ArtSake

Have you visited our new Tumblr, Artists Making Art?

Artists Making Art shares snapshots from the creative process – artists caught mid-art-making! The image above was submitted by Lana Z Caplan: making film collages as part of 100 hours in the Woodshed artist residency, North Adams, MA (photo by Matthew Cavanaugh).

We’d love to see more submissions to the site, so check it out, and consider sending images or video of you and your process.

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We recently updated the Gallery@MCC, our online gallery featuring Artist Fellows and Finalists, with work samples by 2013 awardees. It’s always a privilege to share this work, which gives a hint of the extraordinary diversity and excellence of work being made in these parts.

A snapshot of the recently added work…

• In Crafts, virtuosic embroidery by Daniel Kornrumpf and the fantastical architecture of Jay Rogers‘s structures
• In Dramatic Writing, a reckoning of witch trial accusers by Liz Duffy Adams and a grim picture of a New England mill town by Ben Jolivet
• In Film & Video, Amanda Bonaiuto‘s astonishing animation and Luis Arnias‘s engrossing, observational work on 16 mm film
• In Music Composition, the rich textures of Tamar Diesendruck‘s mixed ensemble work and Lou Bunk‘s fascinating, deconstructed toy piano piece
• In Photography, Rachel Loischild‘s haunting photographs of the aftermath of severe weather and Greer Muldowney‘s architectural portraits of Hong Kong
• In Sculpture/Installation, Rosalyn Driscoll and Sarah Bliss‘s stunning dance/video/sculptural collaboration and Amy Archambault‘s installations exploring athletic culture, childhood play, and home improvement

Explore MCC Artist Fellows and Finalists from 2003 on at the Gallery@MCC.

Media: excerpt from SPIRALING WATER by J. Georgie Friedman; still from DZIAD I BABA by Basia Goszczynska; Keiko Hiromi, PORTRAIT OF KATYA (2012), Archival Digital Printing, 16×20 in; Laura Baring-Gould, RE-SOUND (2011), White Pine, Steel, Fabric, Felt, Sound 12ft H x 17ft W x 83ft L.

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When artists explore a period of history through their art, what is the artist’s responsibility to that history? Which truth – historic or artistic – is of greatest importance? As Karen Shepard, author of the historical novel The Celestials, asked in Part I of this discussion, “What could I make up about history? Could I only write what I knew had happened, or could I also write what I knew hadn’t happened?”

What do we owe to history in our art?

Sari Boren, writer and Exhibit Developer, Wondercabinet Interpretive Design
In my professional work as a museum exhibit developer – the content person on an exhibit design team – my job is to make the public believe we owe history, at least, the recognition of history’s reach. I’m complicit in how museums build narratives of public history through edited stories, selected objects, and exhibit themes that filter history through a specific lens.

In my own, memoir-based writing I’m trying to integrate my parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors into an understanding of my own life. In some ways, children of survivors are like museums. We are repositories and interpreters of history, and we feel responsible for housing the remembrance of traumatic events that happened to our loved ones in another time and place. The question of what I owe the survivors and the dead, even just my family members, let alone strangers, is central to my writing. I wonder, if by placing narrative themes over my family’s experiences – even trying to use the conventions of history museums to interpret how trauma filters through generations – if I’m honoring the past or exploiting it, illuminating history or distorting it. I’m not certain what I owe history, but it sure has its claws in me.

Susan Rivo, director of the documentary Left on Pearl
We owe it to history to tell its hidden stories. In March 1971, International Women’s Day marchers turned left on Pearl Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and took over a Harvard University building at 888 Memorial Drive, declaring it a Women’s Center. Left on Pearl depicts a little known but highly significant event in the history of Second Wave feminism. The ten day building occupation by hundreds of women highlighted the hopes and triumphs as well as the conflicts and tensions within the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and led to the establishment of the longest continuously operating community Women’s Center in the U.S.

I was surprised by how much I didn’t know about this period – the fact that help-wanted ads were segregated by gender, that a woman could be fired from a job for being pregnant, and that she couldn’t get credit or open a bank account without her husband’s permission. These things changed because of the hard-fought battles waged by Second Wave feminists, the granddaughters of the suffragists. Marginalized by backlash, those First Wave feminists were unable to transmit their history to the next generation. Second Wave feminists did not have access to this buried history until they began to uncover it for themselves. As a filmmaker, I see Left on Pearl as part of a larger effort to preserve our history and pass it on to the next generation.

