Mary Mattingly - March 2021

“The Surf Point residency has been an unforgettable experience. I can't do justice to how much appreciation I feel for this time at Surf Point. Waking up to the ocean, being able to spread out in a large studio space and make new work for three weeks has been transformative.”

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Mary Mattingly is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work explores issues of sustainability, climate change and displacement. Mattingly combines photography, performance, portable architecture and sculptural ecosystems into poetic visions of adaptation and survival. In her work, we encounter nomads laboring under the weight of their possessions. We witness their pilgrimage over parched lands and swollen bodies of water. We see refugees of a tainted past seeking out a sustainable future in the natural world. We watch as they carve out an itinerant existence, embracing simple and adaptable strategies for survival. And we see the artist sifting through the particles of her own life in search of a sustainable footprint. In her ambitious multi-media projects, Mary Mattingly aspires to do more than issue a warning about environmental neglect and its aftermath. She offers specific solutions and architectural prototypes that we can build upon in our pursuit of a better life. She inspires hope that we can prepare for a changing world through innovative design and a restorative relationship with nature. Are we ready to embark upon the great migration of our time, from the shortsighted habits of the past to the nimble and sustainable ways of the future?

More of Mary’s work can be found here.

Baxter Koziol - March 2021

“I know I will feel the ramifications of my time at Surf Point every time I'm in the studio. It’s one of those places.”

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Baxter Koziol studied painting at Maine College of Art (BFA 2017) and has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Monson Arts, Hewnoaks, and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation. He lives and works in Portland, ME.

More of Baxter’s work can be found here.

Sascha Braunig - February 2021

“Each day at Surf Point, I woke up to the bright daylight and a feeling of possibility and excitement. After a year of collective grief, I thought a lot about geologic time versus human lifespans, i.e. creativity and mortality, thoughts that were sometimes mournful but other times liberatory. Whether or not I acted on these potentialities, I experienced a creative opening that was completely distinct from my usual studio routine. I believe the combination of the location of the building on the Atlantic coast and the benevolent spirit of its designers and former occupants, Beverly and Mary-Leigh, form a heightened receptivity to creative thought. I took the glow of this feeling back to normal life and it continues to infuse my activities.”

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Like many painters before me, I’m interested in the confines of the canvas, a necessarily restraining space. I ask questions of this historically masculine rectangle: in what ways can the femme figure occupy the frame? Is this relationship inevitably a sadomasochistic one, with its preconditions of boundaries and control? Within the shallow boxes or voided theatrical backdrops of my work, my subject’s relationship to the frame that tightly confines her has grown from the pessimistic immobility of "Hide" or "Tenterhooks" to the fledgling boundary-testing of "Unseen Forces". Although these issues of framing and figuration, based in art history, still fascinate me, over the last three years I’ve introduced the image of the witch and gestures derived from ancient Near Eastern fertility goddesses ("The Offering") in order to propose these questions in an explicitly feminist way. I feel urgently compelled to make images of powerful female figures that simultaneously acknowledge the unstable conditions under which that power can exist. Their postures are strong, sometimes menacing ("The Witch") and sometimes playful ("The Curtain") but they also appear to be made of provisional materials such as paper, fabric, and plastic - or neon, the ultimate shortcut lure to pleasure. As I navigate these shifts in subject matter, I’m also tackling larger-scale paintings with more complex compositions. It’s exciting and challenging to take on more ambitious elements, but it’s also a learning process and I’m still a student of my expanded scale.

More of Sascha’s work can be found here.

Erin Johnson - January 2021

“My time at Surf Point was invaluable. The rhythm created by the view of the ocean, and architectural layout of the house itself, moved me and my work - gently, but with persistence.”

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Erin Johnson's video installations blend documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmaking devices, and foreground the ways in which individual lives and sociopolitical realities merge. Comprised of footage of site-specific performances, the films explore how power structures are communicated through relationships, focusing on the complexity of collectivity, the wide-ranging consequences of scientific research, as well as resistance, desire, and the queer body. While at Surf Point, Erin filmed a new chapter of her ongoing video project surrounding Rachel Carson's letters to her friend and lover Dorothy Freeman. Set in Surf Point's building, the completed film will shift between the interior and exterior of the modernist duplex as it moves between the past and present, exploring the urgency and loss Carson felt in both her environmental research and romance. In addition, Erin edited and scored a new body of work for an installation in Times Square, and worked on the sound design for a piece shot in 2020.

More of Erin’s work can be found here.

Wild Knoll

Image by Greta Rybus

Surf Point Foundation invests in visual artists and those who amplify their work through a diverse, inclusive and accessible residency program on the coast of York, Maine. Our mission realizes the vision of our founders, the late arts patron Mary-Leigh Smart and artist Beverly Hallam.

The Foundation has reached a difficult decision, and we want our neighbors, the town of York, and those in the broader arts, cultural and historic preservation communities to understand the circumstances and reasoning behind it.

Over the last four years, the Foundation has invested in preserving and renovating “Surf Point,” built and lived in by Mary-Leigh and Beverly for nearly 50 years. This 6,000sf home, transformed into a cultural facility, now offers four live-work spaces to artists and arts professionals for three-week-long sessions year-round.

We have been guided by a commitment to honor the spirit of our founders, who contributed their home, land, art and legacy to Surf Point, and who wanted to build a retreat for artistic creation and connection with nature.

Integrated with the Foundation’s mission, our conservation easement, managed by the York Land Trust, ensures a minimal human footprint on our 47 acres of land.

A second building, known as “Wild Knoll,” also sits on the Foundation’s property. Esteemed writer and poet May Sarton rented, lived and worked at Wild Knoll from 1973-1995. When the Foundation assumed ownership of the building in 2017, it found the building in disrepair, and invested significant time and resources to determine the feasibility and cost of renovations.

