While Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne is probably best known as an artist for her cut paper illustrations, she has many identities, all of which are connected. As an exhibiting artist, full-time high school art teacher, and co-founder of The Glass Museum, she plays a major role in the Peterborough arts community. Though much like paper cutting, the added challenge in Goldthwaite-Gagne’s life is that the entire piece has to hold together as one connected structure in the end.

“Of course, there is a constant search for balance between all of these identities,” Goldthwaite-Gagne says. “It is a challenge to ever feel like I am excelling at all of these things simultaneously.” Yet as the recipient of the 2013 New Hampshire Civic Leader of the Year Award and a 2017 PBS Digital Innovator, it’s clear Goldthwaite-Gagne is making a positive impact in her community.

Becoming a parent has given Goldthwaite-Gagne a greater sense of urgency in teaching and community building in general. “I am constantly asking myself if I’m helping to cultivate a school culture that I would be happy having my child be part of,” says Goldthwaite-Gagne. “I really love living and teaching in the same community; I can’t imagine dividing my energy into different communities simultaneously.”

Outside the classroom, Goldthwaite-Gagne’s art was recently featured in the 2017 Whitney Houston Biennial: Greatest Love of All exhibit in New York City. She has also been working on a series of portraits of women she admires. Her goal for 2017 is to create at least 52 portraits, which she will debut at Aviary Gallery in Jamaica Plain in early 2018. “This started with a poster project that I created this past fall to raise money for Planned Parenthood,” says Goldthwaite-Gagne. She chose nine of her creative heroes: Alma Thomas, Nancy Spero, Yoko Ono, Eva Hesse, The Guerilla Girls, Margaret Kilgallen, Zadie Smith, Swoon, and Sarah Urist Green. Goldthwaite-Gagne sold 50 posters in one day, and raised $500 for Planned Parenthood.

Through The Glass Museum, a 501c3 non-profit organization that began in early 2008, Goldthwaite-Gagne and her co-founder and husband, Eric, produce Broke: The Affordable Arts Fair and The Thing in the Spring concert series. Their mission? To bring world-renowned music and high quality affordable art to the Peterborough community at large.

The duo did not set out to build an arts non-profit. Initially, things started out with modest music and arts events around Peterborough, but over the years the scale of these events has grown exponentially. “The guiding principle of Broke has always been that art is for everybody,” Goldthwaite-Gagne says. “We are committed to always offering free admission to the public, keeping the work on sale under $50, and maintaining affordable tabling fees for vendors.” These days, Broke frequently receives more applicants than they can accommodate, often times twice as many.

“To me, these projects are really about bringing the art and music that we love to Peterborough, which is a really singular and special place,” says Goldthwaite-Gagne.

Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne–artist/teacher/co-founder of the Glass Museum
Peterborough, New Hampshire
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The post The Job-Defying Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne appeared first on Take Magazine.

When I reach Haley Morgan by phone at home—which is fitting—she is stretching—also fitting—to prepare for a show later that night. Morgan is the singer for the Western-Mass.-based electro-art duo Home Body. Home Body play dance music, which is inherently about the body—moving the body, feeling and articulating rhythms in the limbs and hips, a physical correlation between the body and the music. The body is an important part of who and what Home Body are.

Clubby dance music can sometimes seem oriented toward physical pleasure, but the meaning of connecting with our bodies through sound and through organized movement is greater than just our ability to pursue or project physical desires. We learn to carry ourselves in space, to convey poise and grace and self-possession through movement.

“It’s so easy to become separated from our body or not think about it as something that you have agency over or to think about it as something that you can reinvent yourself through,” says Morgan. Not surprisingly, Home Body have made fruitful connections with the world of fashion and galleries, sometimes making their music specifically for settings that showcase the multi-media art potential of music.

Haley Morgan, Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Morgan and her partner Eric Hnatow met at Hampshire College in Amherst. The two were a couple for five years or so before they formed the band, with Morgan having a theater background and Hnatow having played in some industrial electronic bands in Ludlow and Palmer.

Morgan and Hnatow want their project to connect with people, and they put thought and effort into making their shows visual, interactive, kinetic, and stimulating. They’re into “the power of spectacle,” says Morgan. “We use sound, we use light, we use costuming, we use dance, just to try to figure different ways to hook people,” says Morgan.

The music strikes a nice balance between the synthetic and the organic. Hnatow gets the beats pumping along with mechanistic oscillations, handclaps, and robotic clicks and hisses. Sometimes the bottom-scraping synth bass lines sound as if giant kazoos were buzzing beneath the fabric of the mix. The glitchy and smeared sonic textures serve as a fitting background surface for Morgan to sing, intone, and blurt over. She has a rhythmic force and emphatic articulation to her singing. Her vocals—with growls, coos, yips and dips—can bring to mind a range of idiosyncratic vocal stylists like Grace Jones, Sinead O’Connor, Robyn, Bjork, Yoko Ono, and even Alanis Morissette and Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries. Home Body are working on a new full-length record, one that could come out by year’s end.

Eric Hnatow of Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Listen to Morgan on “Inner Red” from the duo’s most recent release, 2014’s Guts. “Bite your tongue and swallow it whole/No need to name it, your gut will know,” Morgan sings. Another song, “Something Tempting” has lines about “turn[ing] our bodies back on.”
There are ways of knowing that don’t involve the brain, and that’s seems to be part of this band’s point.

“I think that sound vibrations, the music that we make—sound is movement, and I think that sometimes life can get too heady, literally coming from our brains,” says Morgan. “There’s so much more that we can understand about the world around us if we employ all of our senses.”

Want to hear what Home Body listens to on Spotify when they’re not making music? Check out our Take a Listen channel.

Morgan Hanley – singer, Home Body
Western Massachusetts
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Top image by Robert Tobey

The post Art-Dance Duo Home Body Keep It Corporeal appeared first on Take Magazine.