished piece. Her works can combine pencil, charcoal, pen and ink as well as acrylic, iodine, and even blood. “I draw very non-traditionally,” she says. “I’m more like a draftsman. I’m very organized, I make cut-outs and rearrange them. They reflect my own personal lexicon.”

Howe’s lexicon is diverse; history and New England’s natural world figure prominently in her work. Raised in Northborough, Massachusetts, Howe once explored local woods and apple orchards as a child; she now prefers living on the coast, in Portland, Maine. “The ocean is so much part of life here,” she says. “I could never be landlocked.” She studied history before receiving a bachelor’s degree in studio art from University of Massachusetts, Boston (and later a master’s degree in studio art from Maine College of Art). Historic research—eclectic subjects range from London’s Great Smog in 1952 to Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919—is an important part of her process; she’s especially fascinated with Surrealistic themes like death, horror, and the occult. “I have many similarities with them in my subject and practice,” she says.

Stacy Howe, FUSELAGE OF ANTIQUES AND MEMORABILIA 2015, ink, charcoal, graphite, acrylic on paper, 48” X 60”

A fan of Law and Order reruns, Howe employs the same clinically detached observation of death and horror in her work as a television cop. Her fantastical images unexpectedly pair these themes with beautiful or fanciful images like jewels, animals or flowers. “I’ll create a dead body with occult objects arranged around it in a matter-of-fact way,” she says. Her work has evolved according to what she interprets as horror. “I like the idea that horror can be the anticipation of something happening,” she says. “I like creating that bridge for the viewer so they can anticipate and bring their own ideas to what’s happening.”

Howe’s work has been featured in numerous group and individual shows around Maine, including the Portland Museum of Art‘s 2015 Biennal. Her work is included in the ArtPM Challenge exhibition at the Buoy Gallery in Kittery, Maine, through April 30; and in Bared, an exhibition at the Ground Floor Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee, starting in August 2017.

Stacy Howe — artist from Portland, Maine
Website

Top Image: Piñata Seal 2014, ink, acrylic, charcoal, pencil, 22” X 38”

The post The Artistic Alchemy of Stacy Howe appeared first on Take Magazine.

Western-Massachusetts-native-turned-fake-judge John Hodgman always says, “Specificity is the soul of narrative.” In other words, the more precise a story is, or the more unique the subject matter, the better. Through specificity of content and approach, artists can present audiences with unique characters, stories, and experiences.

The same logic applies to film festivals and the cinema they celebrate. In addition to the dozens of big film fests across the region, film junkies and industry folks alike have privileged access to niche New England film festivals in every state. Movie lovers can see everything from queer romance to cinema written, produced, starring, and directed by folks with hearing impairment. Some of these festivals are right around the corner, while others are still accepting submissions. All reveal subjects that are unique and satisfyingly specific.

AIP Film Festival
April 2 – April 8
Cinestudio
Hartford, CT

Hartford’s beautifully designed 1930s-era movie theater continues its yearly film fest for Francophiles, April in Paris, which goes beyond the French New Wave and into the realm of contemporary cinema. Prospective moviegoers have nine opportunities to see French films produced from 1982 to 2016, all of which examine the exceedingly relevant, “effects of crossing borders, from the political to the personal.”

Wicked Queer Film Festival
March 30 – April 9
Various venues
Boston, MA

Laverne Cox in Free CeCe! | Director Jac Gares, 2016

The 33rd incarnation of Boston’s film festival revealing and unpacking the queer experience through documentary, comedy, and drama will feature internationally renowned voices of the queer community and emerging artists alike. Queer film enthusiasts of all kinds have dozens of chances to see films across the city in a new neighborhood each night.

Maine Deaf Film Festival
April 28 – 29
University of Southern Maine
Portland, ME

The 15th annual Maine Deaf Film Festival is the longest-running and perhaps the only film festival of its type in the nation. Programmed and planned in collaboration with students and boasting content exclusively created by deaf folks across the region, MDFF skillfully solves some of the problems of underrepresentation of people with hearing impairments both in front of and behind the camera.

SENE Film Festival
April 25 – 29
Various venues
Rhode Island

With dozens of films ranging from experimental shorts to feature-length animated dramas, SENE provides attendees nearly endless opportunities to pick their vast or small corner of the world to explore. The Wednesday night screenings of experimental films and documentary features is both a can’t-miss evening and an excellent example of the range and specificity of topics explored throughout the festival.

