Séan Alonzo Harris - June 2022

Sean Alonzo Harris is a professional editorial, commercial and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. Over the past 25 years, Sean’s work is featured in a range of national publications, advertising campaigns, and exhibitions. In these varied contexts, Sean’s work focuses on human experience and identity and examines both how individuals visualize themselves and how they are portrayed. Sean’s images bear witness to often invisible or overlooked members of our communities, and create portraits that provide a counter-image and narrative of self-worth and personal agency. His work has been published in Atlantic Magazine, the Paris Review, Boston Magazine, Maine Home and Design, Photo District News Rising Star feature, Maine Magazine, Harvard University Magazine.

Harris has also received critical acclaim for his fine artwork. His most recent solo exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art, I Am Not A Stranger, was developed in collaboration with Waterville Creates and supported by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission. I Am Not A Stranger is a series of 58 portraits of community members that were displayed in the Colby Museum as well as in sixteen different locations across the city of Waterville.

His work is part of the celebrated traveling exhibition, Going Forward, Looking Back, practicing historical processes in the 21st century. He has developed several significant shows, VanDerZee On My Mind featuring images of African Americans in Maine, sponsored by a grant from the Maine Humanities Council, The Families Of Maine Documentary Photography Project; A Lebanese Family In Waterville, Recollection; Green Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the multi-disciplinary exhibition; If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride at the Portland Museum of Art, featuring video, dance, text, and photography and The Griffin Museum of Photography’s Tenth Annual Exhibition.

Harris graduated from the Art Institute of Boston and studied photography in Viterbo, Italy and at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine

Antonio McAfee - June 2022

Title: Crackling 1

Medium: Pigment print

Dimensions: 24” x 36”

Date: 2021

Edition: 2 of 5 + A.P.

Antonio McAfee is a photographer based in Richmond, IN. He received his BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. Shortly after, he earned his MFA in Photography from the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Post-Graduate Diploma in Art in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). McAfee’s work addresses the complexity of representation by appropriating and manipulating photographic portraits of African Americans in the 19th century, funk and R&B musicians, and transitioned family members.

Title: Plaid 3

Medium: Pigment print

Dimensions: 24” x 36”

Date: 2021

Edition: 1 of 5 + A.P.

Christophe Roberts - June 2022

Air Dragon, commissioned by Industry PDX in Portland, was upcycled from hundreds of Jordan boxes. The dragon is 10 feet wide and 4 feet high and breathes a neon flame.

Christophe Roberts (b. 1980, Chicago, Illinois) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting design and installation work. His work invites viewers to contemplate the ecological and cultural impact of capitalism and consumerism, while exploring complex masculinities, rebel origin myths, and the commodification of identity through meditations on mass culture iconography. He is the founder of Manza Studios.

This triptych was inspired by Christophe’s recent commission for the groundbreaking experiential exhibition ‘WAKE ME WHEN I’M FREE’ exploring the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur, which opened in LA in February 2022.

Wild Knoll History

Image by Greta Rybus

Photos of Wild Knoll by Cole Caswell

FAREWELL TO MAY SARTON'S "HOUSE BY THE SEA"

April 23, 2021
By Bridget M. Burns, Downeast Magazine, February 2021.

In her 1977 memoir The House by the Sea, May Sarton described her first visit to the 1916 Colonial Revival in York that she would call home for the last 22 years of her life. “Once I stood on that wide flagstone terrace,” she wrote, “and looked out over that immensely gentle field to a shining, still blue expanse, the decision was out of my hands.”

The house she called Wild Knoll was demolished this winter, dismantled over three days in November, to the disappointment of some of Sarton’s readers and admirers. The author of 16 books of poetry, 19 novels, and 12 memoirs and published journals, Sarton, who died in 1995, was one of Maine’s most prolific literary figures. She rented Wild Knoll from friend and arts patron Mary-Leigh Smart, who lived next door and died in 2017, willing that her 47-acre property, called Surf Point, be converted to an artist colony after her death. The Surf Point Foundation, which began offering residencies to artists in 2019, met pushback from those who hoped to see Sarton’s home preserved, but executive director Yael Reinharz says the costs of repairing and maintaining the aging house were insurmountable.

