Birds, Bugs & Beasts Exhibition

September 25 – November 6

Opening September 25    5-7pm

Juror:  Alan Crichton

From the Juror

It was both a great pleasure and honor to jury a show here at River Arts.  I appreciated the high quality and enthusiasm of the all the work that the artists submitted. What an enormous and engaging menagerie of Birds, Beast and Bugs to choose from in all media imaginable!

I see clearly that every artist is working from his or her heart, soul and nerve in a very personal and often passionate way. When so many images are alive and kicking, choosing between pieces becomes very difficult.

Art itself is an animal of independent character, which can take us in very unexpected directions. I tried to find those kinds of explorations in what I saw, to choose work that I might not see elsewhere, work that gives a fresh or unexpected view of our animal familiars.

Congratulations to all the artists who submitted! I hope you enjoy the show!

Alan Crichton, Sept 21, 2009

Poetry Reading -

Tony Hoagland

&

Peter Harris

Two nationally known poets

Sunday Oct. 18 at 7:30

Tony Hoagland ’s most recent collections of poems are  What Narcissism Means To Me,  from Graywolf Press–and Little Oceans, from Hollyridge Press.  His next book, Unincorporated Persons In The Late Honda Dynasty, will be published by Graywolf  in January 2010. He’s received many awards for writing, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the OB Hardisson Award, the Mark Twain Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson low residency program. In 2005 his book of essays about poetry and craft, called Real Sofistakashun, was brought out from Graywolf.

Peter Harris, poet, and critic. His BLUE HALLEUJAHS won the 1996 Maine Chapbook Competition. Poems and translations published in national literary magazines such as THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, CHELSEA, THE ATLANTA REVIEW, THE LITERARY REVIEW and COLLEGE ENGLISH; editor of the Poetry Chronicle, VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW. He teaches at Colby College.

Letterbox Treasure Hunting at River Arts – August 24

River Arts is hosting a letterboxing event on Monday, August 24 from 1-4 pm for treasure hunters of all ages.  Letterboxing is a mixture of treasure hunting, art, and exploration. While similar to geocaching, letterboxers trade images of stamps they have created instead of trinkets.  Boxes are hidden throughout the world and letterboxes exist in interesting places all over Maine. Upon finding a box, letterboxers stamp their own personal stamp into the box’s logbook, and then stamp their own logbook with the stamp in the box they have found.

Participants in the River Arts event can learn how to make stamps and logbooks. Activities will include demonstrations or mini-workshops on topics such as stamp carving, bookbinding, compass reading, orienteering or using a GPS unit.  Supplies will be available.

River Arts will have an event stamp and has created clues to find letterboxes they have placed, each filled with a hand-carved stamp. Clues for these new boxes, as well as some previously existing boxes will be distributed. Seasoned letterboxers are encouraged to come and pick up clues.

Sculpture Week with Andy Seferlis – Aug 10-14

RIVER ARTS and FENIX THEATRE  of Portland

PRESENT

3 PERFORMANCES OF

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

August 21, 22, 23

Three performances of Shakespeare’s most fanciful and charming comedy, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” will be presented in Damariscotta by the Fenix Theatre of Portland in collaboration with River Arts. The performances, adapted and directed by Peter Brown, will be held in Amelia’s Field (School Street and Piper Mill Road) on August 21 and 22 at 6pm and August 23 at 3pm.

There is ample parking on Piper Mill Road, and families are encouraged to pack their favorite picnics, spread out a blanket and cap the late summer’s activities with “Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

Advanced sale of tickets for adults at River Arts, 170 Main Street, Damariscotta is $17; $20 at the gate at the time of the performance. Children 12 and under, free.Come out to see Puck and Bottom frolic their way through the genius of William Shakespeare.For more information, visit www.riverartsme.org or call 563-1507.

NEW POET LAUREATE OF PORTLAND

TO GIVE READING AT RIVER ARTS – July 26 at 7:30

Steve Luttrell, who was recently named to a two-year term as Poet Laureate of Portland, will read from his work at River Arts in Damariscotta on Sunday, July 26, at 7:30pm.

Twenty years ago, Luttrell founded – and is the publisher of — the quarterly poetry review, Café Review. He said that he sees his new role as part of his lifelong commitment to promoting poetry. When he was interviewed about his appointment on MPBN, he defined poetry as a “musical sense of language.”

Luttrell was born and raised in Portland. He is a graduate of Franklin Pierce College and the author of ten books of poetry. He currently resides in Falmouth with his wife, Catherine and their dog, Digger.

His latest book is entitled Twelve Moons, Twelve Poems.