Among the many obstacles: mitigation of hazardous materials; replacement and updating of windows, siding, insulation, electrical, HVAC, and septic systems; structural repairs; and reconfiguration for safety, accessibility and privacy.

The cost of such a renovation - combined with the continuing costs of maintaining, managing and programming the building - far exceed the Foundation’s capacity, which has one staff person and a commitment to its primary mission to serve artists and art professionals through the residency program. The Foundation is not equipped to raise the significant sums needed for such an undertaking. We must be organizationally, financially, and ecologically sustainable in order to fulfill the mission envisioned by our founders.

Given all of these factors, the Foundation board made the decision to take the building down, with no proposed future use for the site.

This decision was difficult, knowing that both historic preservation and the life and work of May Sarton are important to the Foundation and members of the community.

We are committed to continuing conversations about our mission and common interests with one and all, including organizations such as the York Land Trust, Old York Historical Society, the York Historic District Commission, Maine Preservation, the York Community Services Association, the George Marshall Store Gallery, and with town residents.

We value our role as a participant in the cultural community, and hope we have provided context for our decision.

Sincerely,

Executive Director Yael Reinharz and the Surf Point Foundation Board

Dennis RedMoon Darkeem - December 2020

“In a moment of chaos & uncertainty, I received a phone call that I was accepted for the SPF residency. I was ecstatic for the good news. Overwhelmed with curiosity and joy for this new experience. Arriving at the home feeling overwhelmed with honor, joy and freedom. During my time at the residency I was able to photograph, hike, paint, collect shells off the beach, play loud music, dance around, jump, listen to the night winds, play with stones, see places I would never have seen, meet amazing individuals, have great talks with fellow artists, made a basket or two, make collages, learn how to make rope from plants, do some reading, think about the future of my artworks, create sculptures that turn into a performance art piece, made a video...I was able to teach from my studio, create curriculum and lessons for my students involving nature, meditation and transformation. I had seafood, ordered food, had great studio visits, met other arts organizations, made a snowman, experienced a Maine snowstorm and hours of no Wi-Fi. Being able to wake up to amazing sunrises and walk along the ocean front has given me a new body of work, a deeper love of nature, water, and a transformation that was needed for me to create and learn.”

Image by Heather Henriksen

I am inspired to create artwork based on the familiar objects that I view through my daily travels. I discover elements in existing architecture and among everyday items found within the home. I ultimately set out to express a meaningful story about events in my life and those found with the communities I work. I utilize different media in the creation of my work. This allows for great versatility and a rich viewer experience as the eye uncovers the multiple layers that often characterize mixed media art. Since my work as a professional artist commenced in the early 2000s, it has evolved into critiquing social and political issues affecting US and indigenous Native American culture. Much of my art has focused on issues like institutionalized racism and classism, jarring stereotypes, and displacement of people of color. As a multimedia artist, I express these motifs through fine art, drawings, paintings, collages, photography, sculpture, and installations. Incorporating a craftwork aesthetic has connected tradition with the contemporary. This is prevalent in many of my pieces. I seek to create a discussion through color, texture, symbolism, and geometric designs. This Residency will allow me to explore the historic value of the community and begin to build visual symbolism of cultures that have migrated and left cultural icons through the environment. The benefit of taking part of the residency will allow me the time and space to focus on creating work that I can exhibit. My goal for this residency is to create a small body of work that consists of transforming everyday items into my narrative of Afro- Indigenous expressions. Incorporating a mix of elements from shells , beads, leather, Crystal's, feathers, natural elements wood, branches, Vines Stones along with traditional materials like watercolors, pencils,cray. These artifacts will have dual use cross between body adornment and sculpture work. This work will give honor to communities that have been lost but not forgotten. My goal is to give life to these artifacts that they may empower and create questions on one's connection to their own history.

More of Dennis’ work can be found here

Yevgeniya Baras - December 2020

“Surf Point is a place that links the resident artist to a number of histories: the biography of the studio and building where art has been made and ideas have been exchanged for decades, to Maine where so many artist colonies have thrived throughout time. This is very palpable and special to experience, that lineage. And in addition to history there is the austere and powerful nature that seeps into the studio. Its sounds and geometry are inescapable. The residency is a fantastic place to reflect and make work, near the rugged and timeless coastline, in the presence of remarkable histories.”

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In researching Surf Point residency, I found myself interested specifically in the landscape. I am inspired by the coast, the rocky textures, the openness and vastness of this land. Also the light really left an impression on me. I am excited at the potential of being immersed in this environment. One of the main themes in my paintings is landscape. Nature is often edited, simplified: sky ground, moon, sun. Landscapes are not typically done from observation. The result is a kind of symbol of a landscape. I also assign pictorial emblems to individual elements of nature. Over and over do I find so much mystery and awe in the landscape. I recall the feeling of smallness as a human in the desert of Sahara, in the mountains in Greece but these journeys are infrequent. In actuality I am so rarely outdoors. I live in Queens where the environment is industrial. I do not have time to observe slowly because of the speed of everyday existence in New York.

Yevgeniya Baras is an artist living and working in New York City. She is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in NY and the Landing Gallery in LA. Yevgeniya is a 2019 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018, and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014 she was named the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, ArtForum, and Art in America. Yevgeniya's current solo exhibition is  in LA at the Landing Gallery. Her next exhibitions are at Inman gallery in Houston and Station gallery in Sydney. Yevgeniya co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery on the Lower East Side of NY (2010-2018). Yevgeniya  has curated and co-curated over twenty exhibitions at Regina Rex and other galleries in NY, Chicago, and Philadelphia. She has a BA and MS from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). Yevgeniya teaches at RISD and Sarah Lawrence College.

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More of Yevgeniya’s work can be found here

Suzy Delvalle - October 2020

“The SPF residency was just what I needed to recover, refocus and REGENERATE! Muchas gracias por esta oportunidad!”

