Maine's Creative Economy

Open door on Haystack Mountain School of Crafts


	The striking Haystack campus and its architect, Edward Larabee Barnes, won the American Institute of Architecture's 25 year award for buildings that endure. Photo by Charles Gailis.

To say that Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is a 55-year-old research and studio program teaching fine craftsmanship, carrying out research, publishing monographs, sponsoring lectures and engaging the community is a formal way to describe an informal place. But it is an informal place with a strong undercurrent of excellence, passion and devotion.

For people interested in building new creative institutions in Maine, a look at Haystack can be daunting - it is both established and accomplished. So it may be instructive to remember that this renowned school began in Waldo County in 1950 with the dream of one patron and some zealous Maine artisans. Ten years later, threatened by the construction of Route 3, Haystack survived an uprooting and landed on Deer Isle to begin again.

The hives of activity on Haystack's campus are the craft studios. In the high season of summer, the studios never close and have an aura of intense energy and concentration. The 90 souls in residence seem intent on wringing craft out of every precious hour in a two- or three-week stint. The artisans are an engaged mix of beginning, emerging and established artisans. Haystack's faculty varies year to year, so its workshops do too. They encompass woodworking, weaving, surface design, quilts, papermaking, printmaking, painting, metals, mixed media, jewelry, glass, foundry, fiberart, drawing, ceramics, blacksmithing, basketry and artists' books. In the afterglow of the studios stand the rest of the communityÑstudent and faculty cabins, lecture hall, dining room, library and offices.

The cost of working and living at Haystack for three weeks ranges from about $1,300 to $3,000 - fees that are comparable to those at other national crafts schools such as Penland in North Carolina's western mountains. With a scholarship endowment of a million dollars, Haystack helps subsidize the cost of study for nearly a quarter of its students and seems especially committed to making the craft experience accessible. Each autumn, it hosts Open Door and the New England Workshops. The first is open to Maine dwellers only. The second expands its reach to those from New England. For a fair price, these part-week sessions allow avocational artisans time and space to get lost in something and shirk their other lives for a moment.

Experiencing another life is the theme of Haystack's collaborations with Maine secondary schools: Student Craft Institute, Studio Based Learning and the related Haystack Mentors Program.

The Craft Institute gathers high school students from across Maine for a weekend of craft - its intensity, challenge and visceral pleasure. Haystack students also learn an important lesson for Maine's growing creative economy: that craft, too, is a legitimate profession, like law or nursing. A Maine Times article once summed up the effort perfectly: "World famous Haystack teaches kids that art is reputable."


	Lisa Tharp discussing a project with her Haystack instructor, Jerry Bleem, who also teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo by Charles Gailis.

Studio Based Learning draws the circle tighter. Haystack invites 80 students from nearby schools in Blue Hill and Deer Isle-Stonington to study and work as artisans for four days. Academic and vocational learners can attend - craft blurs that distinction - and see a notable, but perhaps distant, neighbor from inside. Haystack Mentors continues the relationship between professional artisans and area students throughout the year and brings it from the Haystack campus into those schools. These are the many things Haystack Mountain School of Crafts does and is. To understand the school's relationship to the creative economy, I visited with Stuart Kestenbaum, Haystack's executive director, at the school's winter office just outside Deer Isle village.

Once off Route 1, the trip to Deer Isle is a long one and in the off-season the town feels isolated - the remaining people and institutions stand out. The economy is peeled back to its natural resource vitals: roadside signs advertise fresh crabmeat or salt cod and woodlots are being cut, the trees milled on site into boards.

As a part of the community and economy, Haystack is not invisible. Year-round the school contributes five jobs to the local economy and that number swells to 25 in the summer season, making Haystack a small-to-medium size business. A good portion of the school's million dollar annual budget is spent and revolves in Hancock County, with at least a hundred thousand dollars going to building and renovation projects.

Striking architecture can give an institution a special resonance, as happened with Haystack. On 40 acres of coastal spruce and fir, New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed a cluster of about 20 simple, angular, shingled buildings. Connected by walkways and decks - as in an old-time sporting camp - they cling like lichen to granite outcrops above the Atlantic. Once seen, the setting, complex and views are never forgotten. Because of this, Haystack and Barnes won the American Institute of Architecture's 25 Year Award for buildings that endure.

Kestenbaum estimates there are 50 working artists and artisans inhabiting the part of Hancock County that surround the striking Haystack campus. Some came expressly to study at Haystack and were smitten by the community and landscape. Others were drawn to the place and then discovered the school. The role of Haystack and artisans in the economy plays out during our conversation. A FedEx truck rolls up with a giant ventilator fan ordered by Haystack. We break our talk and help with the task of unloading, learning that the other delivery on the truck is a bundle of steel rods bound for a local blacksmith.


	Jeweler Alan Revere (with torch) demonstrating in the metals studio, summer 2004. Photo by Charles Gailis.

It is not Haystack "by the numbers" as an economic engine that particularly interests Kestenbaum. Rather, it is the fit between artisans and the Deer Isle peninsula that engages him. He believes that the appeal of rural Maine for artisans and artists is not just the stunning landscape, but the culture. Artisans have developed a strong affinity with the locals and admiration for their resourcefulness and authenticity. After all, blacksmiths, ceramists and weavers - like clammers and carpenters - have had to hone their "figuring out" and "making due" skills in this skinny, seasonal economy. As Kestenbaum points out, craft is also about using local materials and responding to a place. Artisans aspire to do what the locals do naturally, merging a way of working and a way of living.

What appears to bring Haystack's director the greatest satisfaction is the relationship that has developed between the school and the Deer Isle community, which has grown beyond the common tension between long-term residents and people "from away." The relationship manifests itself in the Studio Based Learning and Haystack Mentors programs and in Kestenbaum's simple declaration that, "a cultural institution should really provide the same level of excellence in its own town as it does for its program participants."

That reciprocity has played out at the Deer Isle-Stonington Elementary School, where the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and residents collaborated on an interpretive dance about local life. More recently, a mosaic mural of ceramic tiles and poems has come to grace the school - made by third graders, eighth graders, poet Christine Hemp and artist Eddie Dominguez. Reporting on Haystack Mountain School of Craft's 50th anniversary, a long-time local journalist wrote, "Over the years, the school's image and role have changed significantly. There were some rocky times, but now, the school and community have reached a relationship of mutual respect and positive interaction." This is not just economic development, but heart-felt community development.

Across Maine's arts landscape, Haystack plays another role. It is a seasonal center where working artisans and artists meet up, network and exchange ideas. The arts and craft life is, on balance, a solitary one but Haystack and other arts institutions in Maine are the crossroads for creative and social renewal. They are also the places where some of the creative economy's research and development happens. Just as in university labs, Haystack's studios are where artisans test ideas, try things out and make new work. It behooves us to think of them in this light and hear Claudia Brahms, textile designer and partner in Brahms/Mount Textiles, who says, "Haystack is where I return to home base, open the door and let the sunshine in. I relearn how to be open to learning and seeing from an entirely creative perspective."

About the Author:
Maine Arts Commission member Stephen Cole is director of sustainable communities at Coastal Enterprises, Inc., a Wiscasset-based community development corporation. This work was supported by a grant from the Mainstream Fund of the Maine Community Foundation. Look for another creative economy case study in the next edition of MaineArtsMag.