Proudly Announcing the Maine Arts Commission’s 2010 Fellowship Awardees
The Maine Arts Commission is proud to announce the recipients of the 2010 Artists’ Fellowship Awards – one of the nation's highest awards for individual artists made by a state arts agency. The four recipients will each receive a $13,000 grant award.
This year’s four Fellows are David C. Wolfe from Portland (Traditional Arts), Lauren Fensterstock from Portland (Visual Arts), Lee Sharkey from Vienna (Literary Arts), and Ryan Bennett from Pittsfield (Performing Arts).
David C. Wolfe is a master printer who was once an apprentice at Anthoensen Press in Portland. Wolfe now teaches a whole new generation in his 2000 square foot studio in Portland, which houses no less than 15 antique presses and composition machines.
“I decided early in my career that I wanted to live and work in Portland,” said Wolfe. “I planned to work other jobs until the ‘printmaking scene’ grew enough for me to support myself, but I realized after a while that I needed to create the ‘scene’ myself. I have worked diligently to make work and to teach others about the historic process I use. My studio is now a hub of activity in the printing arts in the northeastern part of the USA.
“Government support of any Individuals working in traditional media allows us to enrich our current culture with what has come before our time. What we put into our culture now grows exponentially in the future. This grant will help me this year, but more than that, it tells me ‘Maine’ wants me here.”
Lauren Fensterstock’s is currently the interim director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, and it was her sublime exhibit at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art that was the centerpiece and convincing argument for her selection as the 2010 Visual Arts Fellow.
Fensterstock is an artist that was drawn to Maine nine years ago, but it was not the beauty of the coast or the woods that attracted her, it was Portland’s 19th-century industrial brick cityscape with its vibrant urban art and restaurant scene that captured her affection. Since then though, Maine’s changing seasons have had an impact on the artist.
“The innate power of Maine was unavoidable,” said Fensterstock. “I’ve absorbed the austere quiet of nine long Maine winters; I sensed the undercurrent of focus and sincere contemplation – sometimes rooted in survival - that pervades the state. Maine’s deep snow and plunging temperatures inspire my full-bodied acknowledgement of nature, of site, of time: three qualities that are now central to my work.”
Lee Sharkey, the 2010 Literary Arts Fellow, has much in common with the Traditional Arts Fellow. In 1974, Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type, and produced over the course of a Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Under the imprint South Solon Press, she printed two more chapbooks of her own poetry and portfolios of other poets’ work. Since then, she has continued to work as a writer and editor. Her publications include three full-length volumes: A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2008); To A Vanished World (Puckerbrush Press, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust; and farmwife (Puckerbrush Press, 1977). She received the Maryanne Hartman Award in 2006 for her contributions to the arts and civic life in Maine and the Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché, in 1997. Since 2003 she has co-edited the Beloit Poetry Journal.
Ryan Bennett is a young filmmaker who has been making films in and around central Maine since he was 15 years old; he is thrilled to be chosen as the 2010 Performing Arts Fellow. “I am very proud to be from a state where the Arts Commission recognizes a motion picture, albeit short, as a piece of art. It is truly the greatest compliment a filmmaker can receive and for it to come from my home means more to me personally than I could ever hope to articulate.
“Filmmaking is all the art forms rolled up into one, and due to this, the art of filmmaking is in many ways a catch-22 for young artists. It’s the modern day art; it can demand more out of the individual artist than any other art form.
“The challenge of incorporating all of the elements, the various hats you’re forced to wear in order to simply create your art, is a source of both pride and frustration. The medium allows you to communicate a single thought or an entire world of thoughts. It allows you to share an entire philosophy with individuals and groups of people you have never met, with the hope of making them want, making them dream and above all, making them think.”
