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The Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellows - Fiscal Year 2007

 

	David Moses Bridges 2007 Traditional Arts Fellow. Photo by Darel Bridges

David Moses Bridges, 2007
Traditional Arts Fellow

It is as if he was given his name with a great deal of foresight and prescience. David Moses Bridges has become just that—a bridge linking old traditions with present times. Bridges is the first traditional artist to receive the Maine Arts Commission’s Traditional Arts Fellowship. Raised among generations of Wabanaki artisans, he is being recognized for his mastery of birchbark canoe building and basketmaking. When he was a young boy, David used to talk with his great-grandfather, Sylvester Gabriel about building a canoe together. “He was the last of the old-time makers here in Maine, and he lived with us when I was younger. This was back in the days before day care…and we just talked an awful lot about all kinds of things. He knew all the old stories and legends.” They never got to build that canoe together, but Gabriel left behind his tools, and as an apprentice to master canoe builder Steve Cayard, Bridges mastered the techniques of birchbark canoe building and basket making. Bridges says the award will help him expand the range of styles he works in. He intends to visit museums and study some of the older styles and techniques for making birchbark canoes and baskets.

 

	John Knight 2007 Visual Arts Fellow.

John Knight, 2007
Visual Arts Fellow

John Knight lives and works in Portland, Maine. He completed a painting M.F.A. in 1998 at American University and a painting B.F.A. at Indiana University. He received additional training at Accademia Di Belle Arte, Perugia, Italy. In addition to Knight's studio practice, he has taught with the USM Center for Continuing Education and Maine College of Art Continuing Studies. In 2001 he did the Carina House residency on Monhegan, in 2002 he was an Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park, and also in the winter of 2003-2004 he did an atists residency for seven months at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Knight’s recent exhibitions include a group show in 2004 at the Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York City, and a 2005 solo show at the Clown Gallery, Portland, Maine.

For more information on John Knight and his works of art, please refer to his listing in the Maine Arts Commission's Artist Directory.

 

	Peter Dembski 2007 Performing Arts Fellow. Photo by Amy Etra.

Peter Dembski, 2007
Performing Arts Fellow

An 18 year resident of Surry, Peter Dembski has been playing piano since the age of three. Throughout his late teens and early twenties he studied and lived in Paris, Edinburg, and Rome. He was educated at Yale, Universita per Stranieri in Perugia, Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, and Bennington College.

After finishing his education, Peter moved to New York where he worked as a theater and dance composer, arranger and pianist. Additionally, he has played as a musician at The American Dance Institute, Harvard University and New York University, and a sideman for various players in the jazz world. He has performed in clubs throughout the U.S. and Europe.

His Pandea Group, gigs regularly at 55 bar, one of the oldest jazz venues in Greenwich Village, New York City. A quartet/quintet he formed to perform his original work, the group consists of Peter on piano, bassist Ron McClure, Bob Devos on guitar and Grisha Alexiev on drums.

Dembski teaches gifted high school music students in through a partnership with the Hancock County Mentorship Program. He specializes in teaching musical improvisation to non-improvising classical musicians, a technique he first developed at the University of Maine and is working on a book, “Playing with Music” which demonstrates these unique techniques. He is a past recipient of the Maine Arts Commission’s Good Idea Grant and receives funding from the Mary Duke Biddle Semans Family.

For more information on Peter Dembski and his works of art, please refer to his listing in the Maine Arts Commission's Artist Directory.

 

	Christine Parrish 2007 Literary Arts Fellow. Photo by Roger Hollins.

Christine Renee Parris, 2007
Literary Arts Fellow

Christine Parrish grew up on the coast of Maine reading Doris Lessing, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, and Dostoyevsky. After graduating high school near the bottom of her class at the age of sixteen, she packed sardines at a Down East cannery, waitressed in Florida, and was a deckhand on a sailboat before attending college in her mid-twenties.

A deep respect for nature and an adventurous curiosity led Christine to a career as an itinerant field biologist after she graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Natural Resources. Her subsequent fieldwork included collecting fisheries data aboard a Japanese trawler in the Bering Sea, fighting wildfires in Wyoming, and working with Peregrine falcons in the Green Mountains in Vermont. At the same time she began writing freelance articles for local newspapers and magazines.