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Susan (Suzy) Delvalle is a fierce advocate for art and artists. With over 20 years of leadership experience in the cultural sector, she has committed her career to enhancing the impact of mission-based organizations and building opportunity and equity in the arts. She most recently served as President and Executive Director of Creative Capital, an innovative arts nonprofit that adapts venture philanthropy concepts to support individual artists. Only the second Director in Creative Capital’s history, Suzy oversaw some of the most dramatic changes in the organization’s two-decade history. Under her leadership, Creative Capital increased its annual operating budget 20 percent by instituting a three-year fundraising cycle, further developed the board with ten new active members while also establishing a National Advisory Council, and expanded services to artists by instituting regular, annual Creative Capital Awards and retreats.

Suzy formerly served as the founding Director of the Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling, where she oversaw all aspects of the development and opening of the museum. She previously served as Director of External Affairs and Development at El Museo Del Barrio, where she dramatically increased the museum’s budget and attendance over her eleven-year tenure. Before joining El Museo, she worked for American Composers Orchestra following a career in consumer banking and advertising. Suzy has served as adjunct faculty at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies and is a guest lecturer at several universities. She serves on the Board of ArtTable, New Yorkers for Culture & Arts, The Laundromat Project and is a member of The Metropolitan Museum’s Advisory Committee in Culture Engagement. She was born and raised in Curaçao and speaks Spanish, Dutch, and Papiamento.

While at Surf Point, Suzy plans to work on an initiative on US-Latinx art and artists to address their lack of representation in US scholarship, galleries, museums, institutions, and the sector at large. The voice and perspectives of artists from Latinx and Caribbean communities have long been marginalized, while demographically they represent the second largest majority in the US. They provide alternative, nuanced representations of the many facets of their communities and contributions to the fabric of this country, and the range of issues that Latinxs face today. While there are a few actively working groups addressing certain components, there is a need to gain a larger-picture understanding of the major gaps in the field, and determine a multi-prong, proactive agenda to leverage efforts. Suzy will focus her time on research, coordination and navigation of a more expansive and inclusive plan to proactively bridge gaps and address these needs both short- and long-term.

photo credit: Ariana Lindquist

Meghan Brady - October 2020

“Surf Point was more than I had allowed myself to hope for. The absolute beauty and otherness of its location and story was not clear to me until I relaxed into my residency. And I think that's what I got most from it - a kind of permission to let myself be and do what I needed to do. In other words, to relax! To relax back into my mind and spirit. I felt no exterior pressure to perform, achieve, reach and that was an unexpected gift. I had time to paint and work but also to write, read, think, and wander around in the woods and daydream.”

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Meghan Brady, a painter, is based in Midcoast Maine.  Through painting, printmaking, and drawing-installations, Brady explores the possibilities of a wide-ranging practice.  Recent shows include ‘Said + Done’ at Mrs. Gallery in NYC, ‘Reversible Roles’ at University of Maine Museum of Art, ‘Take Five’ at SUNY Buffalo Anderson Gallery, NADA House Governors Island NYC and ‘Second Hand’ at Space Gallery in Portland, Maine. She’s recently been in residence at MacDowell and Tiger Strikes Asteroid NYC. Brady is a graduate of Smith College and Boston University. 

“Recently I’ve been mulling over questions of how to incorporate human form into an otherwise abstract image. Can I use compositions and arrangements of these forms that are based on outsider sources (early New England gravestone patterns, Shaker Gift Drawings, traditional women’s handiwork and textiles)? And in spite of my assumptions against it, can I create a body of work that holds the balance between abstraction and representation? In the last two years, I've been making wall-scaled paper paintings as a way to work through a backlog of painting ideas. From here, I’ve opened up my process by making cut and collaged canvas pieces on the floor. They are painted, rearranged, and glued and then painted again. There is an ongoing sense of discovery and freedom in this method. But I am ready to bring the project back to oil paintings on stretched canvas.”

More of her work can be found at MeghanBrady.com.

Shannon Finnegan - September 2020

“I am grateful for places like Surf Point that give artists space and resources with the trust that they will use that support in the ways that best suit their needs. Artists need project-based support but we also need support to research, rest, dream, and plan. These things are vital to the sustainability of our practices.”

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Shannon Finnegan is a multidisciplinary artist making work about accessibility and disability culture. They have done projects with Banff Centre, the High Line, MCA Denver, Tallinn Art Hall, and Nook Gallery. They have spoken about their work at the Brooklyn Museum, School for Poetic Computation, The 8th Floor, and The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. In 2018, they received a Wynn Newhouse Award and participated in Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency. In 2019, they were an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam. Their work has been written about in Art in America, Hyperallergic, and the New York Times. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

Julia Rommel - September 2020

“I was comfortable doing less at Surf Point, waking to sit on the craggy shore and watch the sunrise, letting hours go by. I started noticing the variety of life on the property- each tidal pool hosting its own unique world, so many different plants and animals, shifts in the smells as the tides change. It reset my senses, inspired me, and allowed me to approach my work in a new way.”

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Julia Rommel (b. 1980 in Salisbury, MD) received her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Fall Guy, Standard (Oslo), Oslo; Candy Jail, Bureau, New York; Twin Bed, Bureau at Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Stay-at-Home Dad with Mathew Cerletty, Standard (Oslo), Oslo; A Cheesecake With Your Name On It, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles; Two Italians, Six Lifeguards, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

The Work Ahead.

"Again We Rise," a mural on the Aura Concert Venue and Nightclub building in Portland, Maine, painted by local artists Ryan Adams, Mike Rich and Jason McDonald. The mural features a portrait of George Floyd and some of the names of victims of police brutality.