“I think the initial feelings of many people were feelings of distress,” Reinharz says. But the modestly endowed foundation faced costs for structural repairs, a new septic system, and the replacement of windows, siding, insulation, and more. Reinharz is confident the loss of Wild Knoll won’t affect the public’s remembrance of Sarton. “I think the people who know the most about her work are very well prepared to continue to foster that legacy,” she says. Meanwhile, the flagstone terrace remains, a spot where resident artists can look out over the blue expanse, as Sarton once did.

View from Wild Knoll

WILD KNOLL

November 4, 2020

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

Gregory Jamie - May 2022

Greg Jamie is a visual artist and songwriter living and working in Portland Maine. He received a BFA in Film from SUNY Purchase and currently programs films at SPACE Gallery and The Apohadion Theater. As a visual artist he has recently shown work at the Portland Museum of Art, CMCA Biennial, Cove St. Arts, Able Baker Contemporary Gallery, and Border Patrol. As a musician he has released several albums including Crazy Time, released in 2018 through Orindal Records. His visual art is in a folk-art, narrative style with an emphasis on invented dark fairy tales, naturalism and mysticism.

Naoko Wowsugi - May 2022

Naoko Wowsugi is a first-generation immigrant and community-engaged artist who lives and works in Washington, D.C. Wowsugi's interdisciplinary projects, ranging from conceptual photography to socially-engaged art, explore the nature of belonging and inclusive community building while it highlights and fortifies everyday communal and interpersonal identities.

Cosmo Whyte - May 2022

Cosmo Whyte (b.) 1982, Jamaica, has exhibited his works in the , England, Jamaica, United States, Cuba, The Netherlands, Norway, Germany, France, and South Africa. Whyte has been the recipient of the Harpo Award (2021), the Art Matters Award (2019) and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), the Working Artist Award (2018), The Drawing Center's Open Sessions Fellowship (2018), Artadia Award (2016), the International Sculpture Center’s “Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award” (2015) and the Edge Award (2010). His work is in the public collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica, High Museum, 21c Collection, Hallmark Art Collection, and Pérez Art Museum Miami. Whyte attended Bennington College in Vermont for his BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art for his Post- Baccalaureate Certificate and the University of Michigan for his MFA. Cosmo Whyte is an Assistant Professor at Florida State University, College of Art.

Ngoc-Tran Vu - April 2022

Ngoc-Tran Vu (she/her) is a Vietnamese-American interdisciplinary artist and organizer whose socially engaged work draws from her experience as a community organizer, educator, and lightworker. Tran moves between mediums and materials to work in painting, photography, sculpture and social practice so that her art can best resonate and engage with its audience intentionally. Born in Vietnam, Tran came to the United States with her family as political refugees and grew up in Boston's Dorchester and South Boston working-class neighborhoods. She received her MA in Arts and Politics at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and her BA in Ethnic Studies and Visual Arts at Brown University. Tran works across borders and is based in Boston’s Dorchester community. www.tranvuarts.com

39 - This site-specific installation is an homage to the 39 bodies and lives of Vietnamese migrants found in a refrigerated trunk in the U.K, 2019. These tragic journeys are painfully and dangerously happening more often than we realize and the need to unearth its systems and intentions are dire.

Tessa Green O'Brien - April 2022

Tessa G. O’Brien received her MFA from Maine College of Art, and her BS from Skidmore College. She has been awarded residencies at the Tides Institute in Eastport, ME, the Joseph A. Fiore Residency at Rolling Acres Farm in Jefforson, ME, Monson Arts, Haystack School, Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks, and the Stephen Pace House in Stonington, ME. She has received grants from the Ellis Beauregard Travel Grant, St Boltophs Club Foundation Emerging artist award, Maine Arts Commission Project Grant, and the Joseph A Fiore Painting Prize. Her work has been included in group shows throughout the US. In addition to her studio work, O’Brien has completed several large scale public murals, and collaborated on public art projects around New England. She is currently a co-director at Able Baker Contemporary gallery in Portland, ME, and resides in South Portland, ME.