James David Moran, writer and Director of Outreach at the American Antiquarian Society
I don’t think art owes anything to history but I do think that artists who choose to create historically-based art should try very hard to be accurate to the time they are seeking to envision, just as at some level all artists should seek to find and illuminate the reality of the world that surrounds them today.

To me good historical art is like a marriage with one partner history and the other art. As in any good marriage both partners need to be equal and meeting the needs and desires of both is a challenge that often requires creating a delicate balance between the two.

All art should transcend time by getting at what is the essence of the human experience. Often this starts with the very specific: we seek to find what is true in our own place and time and then explore what transcends our moment to become universal. Historical art needs to also explore a third space – the historical time period being recreated. It needs to truly and completely honor the way people spoke, dressed, moved, thought and felt in that time – without any of our own contemporary concepts about those experiences. Before we can transcend any time – present or past – we need to truly and completely live in it.

Susan Thompson, playwright, director, choreographer, and teacher
I often use memory and storytelling in my work. Unforgettable: Letters from Korea, my latest play, is based on love letters my parents wrote while my father was an infantry platoon commander in Korea and my mother was a senior at UCONN. While certainly an homage to them and their love, the play is also an exploration of the disconnection between a soldier’s battlefield experience and those who are left behind on the home front.

Last summer we had the honor to perform Unforgettable for a group of Korean War Veterans in D.C. I have to admit, it was intimidating. What do we owe history in our art? Well, when history is sitting in front of you in the audience, you owe them quite a lot! We fretted over the details of the production from dog tags to C-rations, but what really concerned me was getting the story right for them; we wanted the vets to recognize their own stories in the story of these two young people.

“You told it like it was,” was the comment that we got over and over after the show. We realized that, although the landscape and personalities of war change, the disconnection between peace and war – home and the battlefield – continue. Read more.

Sari Boren will read at the Four Stories reading series in Cambridge on June 11th. The night’s theme is: Revisionist History: Tales of Recollections, Misremembering, & the Past.

Susan Rivo’s documentary Left on Pearl will launch a crowdfunding campaign in September to raise finishing funds. Sign up for the project’s e-newsletter to keep in the loop.

James David Moran, along with overseeing public programming at the American Antiquarian Society, is also a writer, playwright, director, and producer.

Susan Thompson is a core member of Pilgrim Theater Research and Performance Collaborative. The troupe plans to bring Unforgettable back to D.C. this summer to perform for the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the truce between North and South Korea.

What do YOU believe artists owe to history in their work? Leave a comment and join the discussion.

Image: the parents of Susan Thompson, subjects of her play UNFORGETTABLE: LETTERS FROM KOREA. Images courtesy of the artist.

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The Massachusetts Cultural Council is honored to announce the 2013 MCC Artist Fellowship awards in Film & Video, Music Composition, and Photography. Nineteen artists will receive fellowships of $7500, and 17 artists and one collaborative duo will receive $500 finalist awards. This brings the total number of awards given by the Artist Fellowships Program in 2013 to 68 (in January, MCC announced 31 awards in the categories of Crafts, Dramatic Writing, and Sculpture/Installation). See a complete list of this year’s fellows and finalists.

The awards are anonymously judged, based solely on the artistic quality and creative ability of the work submitted. Applications were open to all eligible Massachusetts artists. A total number of 579 applications were received by the January 28, 2013 deadline; 117 in Film & Video, 90 in Music Composition, and 372 in Photography.

The Film & Video panelists were David Pendleton, Tracy Heather Strain, and Nicky Tavares; the readers were Irene Lusztig and Daniel Sousa. The Music Composition panelists were Kati Agócs, Laura Andel, Richard Cornell, and David Fiuczynski. The Photography panelists were Stephen DiRado, Anne Havinga, Jessica May, Suzanne Opton, and Ariel Shanberg.

Find a full list of 2013 Artist Fellowships awardees.

