2021 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 7 Fellows for 2021 are featured below.
Meet the 2021 Fellows
Media Arts Fellow
Dianne Ballon
Dianne Ballon is a sound artist who has lived in Maine and worked in sound for more than 35 years. Her love of the elusiveness of sound opened her ears to the medium. During semester breaks in college, she volunteered in Appalachia, listening to the rich storytelling tradition from the hills and hollows.
From an artist residency in Shenandoah National Park, to teaching audio production at the University of Maine at Augusta, to creating field recordings in northern Iceland and the Arctic Circle, Dianne’s extensive sound portfolio has been heard in exhibitions, museums, theatre festivals, radio broadcasts, and installations around the world.
With the Maine Artist Fellowship awarded during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dianne focused on exploring sound closer to home. From York to Lubec, she planned to continue her coastal harbor series by recording the small harbors, peninsulas, and islands along the Maine coast.
Traditional Arts Fellow
Gabriel Frey
Gabriel Frey is a Passamaquoddy basket maker from Sipayik. Weaving baskets for about 20 years, Gabriel sees the art form as an expression of his natural worldview and a large part of his cultural identity. As a citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and a member of the Wabanaki Confederacy, Gabriel learned about the traditional art form from his grandfather, his first significant teacher.
Passed down through generations of Passamaquoddy basket makers, the baskets connect Gabriel to his past, present, and future. Using brown ash from the woods, each piece includes carved hoops, rims, handles, and wooden pins used to fasten leather straps. Many of his tools, including basket molds, gauges, and a shave horse, are adaptations of traditional designs.
As he develops his own creative path in the basket-making community, Gabriel works to perfect the function and form of traditional baskets while evolving each basket to reflect his personal style.
Fine Craft Fellow
Sarah Haskell
Sarah Haskell is trained as a fine textile maker, but her work has always been more poetic than practical, finding beauty in the imperfections of hand-dyed and woven linen. Thread by thread, she seeks to make visible the known and unknown, the concrete and the mysterious.
Guided by the Buddhist concept of impermanence, the core of her work explores parallels between the impermanence of organic textile materials and human bodies. She subjects handwoven linens to rust dyeing, weathering, bleach, and compost dyeing. These transformative processes allow her to witness metamorphosis and challenge attachment to what was once deemed precious.
After the linen has been weathered and dyed, Sarah embellishes it with hand stitching to add details to the imagery and story. Through the Fellowship, she planned to upgrade her dye lab and expand the visibility and audience for her work.
Visual Arts Fellow
Jocelyn Lee
Jocelyn Lee has made portraits of women and girls for more than 35 years. She uses the camera to explore psychological and physical states of being including puberty, pregnancy, sexuality, aging, illness, and death. Her photographs emphasize the tactile and sensual nature of the world and the place of embodied beings within its material continuum.
As Jocelyn ages, she is increasingly passionate about making portraits of women and girls who do not fit traditional stereotypes of beauty. In a culture focused on vanity and a narrow vision of beauty, she is committed to portraying women living in real bodies.
Through her work, Jocelyn hopes to create a radical empathy that recognizes aging as compatible with sexuality and rejects the idea that disability, surgery, age, or fuller figures should be equated with ugliness or undesirability. Her book Sovereign focuses on women over age 55 photographed in landscapes and at home.
Literary Arts Fellow
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Living in Maine has been transformative for Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s work. The natural beauty, expansiveness of the sky, and openness of many conversations in Maine helped create new space for ideas.
Alex’s next book, Both and Neither, was described as a gender-and-genre-bending work of memoir, history, cultural analysis, trans re-imaginings, and an international road trip about life beyond the binary.
Alex received the Fellowship as support from the Arts Commission and their new home state while working to create a book that speaks to both the past and the future.
Performing Arts Fellow
Michael Odokara-Okigbo
Michael Odokara-Okigbo, better known as Michael O., is a singer, songwriter, performer, and producer who draws from personal and cultural influences to create a powerful sound.
Through music, he aims to build connections that break down ethnic, geographic, and cultural boundaries through an exploration of himself, his heritage, and the world around him.
Michael described the Fellowship as an important validation of his mission in the arts. He planned to use the award to elevate his work and inspire Mainers.
Belvedere Craft Fellow
Tim Whitten
Tim Whitten identifies his area of work as marlinespike craft, which encompasses a broad range of weaving, braiding, knotting, and sewing skills. The pieces he makes are practical in function but sculptural in form.
The range and scale of elemental geometries drew Tim to this work, from the spiral twist of a piece of rope to the complex, multidimensional patterns in a bell lanyard or chest handle.
Tim spent much of his youth camping in Washington County and came to view Downeast Maine as a magical and inspirational place. He moved to Deer Isle in 2008, opened a shop and studio gallery, and continues to make and show work at the Marlinespike Chandlery in Stonington.
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.