New Hampshire Film Festival
October
Various venues
Portsmouth, NH

Still from All The President’s Heads | Director Adam Roffman, 2016

With the time for submissions still open, we can’t say for sure what niches the New Hampshire Film Festival will investigate. However, if last year’s programming is any indication, cinephiles will delve into some strange and specific topics. For example, All the President’s Heads, a film about a history devotee who saves two dozen, massive presidential busts from destruction after being displaced by the building of an Enterprise Rent-a-Car.

Independent Television Festival
October 11 – 17
Various Venues
Manchester, VT

Okay. . .this isn’t technically a “film festival.” However, was True Detective (the charcoal dark, riveting serialized HBO murder mystery disguised as a police procedural) a television show or more of a seven-and-a-half-hour movie split into manageable 54-minute chunks? As the line between prestige television and film blurs more each day, so will our categorizations for the sake of this list. Anyway, ITVFest still counts because it’s a moving image festival celebrating a niche part of a hulking industry, a section of the industry that often gets ignored in cinema as well; the independents.

Global Roots Film Festival
April 7 – 9
Contois Auditorium
Burlington, VT

Still from Ladies & Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen |
Directors Donald Brittain & Don Owen, 1965 | Presented by VT PBS and RETN

This niche film festival is brought to us by the Vermont International Film Foundation which also presents the yearly Vermont International Film Festival. The Global Roots Film Festival endeavors to bring Vermonters, “great films from the countries of many of the New American communities. . .to foster a greater understanding of our diverse cultures.” This year, Global Roots turns the lens towards contemporary films coming from Quebec.

Top image, still from Signature Move | Director Jennifer Reeder (2017)

The post 7 New England Niche Film Festivals You Can’t Miss appeared first on Take Magazine.

During his time as CEO at Urban Farm Fermentory, Neil Spillane ran a collective of kitchens in East Bayside; this was his first experience running a quasi food hub. He ultimately realized the concept needed a full-time organization just to run the kitchens and coordinate collaborations. “That was the genesis for Fork Food Lab—a shared kitchen on steroids,” says Spillane.

Spillane and his partner, Eric Holstein, founded Fork Food Lab in July 2016 as a shared kitchen and tasting room. Located in Portland’s West Bayside neighborhood, Fork Food Lab is a community space that connects food makers with food lovers.

“We have 27 companies operating out of the incubator, the community forming is very tight and passionate, and our ticketed events have been selling out almost every time,” Spillane says. Fork Food Lab has hosted a wide range of events since opening, including a Friendsgiving feast, pop-up brunch, buyers market, and pig butchery class.

Fork Food Lab owners Neil Spillane and Eric Holstein 

“The community is very supportive of local food, there is always a pipeline of ambitious people looking to launch food businesses, and I was lucky enough to find a building close to downtown that was perfect,” Spillane says.

Fork’s member group is as diverse as there are types of carrots. Current members include specialty food producers, food trucks, bakeries, and catering companies. Between them, they produce products from kale chips to fried seafood to maple syrup and gluten-free bread. “It’s food with a story,” Spillane says. “That difference is huge in how diners are thinking about where to spend the cash.”

Apart from the commercial kitchen space, the tasting room has been another important factor in the Lab’s success. An event-driven flex space for members, as well as the community, to use, the tasting room has hosted pop-ups, private parties, classes, and marketplaces. Recently the Lab hosted a brunch in the tasting room; all four seatings were sold out. “The model is to use member products from Fork in all of the dishes,” Spillane says. “In this case, it was 10 different companies represented on the menu, with a couple even helping out on the line in the kitchen.

Fork Food Lab event 

Spillane has lived in Portland for five years now and says he wouldn’t want to live anywhere else (a common theme amongst Portlanders). When he was thinking about launching this concept, he knew it would be buoyed by the strong food industry in the area.

“I have grown up hearing people say the pace of life is slower here in Maine, and that is true,” says Spillane. “What I’ve come to learn is that the time people spend on work relative to play is different here and in New England as a whole. People really like to enrich their time on Earth here, and shape their behavior and work habits to match those ideals.”

Neil Spillane – Founder/CEO at Fork Food Lab
Portland, Maine
Website
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Instagram

Images courtesy Fork Food Lab

The post Put A Fork (Food Lab) In It appeared first on Take Magazine.

In a former lifetime in which the person inhabiting the Oval Office had an actual vision based on facts, the arts were recognized as an integral measure of our society. President John F. Kennedy, for instance, said this about the arts: “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda. It is a form of truth.”