LECTURE ON CONTEMPORARY WESTERN ART

BY FORMER LINCOLN ACADEMY GRADUATE

Thursday, July 16 at 7pm

Charles Rand, a 1971 graduate of Lincoln Academy who is now a noted expert in contemporary western art, will lecture at River Arts on July 16 at 7pm. Rand, will put this uniquely American art – figurative, wildlife, landscape, still life, and cowboy – into an historical western art perspective. He will show and describe works by Albert Bierstadt, Charles, M. Russell, Frederic Remington and others including those by the Taos Society of Artists. Using the past Prix de West winning pieces and talking about their creators, Rand will bring to life the work of many western artists.

Charles Rand currently is the Director of the Dickinson Research Center at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. He also has worked as curator and/or archivist at the University of Oklahoma, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage and the Smithsonian Institution.

After graduating from Lincoln Academy, Charles Rand received a BA in Anthropology as well as an MA in American History from the University of Maine. He also received a Master of Library Science from the University of Maryland.

Rand has authored over 40 articles and conducted numerous interviews with western artists. Clips of these can be found on the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/NCWHMuseum .

Suggested contribution for this interesting and unusual opportunity to learn about a distinct form of historical art is $10. It is just one of the many activities going on at River Arts, located at 170 Main Street, Damariscotta. For more information about this and other events, visit www.riverartsme.org or call 563-1507,

Janet Fish

Lecture

Sunday evening June 28

at River Arts    7 pm

Janet Fish is known chiefly for her virtuosic rendering of reflections: Glass, silver, pottery, plastic, water filled vases, vessels, and bowls make up a large part of her oeuvre.  Early on, her depiction of effects of light on fruits and vegetables encased in shrink wrapped cellophane made news in the art world, and brought fame to the artist.

She continues to this day to create complex compositions of extraordinary color- probably resulting from her color studies with Josef Albers. Her paintings, which often measure 60” X 60,” produce images which are both still life and landscape.   Seemingly effortless brushwork renders the up beat, life-giving actions of light as it plays across fabrics, wire baskets, flowers and her favorite bowls and glass dishes, creating paintings that are a feast for the senses.

Janet Fish has won many fellowships and awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and MacDowell Fellowships in ‘68 and ‘72.  Her work has been published in three books. Her paintings can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,  the Art institute of Chicago, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Cleveland Museum as well and many other museums and galleries around the world. ( The Farnsworth Museum in Rockland owns a Janet Fish still life.)  She is currently represented by the D.C.Moore Gallery in New York City and divides her time between her Soho loft and her farmhouse in Vermont.

River Arts is located at 170 Main St, Damariscotta.  The lecture begins at 7:00 and since seating is limited River Arts suggest coming early. A wine and cheese reception to meet the artist will follow the lecture.
Suggested donation is $10.

Thursday March 12, 2009 - 7pm

LECTURE ON GRECO-ROMAN STILL LIFE BY

NOTED SCHOLAR, ROLF WINKES

Art historian, Rolf Winkes will speak on “Natura Morta,” still life in the Greco-Roman art world at River Arts on March 12.  The lecture begins at 7pm and is part of River Arts’ Thursday Series. This lecture is the first annual Jane Denison Pitts Memorial lecture delivered by Winkes.

Winkes and Pitts in Korfu

Winkes is Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology, History of Art and Architecture and Old World Archaeology and Art at Brown University. In recent years he has been excavating at the site of Tongobriga, a Roman town in the north of Portugal with pre-Roman (Celtic) structures underneath. This project will end with a study season in 2009.  He is working on a book on birds in Roman and Early Christian art.

Museum work has always been a part of his career. In the beginning he was a visiting curator from Brown at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design which resulted in his catalogue on Roman Paintings and Mosaics (Providence, 1982). He directed three exhibitions that were part of the graduate program in the History of Art: The Classical Spirit in American Portraiture, Gold Jewelry, and Portraits and Propaganda. Working together with the late Prof. Hackens from Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, two of the exhibitions became international projects. For these he received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Over the years, he has also been interested in publishing artifacts (paintings, jewelry and bronzes) that had been housed since the beginning of the 20th century in the storage of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

His areas of expertise include Roman portraiture, Greek sculpture, portraiture, Roman painting, and Greek & Roman crafts, the impact of Greek and Roman culture on later periods and the art of emerging Christianity.

This lecture is the first annual Jane Denison Pitts Memorial lecture delivered by Winkes. Jane Pitts was a long time volunteer of Round Top since its inception and Winkes honors her memory by delivering an annual lecture for River Arts, Round Top’s successor. Jane graduated from Bennington College after which she worked as assistant to Bayer of the Bauhaus School in New York. During the war, she was employed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, working on exhibitions. After WWII she became art director of the Xerox Corporation. Her book designs won her the International Award for outstanding contribution in design. She semi-retired to Maine, but was still active as a book designer.

Poetry Reading -  with poets/publishers

Henry Braun and Lee Sharkey

Saturday, February 21st 7:30

In 1974, Lee Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type and print, and produced over the course of a long Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Over the next four years, under the imprint South Solon Press, she printed two more chapbooks of her own poetry, portfolios of other poets’ work, and ephemera such as poems on paper lunch bags.