So much has recently happened in support of the nationwide demand for racial and economic justice, police accountability and meaningful and lasting societal change. Surf Point Foundation honors this historic moment and pledges to do our part in the struggle to dismantle systemic racism so that people of color can finally be safe, free, and fully enfranchised by the social contract that has been too long denied. We face a pivotal moment of reckoning in which no one can remain passive or silent.

Details from message board on Free Street, Portland, Maine (above and below).

As an organization in its growth phase, Surf Point has the opportunity to reaffirm core commitments, ideals and values - and to articulate new ones. We hold ourselves accountable to listen, learn, change, and devote ourselves to the challenging work ahead:

1. We will continue to reaffirm our responsibility to diversity and inclusion and to prioritize recruiting people of color, LGBTQI, women, and those with a connection to Maine as residents. We will do everything possible to make Surf Point a positive, welcoming and empowering space for every resident and visitor, with special sensitivity to the historical, cultural and economic history of our location in York, Maine. Community building is among our top priorities through sustained and anchored relationships.

2. As a primarily White governing body, the Surf Point Board of Directors will create a diversity committee whose mission will be to translate our ideals into meaningful actions and structures. Actions include: prioritizing meaningful diversity on our Board of Directors; mandatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training for our Board and staff; and identifying and supporting through grants Maine-based arts entities that fight for racial justice, judicial reform, and economic equality.

3. We will pursue partnerships with institutions that reciprocally share our values and can enhance our sense of intersectional networks, including creating opportunities for internships and hiring.

4. We will correctively expand our founders’ art library to include monographs, exhibition catalogues and historical and critical works by and about Black and Brown artists and scholars, cultures and creative movements, both historical and contemporary. In addition to serving our residents, we will explore how this library can become a resource for the larger community.

5. We will seek to learn what we do not understand. We will listen. We will see and remember. We will speak out.

In response to the many pressing concerns in our society, and in solidarity with the local and broader community, we have donated to organizations we respect and admire in Maine and New Hampshire that address hunger relief, community building, and celebrate BIPOC artists, art workers, and history: the Abbe Museum, Abyssinian Meeting House, Curtis Memorial Library; Gather, Indigo Arts Alliance, Mayo Street Arts, Ogunquit Museum of Art; Space Gallery, and York Community Services Association.

I look forward to your participation in this discussion long into the future and, as always, welcome your thoughts.

Yours,
Yael Reinharz,
Executive Director & the Surf Point Foundation Board

Floriography: The Language of Flowers - Beverly Hallam Exhibited at Cove Street Arts

Originally conceived as an early April show, as both an antidote to the cruelest month’s lingering gloom, and a reminder that spring, with its florid proliferation of life, was on the horizon, Floriography feels even more timely in its new slot as our first post-lockdown exhibition.

Its message more immediate, urgent, and life-affirming… This exhibition presents a conversation between the work of four talented and stylistically diverse female artists, each in dialogue with her subject matter, with her media and the act of mark-making, and with floral painting as historical genre.

The exhibition also includes a selection of works on paper from the estate of Maine Master and nationally known pioneering postwar female artist, Beverly Hallam. These works span from 1961 to 2007, and media include pastel, acrylic, ink, oil monotype and charcoal.  They beautifully display the artist’s verve and virtuosity as well as her enduring fascination for floral still lifes.

BEVERLY LINNEY HALLAM

November 22, 1923 - February 21, 2013

Beverly Hallam was born in Lynn, Mass. on Nov. 22, 1923, the daughter of Alice Linney Murphy and Edwin Francis Hallam. She graduated from Lynn English High School. During her early years, she studied clarinet and saxophone. In 1945, Hallam received a B.S. Ed. from the Massachusetts College of Art and in that year she received a position at Lasell Junior College (Auburndale, MA) where she was Chairman of the Art Department until 1949. Following coursework at Cranbrook Academy in 1948, she received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1953.

From 1949-1962, Hallam was professor at the Massachusetts College of Art where she taught Painting, Drawing and Design. There, she taught the first courses in Photography and Theater Arts, and led students to experiment with avant-garde effects in set painting, costume design, lighting, projection, and taped electronic music. She supervised the Saturday Morning High School Art Classes.

An avid photographer, Ms. Hallam travelled to Europe and compiled many illustrated lectures on art subjects which she gave throughout the country. From the early 1950s, Hallam was one of the earliest artist-adopters in the U.S. of Polyvinyl Acetate—or Acrylic—now ubiquitously recognized as a fine art medium. Known for her large airbrushed flower canvases and for experimental printmaking, Hallam had 45 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries and participated in 280 group shows. Her work is in the permanent collections of many museums and corporations and in private collections in the U.S., Canada, France, Belgium, and Switzerland—including those of the Harvard Art Museums, Farnsworth Art Museum, Ogunquit Museum of American Art and National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Although she taught full time, Hallam never gave up painting. Over the course of a practice that spanned 56 years, she experimented with media and approaches, ever open to new ideas and technical approaches to making. In 1963, Hallam resigned from teaching to live and work full time in Maine, first in Ogunquit and then in York. 

Hallam had gallery affiliations in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Florida, and Maine. Her exhibition history included retrospectives at the Addison Gallery of American Art (1971) and at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland (1998). In that same year, Midtown Galleries in New York mounted a large traveling exhibition focused on Hallam’s innovative use of airbrush, and Carl Little’s monograph Beverly Hallam: An Odyssey in Art was published. In 1990, the Evansville Museum of Arts and Science compiled an exhibition in Indiana that toured to five other states. Her work was recognized with several awards, including "Distinguished Alumni Award, Massachusetts College of Art" and "Maine College of Art Award for Achievement as a Visual Artist." The Union of Maine Visual Artists, as part of the Maine Masters Project featured her brilliant career on film in Beverly Hallam: Artist as Innovator in 2011, directed by Richard Kane.