Images: Holly Lynton (Photography Fellow ’13), FAIREST, CUMMINGTON FAIR, MA (2010), photographic c-print, 30×40 in; Rachel Loischild (Photography Fellow ’13), FALLEN, BELCHERTOWN MA (2011), 20×30 in; still from DEN (2012) by Amanda Bonaiuto (Film & Video Finalist ’13); still from THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (2011) by Luis Arnias (Film & Video Fellow ’13); cover art for THE GRIEF THAT DOES NOT SPEAK (Centaur Records, 2012) by Tamar Diesendruck (Music Composition Fellow ’13); Greer Muldowney (Photography Fellow ’13), CHEUNG SHA WAN (2011), 20×16 in.

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MAY we interest you (get it, because “May” is also the month!!!?!?!?) in our monthly news and notes from Artist Fellows and Finalists?

Rosalyn Driscoll and Chris Frost are among the Boston Sculptors Gallery artists exhibiting in Convergence, an outdoor exhibition of monumental, site-specific art at the Christian Science Plaza (thru 10/31).

Congratulations to Michael Mack and Monica Raymond, who were profiled in the Cambridge Chronicle for receiving 2013 Artist Fellowships. In other news, Michael is featured in this month’s “artist to artist” discussion on ArtSake, and Monica just participated in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

We’re thrilled to share that David Binder‘s film Calling My Children will have its national television broadcast on PBS this month, in conjunction with Mother’s Day. Check listings. The Magic Johnson Foundation has joined in supporting the film, and the PBS broadcast.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor‘s acclaimed film Leviathan will have its Boston premiere at the Brattle Theatre (5/24).

Janet Echelman will create a monumental public art piece for the TED2014 conference. She is also among the finalists to create a temporary, site specific public art installation along the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway in 2015/2016.

Congratulations to Joel Janowitz, who won a 2013 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Taylor Mac has received a MAP Fund grant to support the premiere of his play The Fre at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. The play draws on Old Comedy conventions to tell an unconventional love story, set in an actual mud pit.

Congratulations to DK McCutchen, who was accepted for a Writing Residency at Woodstock Byrdcliff Guild.

Todd McKie‘s solo show Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Look at Art Again was at Gallery NAGA in April.

Nathalie Miebach has two pieces in Trouble the Water at the Legion Arts Center in Cedar Rapids. The show features a dozen contemporary artists from around the world who explore issues related to water: drought, floods, climate change and economics. Also, some of her music scores (read about her process) are in the group show Datascape at The Block at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Nathalie was recently featured in Surface Design Magazine.

Masha Obolensky‘s play Marvelous Fruit was selected to be a PlayPenn 2013 Conference Finalist and was a Eugene O’Neill Theatre Festival semi-finalist.

Henriette Lazaridis Power‘s new novel The Clover House is a Target Book Club Emerging Author pick for April! She has upcoming readings at Newtonville Books (5/14) and Harvard Bookstore (6/5).

This month, James Rutenbeck‘s documentary Scenes from a Parish will go live on Snagfilms.com and their connected devices.

Sarah Slifer Swift‘s Enter, Dance Floor will be part of the Dance for World Community Festival in Cambridge, MA (6/8). Recently, she participated in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the Bananas Fashion Show Fundraiser for Gloucester City Hall.

Peter Snoad‘s new play The Draft had its first staged reading May 2 at Smith College in Northampton. The play is a multi-media documentary piece that tells the stories of 10 people who made different and life-changing decisions in response to the military draft during the Vietnam War.

Ron Spalletta was one of Lloyd Schwartz’s favorite new poets picks on WBUR!

Deb Todd Wheeler‘s solo exhibition The Sea of Knowledge and Nonsense was at The Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University.

Read past Fellows Notes. If you’re a past fellow/finalist with news, let us know.

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As an artist, where you intend to go at the outset of a new work isn’t always where you end up. You may start with an idea but in realizing it be led into surprising, even bewildering territory.

We asked artists in different disciplines: “What’s the most unexpected journey your art has taken?”

