The Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellows - Fiscal Year 2005


	"Change", detail by Amy Stacey Curtis, 2005 Visual Arts Fellow. Photo courtesy of Amy Stacey Curtis.

Amy Stacey Curtis, 2005 Visual Arts Fellow

Installation artist Amy Stacey Curtis was selected as the 2005 visual arts fellow. Exactly 100 artists applied for the visual arts fellowship. Their submissions were reviewed by a jury that included: Lucy R. Lippard, a well-known feminist art critic, author and theorist; Tumelo Musaka, curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; and Ian Berry, associate director of curatorial affairs and curator at the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Curtis, who lives in Gray, holds a bachelor of art in studio art and advertising from the University of Maine, and a master of art in art and psychology from Vermont College of Norwich University. Curtis has scheduled solo biennials from the year 2000 through 2010. Each exhibit of temporary, large-scale, site-specific installation takes place in a different Maine community, in a vast abandoned space. Each installation explores chaos, order and repetition through a specific theme while inviting audience participation and perpetuation.

Curtis writes, "My work, installation, physically exists as art when temporarily assembled in a space and experienced by an audience... Without the audience's careful participation, my work is essentially unfinished... I persist toward an aesthetic, personal and collective balance of chaos, order and repetition - a raw language which I feel resonates physically, emotionally, culturally and spiritually within and around all of us."

For more information on Amy Stacey Curtis and her works of art, please refer to her listing in the Maine Arts Commission's MaineArtistAccess Directory.

Maine composer Tom Myron was selected as the
2005 Performing Arts Fellow.

The Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, Toshiyuki
Shimada, Conductor.
Music composed by Tom Myron.

Track 1: Katahdin (Greatest Mountin) Listen now (load time approximately 1-2 minutes)

Tom Myron, 2005 Performing Arts Fellow

Tom Myron is a Portland, composer whose music has been commissioned and performed across the United States, including the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, among many others.

Myron was also awarded a Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 1996 in recognition of artistic achievement as a composer.

Myron was selected as the performing arts fellow for 2005 by a jury which included: actress Verna Bloom; Jeff Friedman, professor of jazz composition at Berklee School of Music in Boston; Suzanne Carbonneau, associate professor of performance and interdisciplinary study in the arts at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.

Rob Barnett of MusicWeb writes that Myron's music has "vigour and the power to delight and to shake complacency." Composer Ned Rorem writes that Myron's compositions are "real music - and, for some reason, very American." The Washington Post called Myron's most recent viola concerto "splendid... a delightful piece whose long lines, lovely, uncomplicated artistry, clean sonorities and incisive accents offered both lyricism and rhythmic interest."

For more information on Tom Myron and his works of art, please refer to his listing in the Maine Arts Commission's MaineArtistAccess Directory.


	Maureen Stanton, 2005 Literary Arts Fellow

Maureen Stanton, 2005 Literary Arts Fellow

Ninety-six writers applied for the 2005 literary arts fellowship, including fiction and non-fiction writers, poets and children's authors. After reading more than 4,000 pages of submissions, the jurors selected Maureen Stanton of Georgetown to receive the fellowship.

The literary arts jurors' experience spanned many literary genres. The jury was made up of: Robert Creeley, professor of poetry at Brown University, Providence, RI; Ann Hood, novel and short-story writer, and essayist; Michael White, novelist and editor of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose.

Stanton holds a bachelor of arts from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. and a master of fine arts from Ohio State University. A 2001 recipient of the Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship award, she has received numerous other awards for her writing.

Of her work, Stanton writes, "Moving beyond traditional essay and memoir, I embed research, social analysis and commentary into my writing to bridge the gap between the personal and the political/cultural. I set stories drawn from my experience against historical and demographic facts. The personal juxtaposed with the universal illuminates larger cultural processes."

Excerpt from Laundry by Maureen Stanton

Laundry is deeply private, which is why doing laundry in public is intimate,
almost shameful, a form of public atonement. Most people arrive in
laundromats dirty. They have worn all of their nice clean clothes and so arrive
wearing holey, stretched-out sweat pants. Occupied in the task of laundering,
people shed their carefully constructed personas and masks. They are honest.
Vulnerable. Once I saw a biker folding clothes. He did not look so tough
handling undershirts and socks. When the ritual is over, our clothes are clean
and folded, and a kind of lesser order is restored. Dirt is gone; life starts
anew. The bodies we put into these fresh clothes may do something different
this time around. I've had a fantasy of taking home someone else's load of
clean clothes and wearing them all week, exchanging lives in a way, for what
are clothes but costumes?