2020 Maine Artist Fellows
The Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowships reward artistic excellence, advance the careers of Maine artists, and promote public awareness of the strength and distinction of Maine’s creative sector. Awards are made solely on the basis of artistic excellence. Due to the competitiveness of the Individual Artist Fellowship program and to avoid conflicts of interest, all jurors selected for the program reside outside Maine. The archived 2020 page currently presents six Fellow profiles, which are featured below.
Meet the 2020 Fellows
Performing Arts Fellow
Janoah Bailey
Janoah Bailey lived in Maine for nine years, first on Mount Desert Island and later on Peaks Island. Maine was the place where his work coalesced.
Janoah combines puppetry, storytelling, juggling, and dance until the borders between artistic disciplines become difficult to identify. He uses puns to break language and layers elements together, asking audiences to juggle attention and perception.
His work explores balance amid disorder. Juggling attempts to even out the right and left halves of the body, while unicycling hovers on a three-dimensional edge. He finds, emphasizes, and creates patterns in disorder, organizing chaos until entropy pushes toward collapse again.
Traditional Arts Fellow
Thomas Côté
Thomas Côté comes from a long line of carvers. His mother was always whittling and carving and taught him that design, function, and beauty are important elements of the form. When he was 12, she gave him a jackknife that he continued to use.
After military service, Thomas returned to whittling and spent three years apprenticing in Canadian carving traditions. He incorporated woodcarving into his art curriculum, and in the 1980s Limestone High School offered woodcarving as a fine arts course.
Thomas continued promoting woodcarving as a fine art form through Top of Maine Carvers, apprenticeships, exhibitions, seminars, workshops, and artist residencies.
Belvedere Craft Fellow
Aaron Margolis
Aaron Margolis has lived and worked in Downeast Maine since 2011. He carves spoons, bowls, sculptures, and other wares by hand from locally sourced, freshly cut wood.
Aaron explores and experiments with historic production techniques and shares that curiosity by teaching hand-tool-oriented woodcarving classes throughout Maine, including weekly open carving sessions at College of the Atlantic and workshops with local community organizations.
His work is influenced by the natural materials of Maine, European and American folk and outsider art, the Swedish slöjd educational craft tradition, and the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection.
Literary Arts Fellow
Cate Marvin
Cate Marvin began writing poetry seriously at age 17. After studying poetry in college, she completed MFA degrees in creative writing at the University of Houston and the University of Iowa, followed by a Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati.
Maine was the first place she moved simply because she wanted to live there. After publishing three books of poems, she began work on a fourth.
Moving to a country road in Maine required Cate to reconsider the urban imagery and tropes that had shaped her writing. The challenge encouraged her to rethink how she approached poems and broadened her work.
Visual Arts Fellow
Elaine K. Ng
Elaine K. Ng is a Rockland-based artist whose work explores the physical and psychological structures of place. Her multidisciplinary practice uses material investigation, writing, and research to examine collective knowledge of place.
Her installations and sculptural objects are often poetic in sensibility and respond to the architecture of a space. Her recent work focused on the patterns and materials that help define place and human relationships to it.
Elaine exhibits internationally and has served as a visiting professor and visiting artist at institutions in Canada, Taiwan, and China. She was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship for research in Taiwan in 2017 and 2018.
Media Arts Fellow
Joshua Reiman
Joshua Reiman is an artist working in sculpture, film, video, and photography. His work addresses exploration, identity, nature, and contextual inquiry.
His short films present landscapes and characters that guide audiences through layered ideas about art, history, popular culture, and a love of place. His sculpture has included vitrines, kinetic works, iron castings, and installations, often using humor to begin serious conversations.
Joshua’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Africa. He earned an MFA in sculpture from Syracuse University and a BFA in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute.
Maine Artist Fellows by Year
View current and past Maine Artist Fellows by calendar year. New Fellows begin their fellowship term at the start of each calendar year.