Truth, of course, has taken a hit since 45 took office. That whole “alternative facts” bit. But numbers, or so the saying goes, don’t lie. So with that in mind, we took a quick look at the potential math implications of 45’s federal budget.

First the overview:

• Number of programs and agencies due for elimination: 62
• Number of programs within the Environmental Protection Agency alone: 50

Other programs due for funding cuts—or outright elimination—focus on everything from literacy to low-income home energy improvements to investigating chemical accidents. The enormous breadth and scope of impact on those least able to manage without these programs is breathtaking.

But since we’re an arts and culture magazine, we’re going to focus our hyperventilation on the potential impact of these devastating cuts to art and culture in New England. The proposed budget calls for eliminating all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts ($152 million) and the National Endowment for the Humanities ($155 million).

What NEA funding means to New England:

For fiscal year 2017, New England states received $2.591 million in NEA grants overall, according to the NEA website. Here’s who got what:

• Connecticut: 15 organizations, $310,000
• Massachusetts: 62 organizations, $1,672,000
• Maine: 11 organizations, $242,000
• New Hampshire: 6 organizations, $120,000
• Rhode Island: 9 organizations, $152,500
• Vermont: 4 organizations, $95,000

But the math adds up even less when you look beyond straight grants. Ann Wicks, communications manager for the New England Foundation on the Arts (NEFA)—one of six regional arts organizations funded by the NEA and private donations—explains. Arts organizations can potentially receive NEA dollars in three ways:

• an outright allocation of a grant the organization applies for itself
• an allocation from NEFA through NEA dollars provided to NEFA
• from NEA dollars given to state arts organizations, such as the Massachusetts Cultural Council

Wicks says about 15 percent of NEFA’s annual budget comes from NEA dollars. Beyond grants, NEFA uses those dollars to support artists in other, less direct ways, Wicks says. The Creative Ground Directory, for instance, is a free resource that lists artists and other creators around New England so that it’s easier to find appropriate collaborators for projects. In FY2016, NEFA made a total of 462 grants equaling $3.4 million. New England states received $829,947 of those NEFA grants.

In other words, the loss of funding to New England arts and humanities organizations could be even larger. “NEA support is very important to New England and the creative sector,” she says.

It’s a point that is echoed nationally. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), a national nonprofit that assists state arts agencies, offers this math about how NEA dollars improve the economy at large:

• The arts return $22.3 billion in tax revenue to federal, state, county, and municipal governments.
• Rural areas, low-income communities, and schools would feel the effects of this funding loss disproportionately from reductions. State arts agencies (using state and federal funds) award more than 25% of their grants to rural areas, 54% to low-income communities, and 45% to arts education projects.
• Every NEA dollar leverages more than $9 in matching funds, meaning that the impact of the NEA loss is just the beginning of the potential financial loss for arts organizations.

Cutting the NEA and NEH seem especially confusing given this math offered by NASAA: The NEA receives 0.004% of the total Federal budget, which is less than ½ of one hundredth of a percent.

That math also doesn’t add up when you consider the numbers presented by The Guardian. The British paper reports the following expenses incurred by taxpayers less than 50 days into 45’s residency:

• $56.6 million (or a cool $500,000 a day) to protect Trump Tower. That was through March 1. Assuming that Mrs. 45 stays until June for Mini-45 to finish school, that dollar amount could add another $46 million, bringing the total to $102 million.
• $3+million estimated cost for EACH weekend jaunt to golf work at his Mar-a-Lago Resort (a place where he doubled entry fees from $100,000 to $200,000 the day after he was elected).
• $97,380 for hotels for Secret Service to protect Eric Trump (that would be his son on those business interests 45 still hasn’t divested himself of) while he visited a condominium development in Uruguay. This is just one trip.

And finally this statistic: 45’s proposed military spending increase in his federal budget? $54 billion.

Something definitely doesn’t add up.

Does this irritate you as much as it does us? Here are a few links if you want to #TakeAction. See you on the streets.

Pen.org
artsactionfund.org
Change.org
The Official White House Petition to Save Arts Funding
Contact Your Representative
Arts Advocacy Day – Washington, DC
#SaveTheNEA

Top image courtesy Royal Talens

The post #TakeAction: Doing the NEA Defunding Math appeared first on Take Magazine.

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
Website
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

All photos courtesy Studio 24b

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