Workshop Participants

workshop schedule - 2006 Brochure

Mary Barnes

For Mary Barnes, the physical landscape is her spiritual center, be it on the ocean, in the mountains or quietly under a tree. It is the movement,the light and the resultant configurations that continue to inspire her art. Drawn to the edge where abstraction meets representation, her art is emotive, expressive and full of color. Beauty and darkness find their way into her visual world with subtle shifts and simplicity.

Mary Barnes has exhibited widely on the east and west coasts of the Untied States and in Canada. She has taught studio art for over 25 years in Oregon, Connecticut and New York City both in drawing and painting using a wide variety of mediums and techniques. Mary currently lives in Sedgwick, Maine.

Nancy Bowen

Nancy Bowen is a mixed media sculptor with an extensive background in ceramics. She is currently Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Art and Design, Purchase College. S.U.N.Y.

Lauren Fensterstock

Lauren Fensterstock uses ornament as a language to touch the meeting point between the corrupt and the sublime in her recent series of ephemeral works. Mixing materials as oddly paired as potatoes and diamonds these temporary works function as what Fensterstock has called "the most precarious heirlooms"

Lauren Fensterstock is a resident of Portland, Maine.  Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the US. including recent solo exhibitions at the University of Maine Museum of Art, Rhode Island College, and The Center For Maine Contemporary Art.  Other recent exhibition sites include The DUMBO Art Center in Brooklyn, The Portland Museum of Art 2005 Biennial, The Albany International Airport, and the Boston Center for the Arts.  In 2007 Fensterstock's work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition "Laced In History" at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI. Outside the studio, Fensterstock writes for Art New England Magazine, where she holds the role of Maine State Editor.  Fensterstock was formerly the Director of Hay Gallery in Portland and currently works as a freelance curator.  Her current  project "AFI: Looking Forward/Looking Back" will be featured at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece in 2008. Fensterstock holds degrees from SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000) and The Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997).

Jesseca Ferguson

Jesseca Ferguson has been working with so-called “antiquarian” photographic processes since 1990.  Her work has been exhibited and published in the US as well as in Europe,and is held in a number of public collections, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and the Museet for Fotokunst in Odense, Denmark.  Her work has been supported by Polaroid Corporation, the MacDowell Colony, and Art Matters.  She teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and in the low-residency MFA program offered by the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.

Christina Baker Kline is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor.  Her novels include Sweet Water, Desire Lines, and the forthcoming The Way Life Should Be and Four Way Stop, which will be published by HarperCollins in 2007 and 2008.  She co-authored a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins, with her mother, Christina L. Baker.  She has also commissioned and edited two collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. She recently collaborated with Allison Gilbert on a nonfiction book, Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Their Parents, forthcoming from Seal Press in November of 2006. 

Laura Schenone

Laura Schenone is the author of "A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes and Remembrances," which won a James Beard Book Award in 2004. She's currently at work on a memoir "The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family," to be published by W.W. Norton, 2007. Her writings on food and other topics have appeared in the New Jersey Star Ledger, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other venues. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York and has been cooking for her family for many years, though not quite a thousand. To learn more, visit her web site www.lauraschenone.com

Candice Stover

Candice Stover is an award-winning poet and writer who lives on Mount Desert Island, where her grandfather was born and she continues to bicycle, write, and make her own soup stock in the winter and pick salad greens through the summer (Maine weather permitting). She has taught in Shanghai and New Zealand, as well as offering courses in the short story and poetry in translation at College of the Atlantic. She also continues to design and facilitate independent writing workshops, including a women's writing group that has met on Mount Desert Island since 1993. Her collections include Holding Patterns, which received a Maine Chapbook Award, and Another Stopping Place, part of the chapbook series of 20 New England poets issued by Oyster River Press. Her work has been widely published and appears most recently in The
Other Side of Sorrow: Poets Speak Out About Conflict, War, and Peace and Sailing Maine, due for release this summer.

Janice Strout

Janice, a resident of Bar Harbor, has been involved in the "food" business since 1981, cooking, and baking in local restaurants. She started her wedding cake business as a side line while working full time. She found she was baking around the clock so she left the restaurant business in 1992 to make a go at the wedding cake business. Since then she has been as busy as possible with cakes. Strout reflects, "My customers inspire me and challenge me. The cakes give me a chance to stay creative. I am very grateful for that." [cakes]

workshop schedule

ARTFare 2006; Curators Select

(double click on the bold face names to learn more)

Curators from New York, Boston and Maine were invited to select an artist(s) to create a site-specific temporary installation in a 75 acre organic farm, Beech Hill Farm of the College of the Atlantic. This year the theme is ARTFare 2006, a symposium loosely related to food. The follow Curators and artists are:

1. Mark Bessire, Director of Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine selects artists Christina Bechstein, Adriane Herman and Aaron Stephan, professors from the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine.

2. Bruce Brown, curator from Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport Maine selects Sam Van Aken, Professor of sculpture at the University of Maine in Orono

3. Karen Davidson, artist catalogue and book designer and publisher selects Anna Shapiro both from Boston, MA and Randy Garber.

4. Susan Dowling, Art 21 producer and of Manset, Maine and Pawtaukett, RI selects artist Mimi Moncier from New Orleans, LA.

5. Helen Ferrulli, independent curator and curator for Scholastic Arts Awards program selects Monica Chau of Camden, Maine

6. Katy Kline, Director of Bowdoin College Museum of Art selects the collaborative team Jill Reynolds and Dan Spitzer of Beacon, New York.

7. Susan Lerner, director of the Blum gallery at the College of the Atlantic selects artist Barbara Andrus of Swans Island, Me. And New York City.

8. Carl Little, author and art critic from Mount Desert Island selects Alison Enslin of Milbridge, Maine.

9. Hillarie Logan-Dechene of the Iron Bridge Gallery in Long Lake, New York selects Matt Burnett graduating from the Maine College of Art and Saranac Lake, NY.

10. Nancy Manter, artist and Director of LandEscapes from New York City and Tremont, Maine selects Margaret Manter, artist from Veazie, Maine.

11. Wally Mason, director of the University of Maine Art Museum in Bangor
Lauren Fensterstock, artist and professor at the Maine College of Art

12. Patricia Phillips, Critic and Professor of Art at SUNY-New Paltz selects Deborah Wing-Sproul, a performance-based videographer, sculptor and printmaker.

13. Sam Shaw of Shaw Jewelry in Northeast Harbor, Maine selects Avy Clair, artist from Bluehill, Maine and New York City.

14. Deborah Whitney, Director of Whitney Art Works [whitneyartworks.com] in Portland Maine selects artist Jeff Badger of South Portland, Maine.

15. Syndney Roberts Rockefeller, Curator from Great Harbor Maritime Museum, selects the Neighborhood House kids in Northeast Harbor, ME.

(double click on the bold face names to learn more)