Marguerite White, drawing and mixed media artist
In 2006 I was commissioned to make a public piece for the AHa Festival in New Bedford. I fell in love with a condemned building on the State Pier and proposed an elegant and complex wall drawing involving ethereal white wash images and shadows projected like Batman signals. I imagined a serene ghostly “event” – quiet, understated. I hadn’t taken into account the siding – lichen encrusted, corrugated asbestos – (almost) nothing would stick on top of the distorted surface. Then there was the rogues gallery of onlookers. I needed a new plan.

I ended up mounting steel silhouettes and halogen lights in front – the sundown would push shadows across the wall. I bought a used copy of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and a case of spray paint. I snapped chalk lines across the curvy surface; I called my little brother for tips on “can control.” I only blew the fuses in the fish house once.

Ensuing weeks of rain and wind had me fairly unhinged. I recounted the mariner’s story to anyone who asked; men from Parks and Rec on rider mowers, truckers waiting for loads of scallops, stoned fishermen, confused tourists – they all dug it – my unplanned introduction to performance art.

Mary Jane Doherty, filmmaker
In 2007 I had an idea: to film one high school class in Cuba’s world famous National Ballet School from their auditions to their graduation three years later. And, I’d focus exclusively on pure imagery and ambient sound, material that could not be translated into words.

Good. Over the course of twenty trips to Cuba my central characters emerge, my lyrical poem unfolds. Eventually, I followed the top students to South Africa, Italy and, finally to Toronto for their exhibitions. Not much happened in Toronto, so I dashed down to Havana ahead of the students so I could film their arrival and thus have an ending to my film poem.

At the airport, I’m glommed on to my viewfinder as usual while “my” teenagers file through the arrivals door. The arrivals door shuts and I realize, with a sudden full body rush of adrenalin, that Mayara – my main character, my shy, enigmatic star dancer – Mayara is not here.

It turns out, no Cuban high school student has defected to the US before. And, just like that, my film shifts from a serene poem to a full blown drama, the stuff fiction filmmakers dream about.

Patricia Stacey, writer
E.M. Forester famously asked, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” The notion that we really don’t know ourselves exactly, completely, until we begin to create art, is one of the guiding principles that keeps me working and keeps me confident that the emptiness of the pages is a promise and not a threat. Lao Tzu says that the part of the bowl that is most valuable to us is the part that is empty. Every time we move toward filling that blank space, we are moving both toward what we know and away from what we know. Writing for me is like dreaming. I wake up afterwards and wonder what happened and who made it happen; all of it is unexpected. One day, while I was teaching some Jr. high students how to use random characters and objects to create a story, I pulled two words out of a hat: hair dresser and razor, and in the moment two characters came into being, a gay man and his lover who liked to shave people before he made love to them. The novel that followed turned into an exploration into my past in ways I never would have imagined. I wrote about the Mexican cities my mother took me to when I was very young, obsession and the inability we lovers have of reaching our passionate objects, which like the horizon, have a way of melting backwards. I wrote about cowboys, chaparral near the ocean, a hacienda, and bath houses. The story turned out to be a quilt of me. But when I stepped back, it was a pattern that was wholly new.

Michael Mack, poet, playwright, and performer
Neither my art nor my life feel entirely “true” to me unless I find in them something surprising, risky, and strangely beautiful. This has been true in the writing of my solo play Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith, which explores a darkness that has haunted me since I was a child. The play opens with me as a boy being raised in a devout Catholic family, and dreaming of becoming a priest to fully participate in the mysteries of the faith. That dream ended at age 11 when my pastor invited me to the rectory to help him with what he called “a project.” In the decades following his trespass, I felt deeply estranged – both from the Church and from myself. But by writing this play – which I experienced as an act of spiritual truth-telling – I rediscovered what is still luminous and beautiful about the Church, while also revealing what is so very human. As I brought this story to page and stage as a lyric drama, I was surprised to find myself reclaiming the Church as my own – life imitating art imitating life in all its mystery.

Mary Jane Doherty’s film Secundaria recently premiered at the Independent Film Festival Boston.

Michael Mack is the writer/performer of the one-man show Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith.

Patricia Stacey is author of The Boy Who Loved Windows.

Marguerite White is among the artists in New Bedford Harbor in a New Light at the New Bedford Art Museum (5/6-8/22, opening reception Sat. May 11, 3-6 PM).