Hallam maintained an active studio at Surf Point until her death on February 21, 2013. Her papers are held in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Her legacy includes the conception, with friend and patron Mary-Leigh Smart, of Surf Point Foundation, whose mission is to be an inclusive residency program in their former home on the York coast.

Community Outreach

In response to the many pressing concerns in our society, and in solidarity with the local and broader community, Surf Point Foundation donated to organizations we respect and admire in Southern Maine and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We invite you to explore these remarkable organizations whose work address hunger relief, community building, and celebrates BIPOC artists, art workers, and history: the Abbe Museum, Abyssinian Meeting House, Gather, Indigo Arts Alliance, Mayo Street Arts and York Community Services Association.

Maine Artists Are Taking Their Legacies Into Their Own Hands

A painting of artist Beverly Hallam, left, and arts supporter Mary-Leigh Call Smart by Grant Drumheller hangs on the wall in the entrance area of the Surf Point Foundation in York. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

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By Bob Keyes Staff Writer - Portland Press Herald

YORK — Shiao-Ping Wang felt the presence of Beverly Hallam when she spent three weeks in the late artist’s studio this past fall.

Wang, a painter from Somersworth, New Hampshire, was among the first artists to participate in a new residency program of the Surf Point Foundation of York, which offers artists the opportunity to live in the modernist home that Hallam helped design with her companion, the art patron Mary-Leigh Smart. Before they died, they created the foundation to ensure the home they shared for more than 40 years would remain a place where artists would make art and where their spirit for adventure would survive.

It’s an idyllic setting, close to the pounding surf on one side and abutting the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge on another. “I really feel like I am reliving Beverly Hallam’s life,” Wang said, standing in the light of Hallam’s studio, with its vaulted ceiling and massive walls that accommodate large-scale paintings. “It’s a very emotional, psychological and artistic thing. Every time I go to a new spot and experience something, I think, ‘This is how it feels, how she felt, how they felt——this is a life in the arts. It’s a most significant experience.”

For Wang, that meant the best studio she’s ever worked in, with three weeks to experiment and create——and fresh meals daily.

Photo by Heather Henriksen, courtesy of Surf Point Foundation

Artist-endowed foundation in Maine, and their market values:

Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, $18,882,951

The Bob Crewe Foundation,
$11,527,042

Ellis-Beauregard Foundation,
$10,208,346

Surf Point Foundation,
$9,618,055

Anonimo Foundation (John David Ellis and Joan Beauregard), $9,272,361

Star of Hope Foundation
(Robert Indiana), $5,224,227; artist’s estate not yet settled, not fully endowed

Kenneth Noland Foundation,
$5,084,360; not fully endowed

Falcon Charitable Foundation (Joseph Fiore), $4,333,943

Heliker-LaHotan Foundation,
$1,605,094

Will and Elena Barnet Foundation Inc., $1,225,662

Carlo Pittore Foundation, now International Artists Manifest, $565,292

Joseph and Mary Fiore Family Foundation, $414,945

Acadia Foundation, Richard Estes: $618; this is a living artist’s foundation, not yet endowed

John Marin Foundation, $0; this is a living donor’s foundation, not endowed

Sources: Guidestar and the Aspen Institute

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Surf Point is the latest artist-endowed foundation to begin operating in Maine, where there are more per capita private foundations created by an artist, the artist’s family or a beneficiary than in any other state, indications both of Maine’s longstanding calling as a place to make art and its population’s status as the oldest in the country. Simply put, a lot of artists live and die in Maine, and when they die, they leave their art and legacies behind. By creating foundations while they are alive, artists have a hand in shaping their own legacy while also leaving something behind for other artists and the public.

According to the Aspen Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that has conducted the most research on the topic, Maine has at least 14 artist-endowed foundations at various stages of activity, with a cumulative value of $78 million. Of those, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation of Portland is the largest, with assets of nearly $19 million, according to the latest available tax data. Other large artist foundations in Maine are the Bob Crewe Foundation in Portland with $11.5 million in assets, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation of Rockland with more than $10 million in assets, and Surf Point, valued at $9.6 million.

Depending on the settlement of the estate of the late artist Robert Indiana of Vinalhaven, his Star of Hope Foundation could become Maine’s largest. Indiana’s estate, which will fund the foundation, is estimated at more than $100 million, but is tied to ongoing litigation.

Although there’s never been a reliable census of Maine artists, by the best estimate of people active in the field, there are probably between 1,000 and 2,000 other artists in a state without the resources to establish a foundation,

who have spent their lives making art and will have little to show for their exhaustive efforts after they die——a cause that has become something of a crusade for Sarah Bouchard, executive director of International Artists Manifest, a nonprofit arts organization with the mission of taking on and caring for the works of underrepresented artists after they die. Bouchard co-founded the Woolwich-based organization in 2012, with the gift of the assets of the artist-endowed Carlo Pittore Foundation, where she previously worked but which failed, then dissolved.

It upsets Bouchard to consider the number of artists who spend their lives making and showing their art, “and then usually they die and no one will ever know about their work. It will go to their kids, it will end up in a dumpster,” she said. “I get emotionally disturbed when I think about how many artists that happens to, and not only because of the artist and the loss for them, but for us. … They have spent their whole life creating this work and then it’s just gone, so we as a culture lose this massive resource. It’s so devastating.”

Artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman works in a studio space at the Surf Point Foundation in York.

Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

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A Growing Trend

The increase in the number of foundations and other organizations addressing artists and their legacies reflects a national trend, said Christine Vincent, project director of the Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative of the Aspen Institute. There are 433 artist-endowed foundations nationally, and 40 percent were created in the past 15 years. Most of the foundations in Maine were created during that time.

Hallam and Smart were far ahead of the trend. Although the residency program didn’t begin operating until this fall, they created the Surf Point Foundation in 1988 with a vision of transforming their 6,000-square-foot seaside home and surrounding 44 acres into a residency for artists, art historians, architects, critics and designers after they were gone. Hallam died in 2013, and Smart in 2017.

