Even though we at Take get to look at art made by different New England artists all day long, we are still regularly, pleasantly surprised by the work of someone new—or several someones, as you’ll see here in our third annual listing of artists to watch.

We asked curators from esteemed galleries and museums to tell us about artists they’ve been especially impressed by lately who deserve a wider audience, and were thrilled to get input from Trevor Smith, curator of the Present Tense, and Lydia Gordon, assistant curator for exhibitions and research, both at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; Elizabeth Spavento, visual arts programmer at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine; Lindsey Stapleton, codirector of GRIN in Providence, Rhode Island; Suzette McAvoy, executive director and chief curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine; Will K. Wilkins, executive director of Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut; and Alan Chong, director and CEO of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.

With such an illustrious panel, we know you’ll want to keep an eye on these artists in the coming year—and beyond.

Nicole Duennebier

Nicole Duennebier, Still Life with Meat Pile, 2017, acrylic on panel, 24 × 30 in. Photo by Christian Skorik

A bona fide New Englander, Duennebier was born in Hartford, went to college in Maine, and now lives in Boston. “Riffing off the formal tradition of Dutch still lifes, Duennebier is obsessed with excess and growing, throbbing masses,” says Gordon. “Yet, she spends a great amount of time on delicate surface treatments, complete with glimmers of gold and super fine detail. They’re repellant and beautiful at the same time.”

Duennebier has been experimenting with making clay models to help her visualize specific forms and textures in her paintings. The results of this process, including a brighter color palette, will be on display in a solo show at 13FOREST Gallery in Arlington, Massachusetts, in May.

Heather McPherson

Heather McPherson, Bupropion, 2016, painted chiffon, cast epoxy, drawing pad, 36 × 20 in. Photo by Karen Philippe

Although she freely incorporates colorful sheets of chiffon, puddles of clear epoxy, and plexiglass sheets into her work, “Heather is a painter inside and out, whether she’s making traditional paintings or animating a video—it doesn’t seem to matter,” says Stapleton. “Her language is recognizable as her own, full of history and self-reference.”

McPherson, who is based in Providence, makes decisions through the physical, experimental process of making, but that’s not to imply her work is only about mixing materials. In the pieces she’s currently creating, she’s exploring the ways art has been used throughout history as a spiritual tool.

“Last time we were in her studio, she had an enviable pile of massive primed canvases on her wall,” Stapleton says. “Something astounding is going to be on those bad boys next time we’re there, I just know it.”

Dell M. Hamilton

Dell M. Hamilton, To Haunt Is To Love: Reina #6, from Fallen Angels: Making Sense Out of Nothing, 2014–present, color film and unique digital scan on paper, 25 × 37 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

A true interdisciplinarian, Boston-based Hamilton has been tackling topics as diverse as the United States’ influence on Honduras and the history of desegregation in Boston through performance, writing, installation, curation, and more. Gordon recalls, “I had the pleasure of witnessing Hamilton perform at Boston University’s 808 Gallery. Sharing a contemporary response to historical narratives steeped in collective trauma and memory, her gestural performance involved thinking, making, and doing at the service of imagining a better future. It was really a transformative viewing experience.”

At press time, Hamilton was in the middle of producing a body of two-dimensional work called Punta: Pregunta (translated as Point: Question). She’s exploring the intricate tangles of family identity, trauma, and personal neuroses through large-scale, flat, mixed-media artwork, though she isn’t sure how two-dimensional they will stay.

Sarah Tortora

Sarah Tortora, Last Bastion of the Loser, 2016, steel, felt, cotton, hardware, 54 × 46 × 72 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Vermont-based Tortora “is a machine, and her sculptures are the real deal,” Stapleton says. “Her craft and execution is always impeccable. She was making pretty massive work last year, but we’ve seen some small, intimate pieces on her social media that look outstanding.” (Look for her on Instagram.)

Past work includes painted wood wall pieces that resemble letter forms from an unknown language, and full-size abstractions that hint at marching soldiers or classical architecture. “One of my favorite things about her process is how she titles her work,” Stapleton continues. Titles such as Septum, Pallbearers, and Power Bottom “really solidify each sculpture’s identity in a way I haven’t experienced,” she explains. For 2018, she’s developing a new series of sculptures titled Witness Mark, which will reference the way museums illustrate geological time.