What is YOUR most unexpected journey as an artist? Share a comment and join the conversation.

Image: Marguerite White, installation view of STAGEFRIGHT (2013), cut paper, taxidermy, turntables, flashlights, vellum, 9×12 ft.

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Marathon-month news from past MCC Artist Fellows/Finalists.

Go go go!

The 2013 Commonwealth Reading Series features free readings by MCC-awarded writers and poets: Newtonville Books (4/2, 7 PM); Gulu-Gulu Café (4/7, 4 PM); American Antiquarian Society (4/9, 7 PM); Forbes Library (4/24, 7 PM); and Cambridge Public Library (4/30, 7 PM). Learn more.

Independent Film Festival Boston (4/24-4/30) will include films by MCC-awarded artists Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess), Mary Jane Doherty (Secundaria), and Jane Gillooly (Suitcase of Love and Shame).

John Cameron, Angela Cunningham, Carrie Gustafson, Jay Rogers, and Donna Veverka are among the artists in Smithsonian Craft Show at the National Building Museum in Washington DC (4/25-4/28).

Rosalyn Driscoll, Alisia Waller, and Angela Zammarelli are among the artists participating in REACH Fest (4/13), with performances and exhibitions at venues throughout Holyoke, MA.

At Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Todd McKie, David Moore, Anne Neely, and Dawn Southworth are among the artists in Color Collision (thru 5/11, reception 4/13, 4-6 PM.

Ben Berman received a great, starred review from Publishers Weekly for his poetry collection Strange Borderlands, calling it “a must-have book for readers of poetry.” He’ll read from the collection at the Watertown Library (4/17, 7 PM).

Sarah Bliss‘ video You Leave Here is in the group show A Trapped in Your Mind Feeling, at Transmission Gallery and Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland, CA (thru 5/18). The exhibition explores anxiety sources ranging from economic instability to environmental stewardship, from deteriorating health to identity crisis. Also, Sarah’s soundwork All the Flesh of His Body was featured in a presentation by Fulbright scholar Ciara Cosgrove on the Ulster & Fenian story cycles at the Irish Cultural Center at Elms College (on 3/31).

Edie Bresler is artist in residence at the Boston Center for the Arts this Spring has a photography exhibit, Exchange Economy, thru 6/15. On April 6, 2-5 PM, the artist will hold Exchange Economy Community Photo Day at the BCA. Attendees can “purchase” any as-yet unclaimed photographs by offering something of value in exchange, beginning at 4pm. Learn more.

Kelly Carmody will be exhibiting the Portraits in Little and some recent landscapes at the Art Student’s League’s booth at the Affordable Art Fair in NYC.

Shawn Cody received a 2013 Artist Lab Grants from the American Repertory Theater Institute at Harvard University Alumni Association.

Rebecca Doughty exhibits her work in the Miller Street Open Studios (4/5-4/7).

Andrea Sherrill Evans has a new series of drawings in the group exhibition Mean Girls at SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA (thru 4/28). The artist will have an artist talk (4/27, 1 PM) in conjunction with the show, which is curated by Jill Larson.

Vico Fabbris is exhibiting work at Gurari Collections in Boston (thru 4/30).

Barry Freedland exhibits his new project, Passive Engagement, in the Easthampton City Arts Gallery (4/6-4/29). Passive Engagement is an interactive project that investigates boundaries of artistic ownership and creative process through a series of robotically generated drawings.

Ralf Yusuf Gawlick will have the world premiere of Kollwitz-Konnex (…im Frieden seiner Hände), his song cycle for soprano and guitar, at Boston College’s Gasson Hall (4/8, 8 PM).

Eric Hofbauer has released American Grace, the final CD in his American Trilolgy, described as “Avant-Americana meets Free Jazz, Blues, Bebop and 80′s pop tunes played (without multi-tracking) on a solo hollow body guitar.“

Pagan Kennedy‘s Non-Fiction Career Lab course at Grub Street was a success!

Scott Listfield‘s solo exhibition, Astronaut: Paintings by Scott Listfield, is at Albright Gallery in Concord (thru 5/26). He’ll also participate in Wider Than a Postcard (a group exhibition curated by Sven Davis) at Breeze Block Gallery in Portland, OR (5/2-6/1).