The Aspen Institute released its first report on the artist-endowed foundation trend in 2010, and has updated it twice. Nationally, the value of artist-endowed foundation assets more than doubled from 2011 to 2015, rising 120 percent to $7.66 billion. By comparison, among all foundations nationally, asset value rose 40 percent, said Vincent, the former president of Maine College of Art and a past deputy director at the Ford Foundation, who lives on Vinalhaven.

Giving by artist-endowed foundations is up, as well, and those grant-making activities are “squarely on the arts,” Vincent said, with 79 percent of giving among artist-endowed foundations going to the arts and artists.

The reasons for the growth are simple, Vincent said: demographic trends in the artist population, the rise of the global art market and the desire of artists to provide for their creative works and philanthropic interests in the long term. Maine has a lot of artist-endowed foundations relative to its population because a lot of artists live here, she said.

Living Maine artists have directly benefited from the growth in the foundations and their assets, as more foundations have begun awarding high-dollar individual grants and creating residency opportunities, such as at Surf Point, which has awarded three-week residencies to 10 artists since October. Surf Point expects to award a total of 30 residencies in its first year.

Since December, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation has given $80,000 directly to artists in various fields – $25,000 to Lewiston painter Reggie Burrows Hodges for its annual Fellowship in the Visual Arts, which it has awarded for three years and comes with the promise of an exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art; $20,000 to Minnesota composer Reinaldo Moya, who will use the money to write music for the Bangor Symphony Orchestra; and another $35,000 in project and travel grants to Maine artists, in increments of $2,000 and $5,000.

The Rabkin Foundation, founded and named by an artist and his wife who spent their lives in New York, has given away $1.2 million to 24 arts writers across the country since 2017, and plans to distribute another $400,000 this summer – $50,000 grants to another eight writers. (Disclosure: This reporter was a recipient of a Rabkin Prize in 2017). It also awarded $50,000 to New York Times art critic Roberta Smith for lifetime achievement and gives away $25,000 annually for research and writing in the area of the American folk and outsider art, which was a collecting interest of Dorothea and Leo Rabkin. In Maine, it has given money to a range of art organizations, including the Chart, Union of Maine Visual Artists, Spindleworks, Indigo Arts Alliance and Creative Portland. It also paid for classroom supplies for nine Portland public high school art teachers.

“The sum total of us all is and will be staggering, especially when Robert Indiana’s foundation deploys in the future,” said Susan Larsen, executive director of the Rabkin Foundation.

Indiana, best known for his iconic “LOVE” image, established the Star of Hope Foundation while he was alive. The name refers to his longtime home on Vinalhaven, where he moved from New York in search of isolation. Indiana died there in May 2018 at age 89. At this time, the foundation is valued at $5.2 million, according to figures provided by the Aspen Institute, but that number is expected to soar when the estate is settled and the foundation fully funded.

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Champions of Legacies

But most artists drawn to Maine won’t leave people fighting in court over their work in their wake. Josefina Auslender arrived in Maine in 1986 from Argentina, determined to make a life in America with her husband. A product of the fine-art educational system of her home country, Auslender, 85, is known for meticulous, layered drawings. About 15 years ago, she began thinking about what would happen to her drawings after she died. Those questions became urgent two years ago when her husband did.

Artist Josefina Auslender, 85, in her studio at her home in Cape Elizabeth on Saturday. Auslender, who is originally from Argentina, has had a long, successful career and is working with a Maine group, the International Artists Manifest, to preserve her artistic legacy after she dies. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

She began getting answers when a mutual friend introduced her to Bouchard at an art opening at Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells. Bouchard began working on artist legacies in 2007 when she became involved with the Carlo Pittore Foundation. Pittore, who died in 2005 and was a founder of the Union of Maine Visual Artists, had set aside money for a foundation in his name, but the foundation crumbled when the stock market crashed in 2008. “We lost everything, almost,” Bouchard said.

What was left was used to establish International Artists Manifest, which became a nonprofit in 2014. Pittore was the first artist the organization worked with, and Auslender, of Cape Elizabeth, is the second.

In November, the International Artists Manifest sent out its first fundraising appeal and is actively trying to raise its profile and expand its work, Bouchard said.

Its goal is to champion the legacies of artists. That means documenting their works and creating a digital archive, placing art in exhibitions, selling art and generally promoting the artist. In Auslender’s case, International Artists Manifest is also making a documentary about her, working with Maine-based filmmaker Reginald Groff to tell her story. The organization may also produce a catalog of her work.

Sarah Bouchard, right, executive director of International Artists Manifest, combs through the collection of the late artist Carlo Pittore with art appraiser Zak Vreeland in a storage unit at Fort Andross Mill. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Auslender also hopes to create a grant program to benefit artists who are coming out of art school and seeking their first exhibitions. As a young artist in Argentina, she benefited from mentors, and also had support from other artists and curators when she began establishing her artistic profile in America. “The beginning is so difficult for artists,” Auslender said.

She has agreed to give International Artists Manifest most of her art and her archives. The details of the arrangement are still being negotiated by her family and her attorney, she said.

Auslender opted to work with International Artists Manifest so she would not be a burden to her children. “I have two sons, and they could take care of my work. But they are busypeople,” she said. “One is a doctor here in the United States, and he is very, very busy. The other lives in Germany, and he himself is an artist. He said to me, ‘I am interested in having three or four of your works, but I have thousands of my own.’ I said, ‘Of course.’ ”

Knowing that her art will be cared for and that someone will work to promote it after she dies gives her peace of mind, she said. “They are going to keep my work above the surface. It’s going to a place where it is going to be taken care of,” she said. “This is something I never thought would happen to me. These are things happening to Andy Warhol or (Robert) Rauschenberg, not to me.”