Belleau + Churchill

Belleau + Churchill, The Red Ghost, part of Fantasia Colorado, 2016, mixed media, 18 x 132 x 72 in. Photo by Caleb Churchill

This artist pair from Providence was nominated by two members of our panel. Raina Belleau and Caleb Churchill “make interesting work about history and the environment. They are sweet individuals and masterful craftspeople,” says Spavento.

“We are really into how their projects are visually interesting and accessible while ultimately being heavily research-based,” adds Stapleton. “The work is fun, but still challenging.” For a 2016 installation titled Fantasia Colorado, the pair created memorabilia such as “vintage” postcards, handmade rugs, and historic portrait busts to re-create and commemorate an odd piece of American history: a failed attempt by the U.S. Army to use camels as pack animals in the Civil War; the ultimate release of the animals into the wild; and the terrifying, truth-stretching stories of camel–human encounters that ensued.

“2017 has been a lot of residency and research work, and we’re really excited to see what comes out of that time spent in development,” Stapleton says. Indeed; as of press time, the two were planning to study the concept of utopias—and learn Esperanto, a language created in the 1800s in the optimistic hope of unifying the world—at the Wassaic Artist Residency in Wassaic, New York, in October. 2018 will see their second solo exhibition at GRIN in Providence.

Hong Hong

Hong Hong, Passage II, 2017, cellophane, wood, steel, 8 x 228 x 144 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Born in China, Hong immigrated to the United States at the age of nine and now calls Hartford home. Working with materials as humble as mulberry fiber, mylar, Scotch tape, and fishing line, Hong creates large-scale pieces that suggest, interact with, and (when made with mylar) literally reflect their environment. She’s been making massive sheets of paper—as tall as 12 feet—using buckets and water pistols to manipulate pulp on homemade screens. Far from being precious about her finished pieces, Hong has no qualms about taking work that’s been shown and resoaking it, turning the paper back into a slurry of fiber that can be reused and remade. The work becomes cyclical, self-feeding. Wilkins says, “Hong Hong delves into the mysteries of deep time, even as her work is imbued with the sensuous presence of here and now.”

Hong had a solo show at Real Art Ways that ran from August through October, and she has an ongoing relationship with the Hartford arts organization. “We are commissioning a new work titled Everlasting Ephemera, which she will be working on during the coming year,” says Wilkins. The piece is a yearlong investigation of the temporal nature of human perception, and how those parameters affect our environment and our culture.

Farzaneh and Bahareh Safarani

Farzaneh and Bahareh Safarani, a still from Cocoon, performed at the Boston Center for the Arts, 2015. Photo by Hannah Bates

Having trained as painters at the University of Tehran, twin sisters Farzaneh and Bahareh have been branching out into video and performance while they continue their studies in Boston. The Safaranis use their twin-ness to full advantage, acting as each other’s mirrors or as dual selves on stage. “In their melding of meticulous realistic painting, extraordinary performative discipline, and the most exquisitely subtle use of video, the Safarani sisters create an uncanny sense of intimacy,” says Smith.

And it is truly a melding. The two decide which form their art takes—painting, live performance, both—by determining which will explain their idea better. They’re now hard at work on a series of paintings that each act as a paragraph in a larger story, but performance will certainly be a part of their future. In 2018, you can see their internationally recognized work in Los Angeles, Berlin, Armenia, and Iran.

Emilie Stark-Menneg

Emilie Stark-Menneg, Big Kitty Picture Show!, 2016, acrylic, oil, house paint, and sand on canvas, 70 x 105 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Stark-Menneg was enthusiastically chosen by two of our curators. Spavento says, “Her paintings are delightful, expressive and totally singular in their vision and content. I would recommend her for everything—I’m so in love with her work.” McAvoy agrees, “Stark-Menneg is one of the freshest and most exciting young painters I’ve encountered in a while. Her work is smart, sassy, inventive, and skillful all at once, plus it is a hell of a lot of fun.”