Bree Gant - April 2022

bree gant is an artist and thinker from the westside of Detroit. She cultivates a critical, embodied practice that engages art as a form for care and knowledge production. Using photography, film, movement, and installation, bree remarks on the social forces that shape and distort relationship to self and other. Their work is rooted in research and ritual and a legacy of Black queer performance. bree studied film at Howard University while gentrification paved over Washington, DC, and moved back to Detroit, when the city filed for bankruptcy, to see the cranes had followed her home. She has held residencies and fellowships with Art Matters, Kresge Arts in Detroit, Red Bull Arts, People in Education and Detroit Narrative Agency, and exhibits her artwork nationally. Some of their most transformative experiences were collaborative, improvisational performances with The Gathering, Visions of the Evolution, and The Fringe Society. bree is currently researching bus transit, binge watching early 2000s sci fi, and likely at a city park dancing in the snow.

Don Voisine - March 2022

Don Voisine, in Fort Kent, Me, attended the Portland School of Art and Concept, School for Visual Studies in Portland, ME. He received an honorary BFA from the Maine College of Art in 2000. Exhibiting regularly in the U. S. and Europe, Voisine was the subject of a 15 year survey of his paintings at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME) in the fall of 2016. Since 1997 Voisine has been a member of American Abstract Artists, an artist-run organization founded in 1936, and served as the President of the AAA from 2004 to 2012. In 2010 he was elected to the National Academy. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Collections include: Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Special Collection of the Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Academy Museum, New York, NY; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; and Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME. Voisine’s work is represented by McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY (US), Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO (US), dr. julius I ap, Berlin (DE), Floss und Schultz, Köln, (DE). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

The image of the painting below is "Passage" 2021, 38 x 48 in., oil & acrylic on wood panel.

Leenda Bonilla - March 2022

Leenda Bonilla is an interdisciplinary artist, arts/cultural producer, and community advocate. Her practice is influenced by her urban/suburban background (born in NYC, raised in The Bronx and Puerto Rico). Leenda develops diaristic projects which focus on the impact of pop culture and social tropes in her experience and communities that conceptualize the intersections of gender, race, and identity. As an “ambiguous beige” artist, Leenda is pulled towards addressing the nuances of colorisms and effects of colonial, patriarchal systems in society and cultural capitalism. Her work in mixed media interprets these ”- isms'' via photography, design, installation, performance, sculpture and collaborations to decolonize the model of the Latinx creative lens which has been primarily male and Eurocentric. Leenda’s ouvres and installation/performance work has been exhibited at Art in Odd Places, (NYC), AS220 (RI), The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Taller Boricua (NYC), MOLAA (LA), among others. Leenda holds a Masters from the Pratt Institute in Arts/Cultural Management (‘09, Outstanding Merit/Honors with Distinction), and a BA from Manhattan College, Political Science/International Studies and is a proud member of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) Leadership Institute Program. leendabonilla.com, @leenda.art - Insta.

Sachiko Akiyama - March 2022

Sachiko Akiyama received her MFA in sculpture from Boston University and her work is represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, NC. Her sculptures exert a quiet, physical and psychological presence. She is interested in how tactile, physically assertive forms can describe the psyche – not a specific emotion of though, but rather a state of concentration and introspection. Akiyama has exhibited widely in the United States and she has received multiple fellowships and grants including the Piscataqua Artist Advancement Grant, the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Her work is in the permanent collections of the deCordova Museum and Gordon College. She currently resides in Portsmouth, NH.

Barbara Sullivan - February 2022

Barbara Sullivan is a painter/sculptor and installation artist living in Maine. She works in the age–old medium of fresco, which she learned when she was the head cook at The Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. 

Her work satirizes and celebrates the monotony of everyday life. 

Sullivan’s frescoes are both strange and familiar, tidy and off kilter, tragic and ebullient. The individual shaped fresco objects she makes work well individually, but she often groups them in narrative thematic scenarios using the wall as her ground. Her use of the age-old medium places Sullivan’s work firmly in the medium of painting yet they are individual bas-relief objects which exist simultaneously as sculpture. She attempts to bridge these two disciplines.  

Sullivan attended Monserrat School of Art in Beverly, MA, she holds a B.A. in Art and Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington and an M.F.A. from Vermont College in Montpelier, VT. She teaches drawing foundations at The University of Maine Farmington. She also teaches fresco workshops, including, The Aspen Institute, The Farnsworth Museum, Haystack Mountain School, Pratt Institute, Bowdoin, Colby, and The University of Maine. 

