Calendar of Artists and Events
March
2nd annual "44N 69W: Radius Belfast"
Opening Reception: Friday March 5th, 5-8pm
March 4th through the 28th
Aarhus Gallery to Donate to Food Banks and Celebrate Art in the Community
Please join Åarhus Gallery for an opening reception Friday March 5th, 5-8pm for the second annual '44N 69W: Radius Belfast'. An all encompassing show running from March 4th through the 28th, of work by Maine residents of any age or training, living within a thirty-mile radius of Belfast. From potters, painters, and welders to musicians, knitters and mobile makers, artworks celebrating and illuminating this vast creative community will be on view and for sale with 20% of proceeds going to food banks within a thirty-mile radius of Belfast. Last year over one hundred and fifty pieces of art were exhibited to the delight of hundreds of visitors, friends and loved ones with consequent sales enabling a generous donation to the Good Shepard Food Bank. This year, a $5 fee to submit work will be donated directly to local food banks increasing the help that we all know is critical to the health of our community.
Aarhus Gallery, 50 Main St, Belfast, winter hours are; February-May, Thursday-Sunday 12 noon-6pm. For more information call 338-0001.
as if
an evening of Maine actors reading Maine writers
Saturday, March 20 at 7:00pm.
$7 suggested donation and refreshments will be served
featuring two short stories of love and personal firsts
"Ernie's Ark" by Monica Wood
performed by Larason Guthrie
Collected in: Contemporary Maine Fiction: An Anthology of Short Stories
edited by Wesley McNair (Down East Books)
"The Blender" by Martha Fenton
performed by Beverly Mann
Collected in: Mota 3/Courage edited by Karen Joy Fowler (Triple Tree Publishing)
April
Grid Works
April 1-May 2, 2010
Opening Reception Friday April 2, 5-8pm
Andrea Martens, Sprawling Confinement, 2007; Intaglio (dry point) on handmade paper, graphite, charcoal on canvas; 58" x 74"
- Ragna Bruno
- Ingrid Ellison
- Joshua Ferry
- Annadeene K Fowler
- Jay Gibson
- Marc Leavitt
- Kevin Johnson
- Mark Kelly
- Richard Mann
- Andrea Martens
- Abbie Read
- Wesley Reddick
- Willy Reddick
- Mike Rich
- Bob Richardson
- Jay Sawyer
- Jessica Stammen
Dave Peloquin and Bob Webb
Sounds Like Old Times Concert
CD release party Saturday, April 10 at 7:30pm.
Suggested donation $10 ,refreshments will be served.
Mining old phonograph records for gold is the current joy of two Maine musicians, Dave Peloquin, of Windsor, and Bob Webb, of Phippsburg. They have been singing traditional folk songs for more than 40 years. Two years ago, they discovered their common interest in the earliest commercial recordings of folk and "country-western" artists. The result of their collaboration is a compact disc album, "Sounds Like Old Times," which will be debuted at the gallery concert.
Peloquin and Webb take a faithful, but retro look at commercially recorded rural music from the 1920s to the early 1950s, including songs by Jimmie Rodgers, Alton and Rabon Delmore of the Delmore Brothers, Woody Guthrie, the Mississippi Sheiks, and Hank Williams. Using guitars, five-string banjo and occasionally a mandolin, they offer a new sound that is actually decades old. They sing songs for good times and hard times that honor, without slavishly recreating recordings they and their parents and grandparents once enjoyed on 78-rpm records.
Both men are seasoned presenters. Each has performed solo, as well as in a variety of musical groups. They are well-known around New England and in Europe for their presentations of traditional music of the sea, but the concert won't feature shanties or sailors' songs. "We enjoy singing and teaching about songs under sail," Webb said. "But we're playing a different sort of music. It was astonishing to discover that Dave and I share a real affection for early rural recordings. We've been listening to those songs, separately, since the 1950s."
Bob is an accomplished five-string banjo player. He gave a standing-room only concert of solo banjo tunes and songs at Åarhus Gallery during 2009. For more information about Dave and Bob, long on to www.richmondwebb.com
The new CD, "Sounds Like Old Times" will be available at the concert.
April 24th
www.freerangemusicfestival.com
May
Patterns of Nature
May 6-30, 2010
Opening Reception Friday May 7, 5-8pm
Abbie Read, “Wings, Cascading” (detail), Block print on mulberry paper, 8’ by 28"(overall)
June
Åarhus Gallery Third Ånniversary Show
June 2-27, 2010
Opening Reception Friday June 4, 5-8pm
With many thanks and warm regards to the community, friends, supporters and visitors, the artists of Åarhus Gallery celebrate their Third Anniversary by featuring the works of the 8 partners, and perhaps taking on the challenge of creating something using 3rd Anniversary materials- leather, glass, jade or fushia.