Kent Gordon worked with Bouchard to begin International Artists Manifest. He was a longtime friend of Pittore’s, working with him when Pittore focused on reviving the Union of Maine Visual Artists in the late 1980s.

He was distraught when the foundation faltered, and decided to get involved. “It looked like his attempt to preserve his legacy was going to fail and all his works would end up in a fire sale. I just didn’t want to see that happen, and saw a way to do something about it, not only as a way to help Carlo but other artists who found themselves in a similar situation,” Gordon said.

It took several years to complete the paperwork to dissolve the foundation, which drew its assets from Pittore’s estate, and form a distinct nonprofit organization, which can raise money from multiple sources. The Aspen Institute defines an artist-endowed foundation as one created by an artist, family member or beneficiary that is dedicated to promoting the artist and his or her work for the public benefit. In Maine, a number of public charities, including museums, colleges and land trusts, have received artist bequests, and those don’t count.

“The concept of the whole organization is that it could be, and hopefully it will be, somewhat self-funding in the sense that we’re committed to maintaining a digital archive of an artist’s work, but fund the whole effort by selling some of their actual work,” Gordon said. “To make this work, we have to get a few artists whose estates are worth more than what it takes to preserve them. That way, they can also help other artists, which seems like to me something artists would consider a good idea.”

At this time, the International Artists Manifest is working with an annual operating budget of $65,000. “Ideally, if we had a $3 million endowment, it could run at $150,000 a year. That would be beautiful,” Bouchard said. “We need to find donors who understand the actual problem and that it’s massive.”

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Continued Spirit

While many of the foundations in Maine are thriving, the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation is at what its executive director calls “an awkward moment.” The foundation, formed by the artists John Heliker and Robert LaHotan of New York and Maine, is in the process of dissolving because of a lack of operating funds, said executive director Patricia Bailey. The foundation has offered residencies for painters and sculptors at the artists’ home on Great Cranberry Island since 2006, and hosted 146 residents in 14 years. The four-acre campus on the Pool, a small inlet of Great Cranberry, includes a main house and three studio buildings.

The foundation sold a small parcel of land to fund itself through 2019, and is trying to figure out the next step. “There was never a large sum of money to sustain us, and quite frankly we have lasted much longer than we ever expected to,” Bailey wrote in an email.

“I think it would be acceptable to say that our board would consider a donation of the historic campus, which for almost 50 years was Heliker and LaHotan’s painting headquarters, to another not-for-profit institution with the essential resources to continue the spirit of that kind of philanthropic arts use our founders intended.”

Despite winding down operations, Bailey said the foundation accomplished its goal of giving artists a place to create new work while promoting the art and lives of Heliker and LaHotan.

“As to legacy, it is of course both tangible and intangible. Many national, international and Maine artists spent a month on an island in Maine, not as tourists but living and working as part of the community. It would not be an exaggeration to say that some of them feel their lives and work were changed forever because of that experience,” she wrote.

Mary-Leigh Smart and Beverly Hallam at home at Surf Point. Photo courtesy of Surf Point Foundation

The ability to offer similar life-changing experiences motivated Hallam and Smart to identify their home as a place where art could be made long after they died, said Yael Reinharz, executive director of Surf Point. They placed a conservation easement on the land in 2007 to restrict development for the same reasons they formed the foundation, with a mind to their own lives and legacies and the future of their home and land.

Yael Reinharz Photo by Gillian Laub, courtesy Surf Point Foundation

They were pioneering women in the arts, and each was active in that world in her own way. Smart was a patron and collector, and affiliated with the Barn Gallery in Ogunquit and the major museums across Maine. Hallam moved to Maine in the early 1960s after teaching at Massachusetts College of Art. She was among the first artists to experiment with acrylics, and became a master of the medium. While the Surf Point Foundation holds the bulk of her archives, much of it is housed within the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and her life and work were the subject of a movie and book. Smart and Hallam designed their home as an embodiment of their love of the arts, the environment and the confluence of both.

Every room but one has a view of the water, and that room they used as a gallery. All the interior space was designed to accommodate large paintings or sculpture, and books, magazines, musical records and other items. Surf Point has updated the house to meet safety codes, but otherwise has kept most everything intact.

Artist Kathleen Kolb of Vermont works in the Pool Room, with expansive views of the ocean at the Surf Point Foundation in York. The foundation and its new residency program were the vision of artist Beverly Hallam and arts supporter Mary-Leigh Call Smart and are based in the modern-style home on the coast of York that the women designed and had built in 1971. The space that Kolb is working in used to be the studio space for Hallam. The home has space for three artists for each residency period, which last three weeks. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Bryan Graf, a photographer from Portland, felt intimated by the scope of the ocean when he arrived at Surf Point for his residency in the fall. He was assigned the Pool Room as his bedroom and studio, so named because of the long-ago presence of an indoor pool, now covered with flooring. The focal point of the room is a wall-length expanse of glass windows and doors, opening to the ocean that’s about 25 feet away.

Graf lives two blocks from the ocean in Portland, but had never experienced water like this. “This is a different animal,” he said, facing the ocean from the behind the glass. “I can hear it, I can see it and I can smell it all the time.” The intimidation didn’t last. In no time, he fell into the rhythm of the ocean and began making art.

www.pressherald.com/2020/01/19/maine-artists-are-taking-their-legacies-into-their-own-hands/

Dr. Carrie Cushman - December, 2019

“Time seems to grow at Surf Point. Everyday there was rich in productivity, contemplation, and personal and professional growth.”