Suzanne Matson published a new short story, “Boys’ Choir,” in Carolina Quarterly 62.3 (winter 2012).

Henriette Lazaridis Power has a number of readings scheduled for her new novel, Clover House: Porter Square Books in Cambridge (4/16, 7 PM), New England Review Vermont Reading Series in Middlebury, VT (4/18, 7 PM), Concord Book Shop (4/25, 7 PM), and Gibson’s Book Store, Concord, NH (5/2, 7 PM).

The Draft, a new multi-media documentary play by Peter Snoad, will receive its first staged reading at the Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre at Smith College in Northampton (5/2, 7:30 PM), directed by Daniel Kramer. The Draft brings alive the voices and stories of 10 people who made life-changing choices in relation to the military draft and the Vietnam War. Their experiences range from combat in Vietnam, to resisting the draft and going to jail; from choosing self-exile in Canada to treating wounded GIs as an intensive care nurse in Vietnam.

Invisible Stories by Sarah Slifer Swift and Kate Tarlow Morgan, a new piece for dance, books, and words, will premiere at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (5/3, 3:45 PM).

Jonathan Weinert‘s chapbook Thirteen Small Apostrophes has just been published by Back Pages Books of Waltham, MA. Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin, which Jonathan co-edited with Kevin Prufer last year, has been named a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award in the Essays category.

Congratulations to Marguerite White, who is among the artists selected for the 2013 Portland Museum of Art Biennial.

Rodney Wittwer reads from his poetry collection Gone & Gone at the Randall Library in Stow (4/18, 7 PM).

Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship‘s painting The Juggler, oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches, has been acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in addition to two of her drawings, already acquired.

Read past Fellows Notes. If you’re a past fellow/finalist with news, let us know.

Image: Still image from the installation THE POETICS OF SKIN, a collaboration between Sarah Bliss and Rosalyn Driscoll.

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Past MCC Fellow Jane Gillooly debuts her new film, Suitcase of Love and Shame, in the Ann Arbor Film Festival on March 23. The local debut is at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston on March 30, 7 PM, with an artist talk to follow.

Recently, Sara Archambault of the LEF Foundation (a past funder of Jane and her work) posted a great Q&A with Jane on the new film and her filmmaking process. A sample:

Sara Archambault: You have a rich and diverse portfolio of work. It seems that you push yourself in new directions with each project. Can you talk a bit about your creative process?

Jane Gillooly: My interests are broad and therefore the style and substance of my work changes from one project to the next… I am generally drawn to non-fiction and I frequently produce long form films. I spend years researching, writing and producing. It is not uncommon for me to spend a year editing a film. When I finish a project I like to take a break and open myself up to what is next. This is why certain kinds of projects find me, because I make myself available to them. With Suitcase of Love and Shame I was consciously trying to work in a different way. I wanted to go back to my art roots and blend my interest in non-fiction and collage. I wanted to find a project that allowed me the liberty to be ingenious. I am thrilled that this film provided an opportunity to collage real documentation with research and fictional recreation.

Read the interview.

Learn more about the March 30 screening at the ICA Boston.

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Place is a key element of any work of art, but how it shapes, transforms, or (as the case may be) becomes the work depends on the intentions and explorations of the artist.

For instance, in Elizabeth Graver’s new novel The End of the Point, place “is a kind of central character – the rocks, the paths, the land in nature and outside of it. People… beg, borrow, steal, gift, set ablaze, mythologize, tear down, reject and love their rocky, windswept little jut of land.” Read more.

We asked artists in other disciplines: How does place impact your art?

Sarah Malakoff, photographer
My photographs are directly impacted by place, as I concentrate on domestic interiors. I am most drawn to places that seem quite familiar but are also strange, humorous, and telling in some particular way. For me, our spaces, the choices of what we display and what we don’t, can reveal both our desires and shortcomings. For example, recently I’ve been looking at how we decorate with patterns and representations of nature just as we also wall ourselves off and require protection from the elements and outside world. These bits of character that can be inferred from the place lead me to imagine the inhabitants and dramas that may have played out there.