Resuming Summer Hours: Open Daily 10-6pm
July
George Pearlman
June 29 - August 1
Opening reception Friday July 2, 5-8pm
George Pearlman started potting in 1980 and received his BS from Syracuse University in 1983 and his MFA in ceramics from Pennsylvania State University in 1994. His education was and continues to be a collage of life experiences.
He has shown his work internationally and has been the recipient of numerous grants, residencies, and teaching positions throughout the U.S.A. and abroad. George established the St. George Pottery in 1999 by designing and constructing the three story building himself over seven months in 1998. This is the only break he has ever taken from his passion of working with clay since 1980, but it was well worth it. His studio and gallery are all connected to his coastal home in St. George, Maine.
George Pearlman spends most days in his studio, but he is also passionate about music and plays the piano and drums. He is a passionate outdoorsman, hiker, and kayaker as well. He is a Registered Maine Kayaking Guide and has paddled throughout the island rich Maine coast as well as the northern parts of Newfoundland.
August
Jonathan Mess
August 3-29, 2010
Opening Reception Friday, August 6th, 5-8
A native of Columbus, Ohio, Jonathan Mess studied art at the University of Toledo and received a BFA in studio art at the University of Montana. In 1999, Jonathan moved to the western foothills of Maine, where he taught art at Leavitt Area High School. In 2004, he was commissioned to create a major installation at the Bates Mill Complex for the Governor's Conference on the Creative Economy. Looking for a new challenge, Jonathan left Maine in 2006 to pursue an MFA at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He completed his degree in May of 2008 and returned to Maine, this time to explore the MidCoast region while keeping a studio at the Fort Andross Mill in Brunswick. Jonathan currently teaches art at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle.
September
Robert Shetterly
I Hold With Those Who Favor Fire, acrylic on panel. (study)
August 31-September 26
Opening Reception Friday September 3, 5-8pm
Robert Shetterly was born in 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated in 1969 from Harvard College with a degree in English Literature. At Harvard he took a couple of courses in drawing which changed the direction of his creative life --- from the written word to the image. Also, during this time, he was active in Civil Rights and in the Anti-Vietnam War movement.
After college and moving to Maine in 1970, he taught himself drawing, printmaking, and painting. While trying to become proficient in printmaking & painting, he illustrated widely. For twelve years he did the editorial page drawings for the Maine Times newspaper, illustrated National Audubon's children's newspaper Audubon Adventures, and more than 30 books. He also showed his work in galleries all around Maine & in many other states.
Among the children’s books that he has illustrated are Raven’s Light, The Dwarf Wizard of Uxmal, Muwin and the Magic Hare, the Pond God and Other Stories, Footprints in the Swamp, Project Panda Watch, The Changing Desert, and What’s the Difference?
His paintings & prints are in collections all over the U.S. and Europe. A collection of his drawings & etchings, Speaking Fire at Stones, was published in 1993 with poems written in response to them by William Carpenter. He is well know for his series of 70 painted etchings in response to William Blake's Proverbs of Hell, and for another series of 50 painted etchings reflecting on the metaphor of the Annunciation. His painting has tended toward the narrative and the surreal, and he has not been, until 2002, a portrait painter.
For the past eight years he has been painting the series of portraits ( numbering now over 145 ) called Americans Who Tell the Truth. The show has been traveling around the country for over seven years and is scheduled for the next two. Venues have included everything from university museums and grade school libraries to sandwich shops and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. It has been in more than twenty states. In 2005 Dutton published a book of the portraits by the same name. In 2006 the book won the top award of the International Reading Association for Intermediate non-fiction.
The portraits have given him an opportunity to speak with children and adults all over this country about the necessity of dissent in a democracy, the obligations of citizenship, sustainability, U.S. history, and how democracy cannot function if politicians don’t tell the truth and the media doesn’t report it.
He has also engaged in a wide variety of political and humanitarian work with many of the people whose portraits he has painted. In the spring of 2007 he traveled to Rwanda with Lily Yeh and Terry Tempest Williams to work in a village of survivors of the 1994 genocide there. Much of his current work focuses on honoring and working with the activists trying to bring an end to the terrible practice of Mountaintop Removal by coal companies in Appalachia.
Since 1990, he has been the President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), and producer of the UMVA’s Maine Masters Project, an on-going series of video documentaries about Maine artists.
In 2005 the Maine People’s Alliance awarded him its Rising Tide award. In May 2007, Rob received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Southern Maine and gave the Commencement Address at the University of New England which awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters.
In 2009 he was named a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow that enables him to do week long residences in colleges around the country.
Robert Shetterly lives, with his partner Gail Page, a painter and children’s book writer and illustrator, in Brooksville, Maine.
The Silence Between Old Friends. acrylic on panel, 48"x 48"
The Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits can be seen at:
www.americanswhotellthetruth.org His essays about his work are also available there.