A Massachusetts native, Stark-Menneg was based in Brunswick, Maine, until recently, when she relocated to Providence to enter an MFA program at RISD. At school, she plans to continue to explore ways to depict the shared energy found between people and places, and to examine how technology distorts and relocates our physical bodies.

Wang Yefeng (Frank)

Wang Yefeng, a screenshot from Drifting Stages, 2016, dimensions variable

Wang is a digital media artist whose surreal, disorienting animation should really be seen in motion to be fully appreciated. In one of his video pieces, generic, vaguely Asian MIDI music backs a tableau of Hooters waitresses with C-3PO heads holding meat grinders that cascade blood onto a plastic toy figure of a man in a suit, who’s lying in a bathtub with pigs’ feet, and . . . well, it’s better to visit his website and see it for yourself.

As a Rhode Island–based digital media artist with a sculptural background, Wang has been recently rediscovering his love of working with physical materials, including 3D-printed objects. Over the coming year, he plans to experiment further with mixing multiple disciplines to discover the best ways to make his ideas real.

“He’s making work unlike what we typically see in New England, probably in part because he splits his time between the United States and China,” Stapleton says. “There’s always a narrative—usually a surprising, semi-autobiographical one—behind his work, but it never gets too personal. There’s reservation in his lavishness, and now that he’s back in the States for a while, we’re looking forward to what he will come up with.”

Vivian Beer

Vivian Beer, Forth Bench, 2011, stainless steel, pure pigment, ferrocement, 96 x 48 x 48 in. Photo by Alison Swiatocha

While not unknown to us—Take profiled Beer last December, following her win on Ellen’s Design Challenge, a furniture designers’ competition à la Project Runway—Beer’s work isn’t as well known as it should be. “Vivian Beer is an exciting local artist who is pushing the boundaries of furniture making,” says Chong. “Inspired by various forms, from airplanes to high heels, her industrial chic work is both strong and beautiful.”

The streamlined, retro-industrial shapes in Beer’s work are clearly informed by her 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum—a fitting place for an artist working primarily in materials such as steel, cement, and automotive paint. “Her inventive and stylish forms have crossover appeal between functional furniture and sculptural works of art,” continues Chong.

Over the last year, Beer has been sharing her appealing design skills through teaching residencies and public art commissions across the country. She also moved her furniture studio from Manchester to Pembroke, New Hampshire, where she plans to build out a space for holding design workshops. As for the work itself, Beer will be developing a line of limited-production furniture (all of her previous pieces are one-of-a-kind) in the spring.

top image: L to R: Wang Yefeng, Dell M. Hamilton, Farzaneh Safarani, and Bahareh Safarani. Photo by Izzy Berdan; composite image by Aaron Taylor-Waldman

The post Artists to Watch in 2018 appeared first on Take Magazine.

Depending on which door you walk in, SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, is either a theatre, a traditional art gallery, an artist studio space, or a presentation hall. But to new executive director Kelsey Halliday Johnson, the organization’s greatest strength is its ability to “cross-pollinate” into a variety of arts and forms.

The non-profit formed in 2002, grew into a large space on Congress Street and helped anchor a burgeoning arts district for the city. Two years ago, after a capital campaign, SPACE bought its building and is now positioned to become a major gallery player for artists from around New England and beyond.

When Take sat down with SPACE Gallery’s new director, she had only been on the job about three weeks. Johnson, 31, was born in Philadelphia and previously held positions at the Michener Art Museum, Locks Gallery, Vox Populi, the Penn Museum, and has taught photography and digital arts at the University of Pennsylvania and Interlochen Center for the Arts.

As set designers in the adjoining theatre hammered away, getting the room ready for a play that weekend, Johnson talked about the draw of a regional gallery, the scale of her expanding organization and the challenges of modern art.

Take: What is it like coming to Portland from Philadelphia? Are there similarities? What did it take to make the leap in geography and scale?

