one_c

1C - Imaginative Collaborations – Artists Making Change

Moderator:

Dr. Owen Smith, Professor, University of Maine – Orono

Dr. Owen F. Smith is the Director of the Intermedia MFA Program at the University
of Maine. He is also a professor of Art History and Digital Art in the Department of
Art and the Chair of the Department of New Media. He received his BA in Art History
and Russian Studies, his MA in Anthropology and his PhD in Art History from the
University of Washington in Seattle. He is a specialist in Modern and Contemporary
art, particularly what he calls alternative art forms. He has lectured widely in the
US and Europe on art in the 20th Century. His seminal book on the history of fluxus,
Fluxus: a History of an Attitude, was published by San Diego State University Press in 1998. More recently he was the co-editor of a two volume special issue of Visible Language, Fluxus and Legacy, Volume 39, No. 3 (Fall 2005) and Fluxus After Fluxus, 40:1 (Winter 2006) Owen Smith is also a practicing artist who works in digital art and new media forms and has exhibited his work in over 80 national and international exhibitions over the last ten years. More information on his creative work can be found on his web site: http://www.owenfsmith.com, and more information on the Intermedia MFA at the University of Maine can be found at: http://www.intermediamfa.org
 
Speakers:

Marty Pottenger, Animating Democracy

Marty Pottenger is a theater artist, director and writer who moved to Portland two years ago to begin Art At Work – a national initiative to improve municipal government through strategic arts projects with the employees, elected officials and local professional artists.  She has been working with the City of Portland creating over 60 original artworks including Portland Police Poetry Calendar 2009, with 2010 being published in November. Her plays and community arts projects have been nominated for an Alpert Award, a United States Artists Award, and the National League of Cities Best Practices Award, and winning an OBIE for City Water Tunnel #3.

Leon Johnson, Creative Material Group

Leon Johnson is a convergent media artist and educator, born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the proprietor of The Long Bell Press, and founding member of Creative Material Group. He performed  "Faust/Faustus: A Duet For Devils" in the UK, in the summer of 2000, with the film version being selected for the KunstFilmBienale, Cologne, Germany, and the Raindance Film Festival, London. He is the recipient of the Pollock/Krasner Foundation Award for Painting and the Ersted Award for Innovative Teaching. He teaches at the Transart Institute in Berlin, and with the Intermedia Department at UMaine.

Christina Beckstein, Professor of Sculpture, Maine College of Art

Christina Bechstein is a social and public artist who has taught in art and architecture programs at University of Detroit School of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Massachusetts and currently at Maine College of Art. In her teaching, she works to foster creative site and community specific dialogue among students and community members and co- creates multi-year projects that blur teacher, student and university boundaries. In her collaborative public art landscape based projects – including “Growing Fence,” and “Sodadi,” she investigates the role of art in place-making and community-building. Currently she is working on  "Pattern", a project that brings together Lewiston neighbors, pre-school children, and other diverse collaborators and stakeholders to co-create public art and is funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation and the Harry Faust Fund. On each of these projects she convened diverse neighbors of all ages and backgrounds around a creative project, food, translating, sharing and imagining to co-create with her the places we call home.  Launching in November, "What if We", is a web-based project that is about making room for utopian, creative, imaginative thinking about our world. Funded in part by the Maine Art Commission Visibility grant.