James Rutenbeck, documentary filmmaker
When I was in junior high, a traveling production of Spoon River Anthology played in our small town in eastern Iowa. Edgar Lee Masters’ play is a series of free verse poems spoken by residents of a fictional Midwestern town – one much like my own. The poems probe into place at a granular level but still convey a collective experience. Other works come to mind – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I think Spoon River Anthology affected me so deeply because it helped an awkward adolescent process a tenuous relationship with his own town.

Among my most profound life experiences have been the moments when I’ve experienced a deep feeling of community. I wondered if that feeling could be portrayed on screen in non-fiction form. When I started work on Scenes from a Parish, I intended to make an egalitarian film composed of many small narratives, with not one greater than the others. Place would be the film’s central character. I held onto the idea. So many years later, I was still searching for community, this time in a struggling Catholic parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Steven J. Martin, screenwriter
Place, specifically the city of Tokyo, was a major force in shaping my screenplay Summation. While it is admittedly clean, safe, vital, and cosmopolitan on many levels, Tokyo is also remarkable for something else: its clockwork. Tokyo is a machine, not unlike the omnipresent “combine” described so eloquently by Ken Kesey in his classic, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Whereas most metropolises thrive day and night in an endless, furious, pulse-like fashion, Tokyo is the definition of controlled chaos. Every train, bus, school, workplace, meal, and entertainment venue operates accordingly, unflinchingly spinning themselves according to the dictates of time, ceremony, rules, and order. It is the most comforting and infuriating scenario imaginable, depending on one’s perspective. Thus the characters of Summation exist within the confines of such a metropolis. There is a compartmentalization of their lives that suffocates, frustrates, as well as activates their choices and their subsequent need to find freedom and closure to their respective dilemmas.

How does place factor into your own work? Share a comment and join the conversation.

Sarah Malakoff‘s work is currently featured in Suburbia, an exhibition at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery in Atlanta, GA (thru 3/16).

Steven J. Martin is screenwriter and an experienced language, literature, and writing teacher in both the U.S. and Japan.

James Rutenbeck‘s film Scenes from a Parish screens at MIT as part of the Urban Film Series (4/4, 7 PM).

Image: Sarah Malakoff, UNTITLED INTERIOR (WORLD), 2010, Digital C print, 32×40 in.

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In our March list of news from past MCC Fellows/Finalists, we come in like a (drawn) line, out like an iamb.*

Congratulations to Caitlin Berrigan and Kelly Carmody, both recently selected for the Assets for Artists Program.

Linda Bond, Jan Johnson, Masako Kamiya, and Lydia Kann Nettler are among the artists in the 2013 Wheaton Biennial Show, Drawing Out of Bounds (thru 4/13). Also, Debra Weisberg, artist in residence at Wheaton College, collaborated with Wheaton students on Swoop, a large scale tape/paper drawing installation featured in the exhibition.

Elizabeth Alexander has a collaboration with Christina Pitsch, Delicate Fragments, at Derryfield School in Manchester, NH (thru 4/14, reception 3/13, 5:30-7:00 PM).

Sandra Allen‘s solo show Trunks is at Carroll and Sons Gallery (thru 4/13).

Along with being in the Wheaton Biennial (above), Linda Bond has work in The 8th Annual Human Rights Juried Art Exhibition at South Texas College in McAllen, TX (3/18-4/6).

Edie Bresler is artist in residence at the Boston Center for the Arts this Spring, and a new photography exhibit, Exchange Economy, opens this month (thru 6/15). Artist Talk with Edie Bresler on 3/20, 7-8 PM, at the Mills Gallery at the BCA. Learn more.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and co-director Véréna Paravel celebrate the theatrical premiere of their new film Leviathan with a run at IFC Center in New York (thru 3/14), followed by a national release. Recently, the film won the True Vision Award at the 2013 True/False Film Festival.

Laura Chasman‘s portrait “Oliver at 20″ will be included in the upcoming triennial event at the National Portrait Gallery (3/23-2/2014).

Duy Doan‘s poem “History Lesson From Anh Hai” was published in Slate.

Rosalyn Driscoll has a solo show, Water Over Fire, at Boston Sculptors Gallery (3/6-4/7, Reception 3/9, 3-6 PM.

