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The Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellows - Fiscal Year 2009

	Don Roy 2009 Traditional Arts Fellow. Photo by Brown, Inc.

Don Roy, 2009
Traditional Arts Fellow

Don Roy is the Maine Arts Commission’s 2009 Traditional Arts Fellow. As a boy, Don started spending school vacations and fishing trips with his Uncle Lucien, whose father had immigrated to Maine from Canada. If you ask Roy why he liked the fiddle, he says simply, “Uncle Lucien played it.” One day when he was fifteen, Lucien let Don take a fiddle home with him, and on weekends and vacations, Don would visit to learn a tune or two, and sit in on family gatherings.

Don reminisces, “Weekends we’d get together in the Winslow area, with all my mother’s brothers and sisters, and they’d have a party every weekend. It would last two days. They all either sang or played the fiddle.”

Roy learns most of his tunes by ear, though he occasionally thumbs through collections of fiddle tunes. In addition to learning tunes at gatherings and visits to his Uncle Lucien, he traveled with his uncle to fiddle contests in Canada. His uncle always cautioned him not to get too wrapped up in the contests. “If it’s not fun,” he said, “It’s not worth doing.” For Roy, the fiddle contests were simply a reason to get together.

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

 

	Alison Chase 2009 Performing Arts Fellow.

Alison Chase, 2009
Performing Arts Fellow

Alison Chase is this year’s Performing Arts Fellow. Alison is perhaps best known as a choreographer and as the Founding Artistic Director of Pilobolus Dance Theater.

In 2005, Alison moved on from Pilobulos to create Apogee Arts, which allows her to follow a passion for multidimensional story telling and site-specific works.

Alison, who was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, now lives on the coast of Maine with her husband and three children. She received her B.A. in Intellectual History and Philosophy from Washington University and her M.A. in Dance from UCLA. Alison had been Choreographer-In-Residence and Assistant Professor of Dance at Dartmouth College for three years when she became a founding Artistic Director of Pilobolus Dance Theatre in 1973.

She continued teaching at Yale for six years in the Theater Studies program, and in addition to working as Artistic Director and choreographer for Pilobolus Dance Theatre she headed the company's educational outreach for fourteen years.

Alison was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, the Connecticut Governor's Award in 1997, the Scripps Award in 2000, and the CINE Golden Eagle Award in 2002. She has choreographed for La Scala Opera, the Geneva Opera, the Ballet du Rhin, the Fete de l'Humanite and Radio City Music Hall.

Alison was happy to explain her reaction to receiving her Fellowship Award, “My first response to the news of being awarded the Individual Fellowship grant was to jig around the living room. As the news settled in, I experienced an overwhelming welcome as a working Maine artist.

“I plan to use the grant to create Apogee/Arts inaugural new work that will explore the varied ways people come together: alone, in pairs, in trios, in foursomes, constructing and deconstructing through time and space to form and fuse into unexpected configurations of bodies, arms, legs, and projected images. The intent is to challenge preconceptions about physical form and psychological function, about human purpose shaped into roles, rules, and responsibilities through our complex relationships.

“I am excited to get to work and to explore the dramatic possibilities of integrating dance with interactive visuals. New work is what allows every artist to be fully engaged and I am very grateful for this opportunity and its timing as I launch a Maine based company.”

 

Randy Regier, 2009
Visual Arts Fellow

	Randy Regier 2009 Visual Arts Fellow.

Randy Regier was selected from among 134 applicants to be the 2009 Visual Arts Fellow. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1964 and by the late '60s had moved to Barcelona, Spain, where his father studied at university. Randy moved back to the United States in the early '70s and lived in rural Oregon until the late '90s where he largely spent his working hours as an automobile painter and raising a family.

While working as an automobile painter toys were never far from Randy’s mind, and long before he ever considered an art career, which began as a 34 year-old freshman at Kansas State University in 1998, he was conscious of their bearing witness to history and childhood.

Randy explains, “The power and the potential of toys are not reducible to the category of childhood memories, however. On one level the fabrication of toys allows me a continuation of play, from the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘play: To move or operate freely within a bounded space, as machine parts do.’ This defines my studio practice; a serious, investigative and sometimes exultant state of play. It is an incredibly rare thing, even a privilege in our contemporary adult society, and as such it is also incredibly fragile and difficult to sustain.

“With this fantastic grant I can acquire a few desperately needed tools without which my practice has foundered. It will be a huge spiritual and psychological boost to me to have these materials and tools without it taking from my family to acquire them.

“My current and ongoing work (in process since 2003) titled NuPenny, is without a doubt the single body of work that I most desire to complete. NuPenny will be an installation that has all the makings of a toy store, with an aesthetic that references the early to mid ‘60s, but every element will be rendered entirely in photographic grayscale. The physical location itself will be a vacant commercial storefront, something that can still be found in most towns and cities, and of an early ‘60s aesthetic, hopefully with the aluminum windows and such. Augusta has a few that would be perfect. I will render the interior in shades of gray, and then install all of my hand-built NuPenny toys, boxes and store ephemera, also fabricated, or refinished in grayscale."

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

 

	Penelope Schwartz Robinson. 2009 Literary Arts Fellow. Photo by Claudia Dricot.

Penelope Schwartz Robinson, 2009
Literary Arts Fellow

Penelope Schwartz Robinson was selected from 65 exceptional applicants to be named as the Maine Arts Commission’s 2009 Literary Arts Fellowship Awardee. Penelope holds a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. Among many things Penelope has been a feature columnist for the Portland Press Herald, and her spoken essays have aired on Maine Public Radio.

Her essays have received an Association of Writers and Writing Programs Intro-Journals Award in Nonfiction and been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays, 2005. In 2007, Robinson was awarded the Stonecoast Book Prize for her essay collection Slippery Men which will be published by New Rivers Press in 2008. She has taught nonfiction writing and literature at the University of Maine, Farmington and Southern Maine Community College. She lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with her husband.

I’m a late bloomer. I didn’t begin to concentrate on my writing until after the age of fifty, twenty years after moving to Maine. I found my voice here, a voice given utterance and eloquence by the range of creativity nurtured by the Maine artistic community. — Penelope Schwartz Robinson

The jury selected Penelope’s work in part because it seems to embrace all the genres; it was poetic, narrative, fictional and not. They also were taken by the erotic overlay to the entire piece and the way Penelope unfolded the story slowly, never delivering the whole until the end.

“Penelope Schwartz Robinson is a wise and wonderful tour guide into the landscapes of her life—from the mitt of Upper Michigan, to upstate New York, through Maine’s woods, to a day mucking around a Florida swamp. Her prize-winning collection, at once lyrical and reflective, makes us see the power of place to reveal and to nourish who we are: along paths of beauty and darkness, silence and sound, loss and rejuvenation. A journey not to be missed!”  — Mimi Schwartz, author of Good Neighbors, Bad Times, Echoes of My Father’s German Village

The Maine Arts Commission is publicly honoring this year’s fellows during an action packed showcase filled with fantastic music and dance. This, free to attend, awards showcase is at Bangor’s Penobscot Theatre, on November 21.