She received a graduate degree in writing from Colorado State University before returning to Maine, where she continues to balance her interests in natural resource conservation and narrative journalism. She spent several months in China in 2003.

 

Excerpt from: Chasing Chairman Mao: Across China Barefoot- By Christine Parrish

A stylishly dressed Chinese woman in her mid-twenties stepped out from the crowd.

“New teacher?” she asked in English.

She introduced herself as Helen, confidently took my bag and led me toward the doors of the terminal. She paused in the middle of the lobby to hand my bag to another woman with a broad, flat face. She looked less sophisticated than Helen did, and older.

“Are you from the school?” I asked them.

“Yes, of course,” Helen said, nodding her head in the direction of her companion. “And this is my sister, Janet.”

Janet shouldered my bag and they hurried out to the parking lot with me trailing along behind. Janet put my bag in the trunk of a small red car and Helen opened the door to the back seat for me.

“Please, get in.”

We zipped out of the airport and headed into the city, dodging cars, buses, and pedestrians. The sparkly glass of new high rise buildings flashed past in the pale morning sunshine. In contrast to the outer corner of Beijing that I had seen, it all looked so new; new sidewalks, new streets, new buildings, fashionable women walking in super pointy toed shoes so popular in Italy this season. So chic, all dressed in black. No baggy blue Mao suits and red badges here. Hardly any bicycles, either. Just well dressed people with black hair, walking. It could be any modern city anywhere in the world flashing past like a jerky video music clip. Except it was China. And all the people were Chinese.

“Have you been at the school very long?” I asked Helen just to have something to say.

She turned back to look at me.

“First time China?” she asked, smiling widely. “You like?”

I said I did what I had seen of it. Satisfied with my answer, she turned back to the front. Her sister seemed to speak no English at all. I tried again.

“Helen, how far to the school?”

This time, she shook her head and said something to her sister then turned to me.

“Address?”

“Address?” I echoed, and said the name of the school. She shook her head again.

“Address,” she said firmly. “In Chinese.”

“But I don’t have the address.”

“Need address,” she said. “You write.”

My jetlagged haze cleared abruptly. Something was clearly wrong.

“I don’t know the address. You’re supposed to know the address.”

“Need address,” she said, again.

I didn’t know who they thought I was and I certainly didn’t know who they were. Had they come to pick up a teacher for another school and had picked me up by mistake? I fumbled in my pockets and found the phone number for the school.

“Phone?” I asked Helen, putting my forefinger and thumb to my ear and mouth in the universal phone symbol. Helen shook her head.

“Mobile?” I said, not quite believing her. Didn’t every urban Chinese have a cell phone? All the ones in the airport seemed to.

“No phone. Address. Address. You write.”

Meanwhile, Janet kept driving as fast as she could away from the airport. I scrambled through my pockets for some scrap of information about the school and came across the free pen from the airlines, which might actually have come in handy except that I had no address for the school. Just the phone number Bruce had given me to call when I reached Beijing to let them know when I would arrive in Dalian so he could send someone to the airport to meet me. Someone, it turned out, who was not Helen.

“I don’t have the address.”

“Address,” said Helen, admonishing me.

“No address,” I countered.

I opened my Chinese phrase book and flipped around until I stumbled across the phrase “Are you the representative from...?” and pointed it out to Helen. She shrugged a little and laughed.

“Taxi?” I asked. Suddenly I knew what had happened. I had gotten in an unlicensed taxi: these two women weren’t from the school or from any other language institute. They weren’t even taxi drivers; there was no taxi meter in the car. They were two outlaw entrepreneurs with a compact car and twenty words of English between them. Helen had stepped in front of the taxi touts with confidence, that’s all. She had bluffed her way in.

“Taxi,” she agreed.

“No taxi,” I said, pointing at the word “school” in the phrasebook, but Helen shrugged again and her sister kept driving away from the airport. I managed to find the word “NO” in the phrasebook.

"Bu, bu, bu, bu, bu," I said emphatically and motioned Janet to pull to the side of the road.

What Bruce forgot to mention when he told me I would be just fine without knowing how to speak Chinese—and I was just starting to find out-- was that probably 1.2 billion of the 1.25 billion Mainland Chinese couldn’t understand a word of English. That meant the burden of communication rested completely with me when I wasn’t in the classroom. Had I not been so tired and so hungry, I would have realized NO was probably one of the English words they did understand.