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Dr. Carrie Cushman joins Surf Point for a residency during the third week of December. Carrie joined the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in September of 2018 for a three-year term appointment as the Linda Wyatt Gruber '66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography. She has a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University and is a specialist in the history of photography in Japan. Her dissertation is titled "Temporary Ruins: Miyamoto Ryuji's Architectural Photography in Postmodern Japan." As the Gruber Fellow, Carrie is responsible for teaching and curating with the Davis Museum's permanent holdings in photography, collaborating with faculty across disciplines, and curating special exhibitions. In fall 2018, she organized the exhibition Bread and Roses: The Social Documentary of Milton and Anne Rogovin, to highlight a recent gift to the Davis of 250 vintage prints by Milton Rogovin; for fall 2019, she curated Recent Acquisitions: New Photographs, featuring the work of Haley Morris-Cafiero and Habiba Nowrose, two emerging female photographers Cushman brought into the Davis holdings. For spring 2020, she will realize two ambitious and conceptually conjoined exhibitions. Making, Not Taking: Portrait Photography in the 19th Century recreates the environment of a nineteenth-century portrait studio amidst selections from the Davis’s collection of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and tintypes.

photo: https://academies.hypotheses.org/

Elaine K. Ng - December, 2019

“I loved my studio space and its glorious view of the ocean and surf. Being able to watch the surf come in and the weather change each day - you would think this would be unproductive, but actually it gave me the peaceful and expansive mental space I needed to work. Surf Point has all the makings for an exceptional residency program: a legacy specifically in support of the artistic process, an intangible spirit of place, and a generous and supportive staff and organization. What more could an artist ask for?”

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Elaine K. Ng explores the physical and psychological structures of site. Her multi-disciplinary practice uses material investigation, writing, and research to examine collective knowledge of place. It manifests as installations and sculptural objects that are often poetic in sensibility and play off the architecture of a space. Her most recent work has been focused on the patterns and materials that help define place and our relationship to it. Born in Dallas, Texas to immigrants, Elaine first trained as a classical musician and then studied pre-veterinary medicine and ceramics at the University of California, Davis. She went on to obtain an MBA and an MA in Arts Administration from Southern Methodist University. After a 10-year career in nonprofit management, she returned to the studio to focus on her own artwork and completed her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2014. She exhibits internationally, has been a Visiting Professor at NSCAD University and a Visiting Artist at Tainan National University of the Arts, and has lectured at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. She is a 2019 Artist in Residence at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program and a 2019-20 Research Fellow with the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, and was recently named the Maine Arts Commission’s Visual Artist Fellow for 2020. In 2017-18, Elaine was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship for research in Taiwan. Elaine is currently showing work in a group exhibition at Able Baker in Portland.

101 Guohoa Street, Section 2

More of his work can be seen at www.elainekng.com.

Daniel AnTon Johnson - December, 2019

“Between the house, the views, and the community, there's something really special about Surf Point.”

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Daniel AnTon Johnson is an artist with a diverse practice based in photography, language, film, and video. His work examines how technology shapes notions of identity within popular culture and contemporary visual media. Focusing on authorship and representation, Johnson’s practice explores cultural and visual literacies and how they form worldviews. He has shown nationally and internationally in group exhibitions and video festivals in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo (JP), Berlin (DE), Tel Aviv (IL), and Bratislava (SK), among others. Johnson has taught and lectured at School of Visual Arts, Adelphi University, Rutgers University-Newark, and Columbia University, and mentored teens at ICP and The Harlem School of the Arts. Johnson holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in English from Washington College. He currently resides in Brooklyn.

BARRACK OBAMAS: I FEEL BLACKEST AGAINST #FFFFFF

More of his work can be seen at danieljohnson.net.

Anna Hepler - December, 2019

“I dove into a state of full immersion in the studio, and was held there by the relentless pounding waves (the drum beat of the Atlantic edge), savoring the chance to focus without interruption, and cared for in such a way that risk taking became inevitable.”

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Anna Hepler is a sculptor based in Greenfield, MA. She comes from a family of botanists and beekeepers who structured their lives around the unpredictable movements and challenges of the natural world. This life, collaborating explicitly with forces beyond one’s control, establishes a dynamic of flexibility and acceptance, or respect for the unknown. It is this same dynamic that drives and guides her work. Though she has been based in New England for several decades, she has also spent fruitful periods in Seoul, South Korea, in the Netherlands, Italy, and Cyprus, and within the US on both coasts, in cities, in the desert, and in the mountains. Living within unfamiliar cultures, surrounded by the sounds of different languages, and in varied landscapes, she learns to let go of knowing, understanding, and controlling her experience.

The Referee, 2017, plywood, paint, ink, 8 x 6 x 4 feet

Hepler earned a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former Henry Luce Foundation fellow in Seoul, South Korea, she has completed residencies at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, the Tamarind Institute, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Archie Bray Foundation. In 2016 she was awarded a fellowship by United States Artists, a grant from the Harpo Foundation in 2018, and most recently a Nancy Graves Foundation grant. Hepler has exhibited widely, and her work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

More of her work can be seen at www.annahepler.com.

Kathleen Kolb - November, 2019

“My residency at Surf Point gave me solid, expansive, productive, creative time in an elemental setting that grounded the work. The other residents enriched my experience, broadening my mind, and my network. In three short weeks I came away with finished work for exhibition, and new peers I look forward to maintaining connections with.”

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Kathleen Kolb is interested in the action and meaning of visual light on everyday surroundings and in the intersection of emotional experience with what we see. As a painter, her work is based in observation. The primary theme in all her work is light. In addition to light, her work is about attachment and place. She is drawn to rural landscape and to the formal qualities of the geometry of traditional New England architecture, looking for inspiration in rural landscape, wilderness, and small town New England.  Her aim is to evoke a time and place in our shared world, and a corresponding emotional experience. Her method is to spend time paying acute attention. She searches out subjects that are visually arresting and that evoke riveting emotional energy.

Back Steps - 2012

More of her work can be seen at www.kathleenkolb.com.