Kelsey Halliday-Johnson: The geography was easy because Maine is really beautiful. I was very excited about that. I’ve been coming to Maine for a long time and in fact had talked in the past about looking for cities to move to and Portland had been on that list. It’s funny though because Philly is a city very much in the shadow of New York and that really affects the cultural sector where there’s only a couple of major commercial galleries and artists get to a certain level of their career and they move to New York or LA. I’ve always shied away from moving to New York and I’m very interested in regional art histories and a non-New York dominated narrative of what contemporary art is, so in that sense it was really about finding another place to be where you can elevate the cultural practice that’s happening with contemporary artists that doesn’t have to be centered around the huge cultural vortex that actually ends up with a lot of incestuous and similar thinking. There’s a lot of exciting and creative projects that can happen outside of that.

T: You come from the James Michener museum. I would imagine that is a very different place than space.

KHJ: I used to also work at Vox Populi, which is a sort of collective model kindred to SPACE. So I was toggling many things to keep my artistic focus, but also expand my skill set. Michener was interesting because it was the first time I ever worked for something that was regionally focused, and I was drawn to how to bring a contemporary program to a regionally focused museum. It’s a special place and I’m interested in how a smaller place can have major art history programs and output. So I feel strongly about looking a little deeper, to be locally focused but national and globally minded.

T: So do you look at SPACE as regional or a national organization?

KHJ: Good question and something I hope we can define in people’s minds and imaginations. I think a lot of people look at the website or something we do and ask if we have a local mandate. SPACE doesn’t but it also has a long history and strong commitment to elevating emerging to mid-career practitioners to larger opportunities and there’s something to be said about aiming for both of those things.

T: Given SPACE’s mutli-media approach to gallery space, how do you pull persons across the genre? In other words, how is someone who is interested in your film series, also come out to a play or gallery showing?

KHJ: Encounters with artists, for me, are the biggest draw. I love art history, but if you’re just reading or seeing, you hit your head against the wall because you want to find the source material. So the fact that we have artist and film maker talks means a lot. Those activities are a way people can realize art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I’m interested in the idea that the arts are a form of research that has a process and a series of theorems and things that people pursue in their studio, and they reveal the evidence of that search in their final product.

T: As a new director, what’s the big priority, the thing that’s taking your brain space right now?

KHJ: Having worked at an interdisciplinary organization, I’m interested in seeing how we can most clearly explain what we do well and also to create a critical space for artists and their intentions. It’s easy to keep rolling and getting people in the doors for events, but I want to make sure we’re building better archives and creating opportunities for writing and dialogue. I want to be able to explain to people contextually what’s on view. There are people who see contemporary art and don’t feel welcome, so my work right now is to create a sense of “come in and let’s talk about what you see.”

T: Where does SPACE stand in Portland? How are you unique here?

KHJ: I’m in a period of active listening, but my sense is there is a magnetic draw with a certain audience that has been at the heart of this loyal community for a long time. But I also think there are people who walk by our doors and have no idea what we do or who we are. But this is a true arts district that’s going to last and SPACE is crucial to that.

Kelsey Halliday Johnson–executive director, SPACE Gallery
Portland, Maine
Website
Instagram

Top image, Kelsey Halliday Johnson

The post Finding Space in Portland appeared first on Take Magazine.

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.

America proclaims itself the land of the free, but imprisons more people than every other country in the world. That profound hypocrisy unfolds in Freedom Project, a multimedia physical theater work from Providence, Rhode Island-based Everett Company. The show brings together personal stories culled from research and interviews, athletic choreography, and evocative imagery in an intimate examination of the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States.

Freedom Project represents a natural progression for Everett, which provides free after-school theater and dance programs for low income youth in Providence and often responds to social issues in its work. “We were seeing firsthand the effects of mass incarceration on communities of color and low income communities locally,” says Aaron Jungels, co-executive/artistic director. “So many of our students had family members who were incarcerated, so many former students had been incarcerated, even former company members had ended up incarcerated.”

Jungels says Everett aims to “bring many perspectives together” while “centering [the work] in the community that is most impacted” by mass incarceration. At the outset of the project, the company asked itself, “How can performance most effectively contribute to a movement to end mass incarceration?” As a company Everett members improvise in the creative process, videotaping everything and returning to what resonates emotionally. Composition then involves pulling pieces together that speak to each other. “It’s a little bit like creating a puzzle without having the outlines,” Jungels says. “The outlines are forming as you’re building it.”