Since then, she has continued to work both on and off the grid as a writer and an editor. Her publications include two other full-length volumes, Farmwife (Puckerbrush Press, 1977) and To A Vanished World (Puckerbrush, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust. In 1997 she received Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché. Recent poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Margie, Nimrod, The Pinch, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. Since 2003 she has co-edited The Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest and most respected poetry journals. She lives in the woods outside of Farmington, Maine, with her husband, Al Bersbach, and stands in the weekly Women in Black peace vigil in front of the Farmington post office.

Henry Braun was born in Olean, New York in 1930 and grew up in Buffalo. After graduating from Brandeis University, where he studied with Claude Vigee and J.V. Cunningham, he spent a year in France on a Fulbright, and then went to Boston University, where he participated in Robert Lowell's workshop.

Most of his career as a teacher of literature and creative writing was at Temple University, including a year at Temple’s branch campus in Japan. He has served as coordinator and host of the Poetry Center of the YM-YWHA in Philadelphia. In 1968 his first book of poems, The Vergil Woods, was published by Atheneum. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, The Nation, The Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review, and in several anthologies. He is presently a Contributing Editor for the American Poetry Review. His book, Loyalty, New and Selected Poems, which won the Maine Writers and Publishers Award, is the first offering of Off the Grid Press, and is now available . He lives with his wife, the artist and family therapist Joan Braun, off the grid in Weld, Maine.

......................................

For photos and a demo from this summer's  Colin Page workshop

check out Dan Corey's entry on wetcanvas

http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=524071

Poetry Reading

Friday, November 21st at 7pm

Peter Felsenthal & Elizabeth Potter

River Arts is pleased to host a poetry reading on Friday November 21 at 8:00 pm at the River Arts center at 170 Main Street in Damariscotta. The two featured poets will be Elizabeth Potter of Round Pond and Peter Felsenthal of Trevett. After the reading, light refreshments will be available. The reading will be about an hour and one half.

Elizabeth has been writing poetry since grade school. She has much experience as a reader having been a featured poet at the Camden, Bristol and Wiscasset libraries as well as the Harlow Gallery in Hallowell. Ten of her poems, written in response to paintings by accomplished artist, Jerri Finch, were on exhibit for the month of October at the Belfast Free Library, as part of the 2006 Belfast Poetry Festival Her poetry and essays have been published in local and national journals and newspapers. She has taught writing workshops locally to all age groups from elementary school to seniors. Recently she won Honorable Mention in the 2006 Friends of Acadia poetry contest judged by Wes McNair.

Peter has been reading and writing poetry for more years then he cares to talk about. He has read in delicatessens, libraries, retirement centers and classrooms .He has read with dancers, jazz musicians and improvisational groups. His poems have appeared in newspapers and journals. Besides his own poetry he will read some translated poems.

Please come and enjoy the spoken word.

Poetry Reading - Beirut Summer

Catherine Evans Latta - Thursday, August 28th 7:30

Catherine Evans Latta has visited Beruit as recently as 2006 and has written a collection of poetry set in the sadly war-torn city, "Beruit Summer." Latta formerly taught at the American University in Beruit and spent time there over the last four decades.

River Arts will host its second Poetry Reading

Saturday, January 31st at 7:30

with poets Karin Spitfire and Gary Lawless.

Karin Spitfire

Recently relieved of her consumptive duties as Poet Laureate of Belfast (07 & 08), Karin Spitfire again becomes a poet at large, willing to read in any town, any venue, as well as write a very specific poem for that certain someone who has everything.  Author of Standing with Trees(2005) and Wild Caught (a chapbook 2007), her poems have been published in Wolf Moon Press, The Narramissic Notebook, Trivia, The Waldo Independent and Currents. She is the author of Incest: It's All Relative, a performance/dance poem that toured nationally from 1982–86. Other performance poems include Corpus Callosum, the original Standing with Trees, Sports and Art, and Wild Card Anatomy.

Gary Lawless

Gary Lawless and his wife Beth Leonard are co-owners of the Gulf of Maine Bookstore in Brunswick, and live as caretakers at Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, the Maine home of writers Henry Beston, Elizabeth Coatsworth and Kate Beston Barnes. Gary has published 14 collections of poetry, 10 in the US and 4 in Italy. He has given readings and workshops in Italy, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania and Cuba. In May of 2008 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Southern Maine. He currently offers courses at the University of Southern Maine in Lewiston, and facilitates a writing group for combat veterans at the Veterans' Center in Lewiston.

OPENING: WATER EXHIBITION Jurored by
Michael Komanecky, chief curator of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland.

Ninety entries of sculpture, paintings, photographs, video from across the country.

Opening reception: Friday August 29th 5 - 7 pm
Over 40 works of art - runs through October 14

Photos from Kids Art Week - August 4-8

Isabella Corwin, a river arts faculty member, conducting

BATIK ON RICE PAPER demonstrations

Saturday, July 5

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