Jane Gillooly‘s film The Suitcase of Love and Shame will screen at the ICA Boston (3/30, 7 PM). Find a full screening schedule.

Perry Glasser is reading at the West End Boston Public Library (3/7, 6 PM) with a group of writers from Gival Press.

Elizabeth Graver reads from her new novel The End of the Point at Porter Square Books (3/12, 7 PM), Wellesley Books with Jennifer Haigh (3/13, 7 PM), Dean’s Colloquium at Boston College (3/14, 4:30 PM), Newtonville Books with Brian Sousa (3/19, 7 PM), Lincoln Public Library (3/20, 7 PM), and Concord Bookshop (4/7, 3 PM).

Michael Hoerman hosts a reading of Merrimack Valley and Mississippi Delta poets at the Worthen House in Lowell on March 7. On March 9 he’s reading at F*** Poems Wet Brunch Reading at AWP. Later that day he’s chairing a panel at Kerouac Fest: Go! Go! Go! in Houston.

Dawn Kramer is performing a short new piece with Stan Strickland (jazz musician) and Stephen Buck (video projections) as a guest artist on a concert of Berklee composers (3/27, 7:30 PM) at David Friend Hall, Boylston St.

Jane Marsching has a number of upcoming events: Stitching the Shore (3/6. 6:30 PM is a public event by Plotform at 808 Gallery, Boston University, a collaborative crochet session to stitch floating salt marsh islands before they’re deployed in the Boston Harbor. She’s also exhibiting at the Transit Gallery at Harvard Medical School (thru 4/23), with an Artist Talk and Reception 3/13, 4-6 PM. And she’s among the artists in Globall: Art and Climate Change at Contemporary Cultural Space in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Nathalie Miebach is in the group show Above the Din at Artworks in New Bedford (thru 4/8). She has a solo show, Blizzards, Gales and Ocean Buoys at Common Street Arts in Waterville ME (thru 4/15). Associated with that exhibition, there will be a musical performance of Nathalie’s score called “The Ghostly Crew of the Andrea Gail” in the evening of April 6th as well as an artist talk. Her project Synergy, sponsored by MIT Arts, is currently showing at the Museum of Science. (The image at the top of the page is a teaser for a piece called “To Hear and Ocean in a Whisper,” which translates acoustic data from the Gulf of Maine into a raft full of amusement park rides.)

Elin Noble‘s solo exhibition, Elin Noble: Color Alchemy, is at the New Bedford Art Museum. The exhibition includes work from the last 12 years and runs through April 28. Her quilt Fugitive Pieces 9 is in the upcoming exhibition Fiber Art International ’13, opening April 19 in Pittsburgh, PA, at the PIttsburgh Center for the Arts.

Henriette Lazaridis Power launched a new Web site for her about-to-be-published novel, Clover House.

Monica Raymond‘s The Owl Girl will be having a staged reading at the Cleveland Public Theater on Sunday, March 10th, 2013.

Allan Reeder has a new blog, Sentence X Sentence, exploring the craft of writing.

James Rutenbeck‘s film Scenes from a Parish screens at MIT as part of the Urban Film Series (4/4, 7 PM).

Claire Sanford is among the artists in Adornments & Delights: Five Jewelers Courting Nature at Fuller Craft Museum (thru 6/16).

Rachel Perry Welty has exhibitions current, past, or upcoming in Australia, Kansas, New York City, and Lincoln, MA (at the deCordova!), and had work in fairs in Texas, Paris, Miami, and New York. Her tribute to Nora Ephron was published in the New York Times Magazine and she created the book jacket for the new short story collection I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro. Read an interview with her in Musee Magazine, No 5.

Michael Zelehoski has a site specific installation, Wall Art, part of Volta NY through Ethan Cohen New York (3/7-3/10).

Read past Fellows Notes. If you’re a past fellow/finalist with news, let us know.

Image: Nathalie Miebach, detail from TO HEAR AN OCEAN IN A WHISPER, which translates acoustic data from the Gulf of Maine into a raft full of amusement park rides, part of Ocean Stories at Boston Museum of Science.

*(We used that same joke last March, too.)

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