Grace Face, Freedom Project, Everett Company

Freedom Project features projections of interview subjects among its varied media, providing a chance for unfiltered testimonials from formerly incarcerated individuals that can be juxtaposed to reinforce or enhance their resonance. “Things like that are powerful when you hear it from the voice of the person themselves, not translated through an actor,” Jungels says.

Jungels hopes that audiences leave both outraged at a system unnecessarily brutalizing so many people and energized to make an impact rather than be complacent. “This is going to be the first time we perform [the piece] since the election,” he says. “Our previous run of it was last summer.” He explains how the subject matter “has been resonating differently” in the face of the most overtly white supremacist administration in the last several years. “It was there, but it was harder to convince people that it was there. There wasn’t really an acceptance that a lot of the power structures in this country are racist basically.”

Aaron Jungels, Freedom Project, Everett Company

This summer Everett took Freedom Project to The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard, Trinity Rep in Providence, and Kō Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts. “When we went to Trinity, we were reaching an audience that doesn’t probably normally see this kind of theater, and may be challenged by the political perspectives in it,” Jungels says. “That’s what I really feel is where we can have the most impact.”

Performing around New England, considered an ostensibly progressive area, has been important for breaking down some stereotypes about mass incarceration, an issue that has steadily worsened around the country in the last four decades. “People always tend to think of this as an urban issue,” Jungels says. “But it turns out it impacts rural communities strongly, too. Obviously the statistics are worse when you look at the South, but New England is not without its issues. We here in Rhode Island have a voter ID law, and we’re supposed to be one of the bluest states in the country. And yet no one even thought to challenge it or thought to connect it to these other issues.”

Christopher Johnson, Freedom Project, image by Justine Bevilacqua

Everett will perform Freedom Project at the SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine on Friday, September 8th and Saturday, September 9th at 7:30 p.m. That weekend they’ll hold workshops with Maine Inside Out, an organization that uses theater to help formerly incarcerated youth unpack the issues they face upon release. The piece will then travel to New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro in association with Vermont Performance Lab on Friday, September 15th and Saturday, September 16th at 7:00 p.m.

Jungels emphasizes Freedom Project’s intentions to address the sobering issue of mass incarceration with emotional complexity. “There’s a lot of humor. There’s a lot of beauty. It’s not going to be a dreary, hopeless experience,” he says. “It’s going to be something where I think people are going to come away uplifted. They’re going to come away energized. And I think they’re going to come away feeling hopeful that change is possible.”

Aaron Jungels–Co-Executive/Artistic Director, Everett Company
Providence, Rhode Island
Website

Photography by Justine Bevilacqua, courtesy of Aaron Jungels and Everett Company

The post #TakeAction: Finding Hope in the Theater 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
Facebook

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.

Matthew Delamater was searching for his passion after graduating college with a degree in business administration and found it right in his hometown of Oxford, Maine. He was 25 and had just landed his first acting role playing a salesman on the train in the opening scene of The Music Man.

“There was no pay, no ego—just people working so hard to create the best production they could,” he says. Although Delamater admits he had no idea what he was doing, he fell in love with acting because of that performance. “I loved the teamwork aspect of it, that you had a role to play, and that the overall goal was for the show to connect with people and when you did it, it was amazing,” he says.

Matthew Delamater in American Odyssey, photo courtesy NBC

As a lifelong Maine resident, Delamater says he has done and seen some of his favorite work right here in Portland. “There is great theater here, film and even commercial work for an actor, and though it’s certainly not as plentiful as the bigger markets of course,” he says. “But given how accessible it is to great film markets like Boston and even New York, you can really make it work.”

Delamater’s past year proves his point. He had a part in Detroit, a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, which releases on August 4, 2017, as well as in the major motion picture Daddy’s Home 2 to be released November 10, 2017.

Delamater keeps himself plenty busy in Portland’s thriving local theater scene. He was recently is in a production of Constellations by Nick Payne at SPACE Gallery in Portland, directed by Sean Mewshaw. “It’s a beautiful play about relationships and the infinite possibilities that the universe creates,” he says. “It’s basically about the choices we make in our lives and and how different choices can manifest entirely different universes.”