Barbara has been included in several Biennial Exhibitions at The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, and The Center for Maine Contemporary Art Rockport, ME. In 2007 she had her first solo Museum Exhibition, at The University of Maine Museum, Bangor, ME. She has shown in many group exhibitions in Maine and New England as well as in NY that include Morgan Rank Gallery, East Hampton, NY and "Fresh/Fresco", an exhibit at Ernest Rubenstein Gallery, “Fresco, Off The Wall” at The Hudson Guild Gallery, and at Safe Gallery in Brooklyn.  in New York City.  She is a recipient of both the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant and a Pollock/Krasner Grant.

Barbara is Represented by Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, ME. 

Jessica Straus - February 2022

A native of New Hampshire, Jessica Straus lives in the Boston area. Straus works primarily in wood and mixed media, and has most recently been creating site-specific, large scale installations. Inventiveness, humor and narrative are key elements of her sculpture. She is a passionate follower of Outsider Art and writes about her field research on the subject on her blog, “Quirk”.

Straus headed the Visual Arts Department at Concord Academy where she taught Sculpture and Drawing for over two decades. Straus has exhibited her work at numerous venues including Addison Gallery of American Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Fuller Craft Museum, Danforth Art Museum, Duxbury Art Complex Museum, DeCordova Museum, Brattleboro Museum, Ohio Sculpture Center, Qorikancha Museum of Peru, and ArtTerritoire in Normandy, France.Her work is in the collections of DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, Fuller Craft Museum, the Art Complex Museum, and numerous private and corporate collections.

Dalia Amara - February 2022

Dalia Amara is an American-Jordanian multidisciplinary artist working in photography, video, performance, and sculpture. Amara was raised in the USA, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and UAE. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Amara has lectured, screened, and exhibited in New York, Toronto, and online at White Columns, Gallery 44, Selena Gallery, MOUNTAIN, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Her work has been written about in The New Yorker, Observer, Artnet News, The Art Newspaper, and Hyperallergic.

Ryan Adams - January 2022

Ryan Adams is a Portland Maine artist, born and raised, where he lives with his artist and designer wife and their two daughters. His background in traditional graffiti led him to creating large-scale mural work as well as hand lettered design and signage. His signature ‘gem’ style of work is a geometric breakdown of letterforms with shadows and highlights incorporated in order to create depth and movement. His work often including statements within them that addresses introspective or cultural issues. Currently, Ryan owns and operates a mural and signage company along with exploring and exhibiting his ‘gem’ style work in exterior and interior spaces.

Tempestt Hazel - January 2022

Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, artist advocate, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based arts publication and archiving initiative that has promoted and preserved the practices of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists, and artists with disabilities across the Midwest since 2010. Thanks to a lovely nomination from by several members of The Blackivists archivist collective, her curatorial work and work with Sixty was recognized with a 2019 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists (and even though it’s been over two years, she’s still in disbelief over this). She is also the Arts Program Officer for the Field Foundation. At Field she advocates for resources to be directed to Chicago-based BIPOC organizations and artist-led projects that value solidarity economies, cooperative leadership, community organizing, community-defined art forms, and self-determination. Tempestt was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, spent several years in the California Bay Area, and has called Chicago her second home for over 12 years.

A collection of materials from my personal archive, arranged on a wood surface in a row. This image was made to accompany a visiting curator lecture called "To Keep, To Care, To Leave Behind" at the University of Illinois at Chicago in November 2021. Photo by Tempestt Hazel.

Ivan Rios Fetchko - January 2022

Ivan Rios-Fetchko (b. 1994) is a painter and photographer currently living and working in Los Angeles, California, where he was raised. In 2018, he graduated from the Brown/RISD Dual-Degree program with a BFA in Painting from RISD and a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown. His work deals with history, memory, and how they appear in the American landscape and mythos.

Lisi Raskin - December 2021

Lisi Raskin’s creative and curricular practices have become laboratories where they deliberately build anti-architectural bridges between politicized subject matter, queer ontologies, abstraction, collaborative making, non-hierarchical and intersectional interventions into normative systems of power, and engaged pedagogy. These laboratories have supported the making of paintings, drawings, objects, videos, animations, and large, constructed environments that house pedagogical, performative, and socially engaged programming. Raskin is currently working on a book about engaged and inclusive pedagogy. As a member of the rock band Peebls, Raskin has loved, laughed, cooked, and eaten in the process of co-authoring an album of intersectional propaganda for children of all ages.