Like most actors, Delamater has a wish list. “One dream I do have I suppose is to play a significant supporting role in a significant independent film. Having the access to the kind of roles that I do in Boston is amazing, but usually it’s the theater that allows you to explore larger characters,” he says. “Some day I’d love to really dive into a character on screen that has the depth and development that typically I have only been able to explore on stage. But truly, any opportunity to do real, honest work that connects with people really is the dream.”

In the meantime, he’s enjoying theater life in Maine. “I feel blessed that I can live in the beautiful state and city that I love and be a part of a community that is so vibrant and supportive and be able to act as much as I do.”

Matthew Delamater–actor
Portland, Maine
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

Top image by Emily Delamater Photography

The post On Set with Matthew Delamater appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our September 2015 print edition. 

Peter McLaughlin launched his music career in Portland, Maine, and never looked back.

McLaughlin’s work as a drummer, composer, sound engineer, producer, and collaborator makes him one of the highest-regarded champions of the city’s music scene. His new project—Pretty Purgatory, which launched late last year—is both an Americana and folk-focused record label and an art collective. The label has released new offerings by Family Planning; Butcher Boy; Lisa/Liza; and McLaughlin’s own band, The Milkman’s Union. The latest is a split 7″ single featuring Maine’s Jacob Augustine backed by the psych-folk band Bad Braids from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Peter McLaughlin at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine.

“It’s easily my proudest release so far—from music, production value, right down to the art and packaging, designed collaboratively by Jakob Battick, Megan Biscieglia, and Tom Ryan,” McLaughlin says.

What is it about this coastal city, with a modest population of just over 66,000 and a reputation that rests more on chefs than musicians, that attracted the Needham, Massachusetts, native? It turns out that while Portland’s culinary diversity lures tourists, its cultural vibrancy has inspired an influx of savvy, dynamic, and creative music makers.

Upon his 2010 graduation from Bowdoin College, where he studied composition with celebrated American composer Elliott Schwartz, McLaughlin flirted with the idea of moving to a larger metropolitan area before turning his focus to Portland. “I was choosing between Boston, New York, Portland, and Northampton [Massachusetts]. I thought that the Portland music scene was honestly more interesting. It seemed to be a tight-knit community of people creating exciting music, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

On top of running his record label, McLaughlin also programs SPACE Gallery’s musical performances.

McLaughlin immersed himself in the scene by expanding on his college job experience as a soundman and talent booker for Bowdoin’s campus pub. He landed a gig at the busy nonprofit arts-and-music venue SPACE Gallery. Today he is the organization’s music programmer, bringing in such notable acts as Screaming Females, Death Vessel, and Today Is the Day. It’s a job that allows him the flexibility to continue touring as a musician.

“I’ve hit the road hard these last couple months, doing short tours and multi-week runs,” McLaughlin says. “I’ve traveled all over, and my travels always reaffirm what I know about Portland—that it’s a unique place. You get all the niceties of a small town with many of the advantages of a big city.

“It is attractive to young people, artists, developers, and the folks moving into these developments for the same reasons—it’s a thriving, artistic town,” he says. “And all of these people need to be careful that Portland remain just that.”

Peter McLaughlin’s Five Under-the-Radar Musical Paragons of Maine

Tom Kovacevic
Oud-playing Arabic music cognoscente. Weaver of delicate and idiosyncratic songs like no others.

Caethua
Enchanting hymns truly out of the forest. Makes bleakness resplendent like the winters she knows so intimately.

Big Blood
High priests of don’t-call-it-psychfreak-folk-new-weird-whatever-because-it’s-just-transcendent-goddamn-music.

Asa Irons
Exalted dirges, full of light and grit, like the salt of the New England earth. Always sounds like home.

Colby Nathan
Torch bearer and medium of feelings: nervous laughter, wide-eyed awe, honest tears, and subtle serenity.

Peter McLaughlin – owner, Pretty Purgatory
Portland, Maine
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Photography by Cara Slifka

The post Indie Music’s Maine Man appeared first on Take Magazine.