Painters, Players & Poets
Visit www.paintersplayersandpoets.com for more information on the traveling exhibition, including when and where to see it.
Maine is renowned for inspiring some of the world’s greatest painters: Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Dahlov Ipcar, Louise Nevelson, and Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. Though art of this caliber speaks to the soul, one of its key defining qualities is its power to leave us speechless. That is the reason why the Maine Center for Creativity collaborated with Con Fullam, who conceived of the idea, to create an artists’ collaboration called Painters, Players & Poets™.
Painters, Players & Poets is a unique and exciting collaboration of 32 accomplished Maine artists from the worlds of painting, poetry and music. The project includes 16 painters, 9 composers, 7 poets and 16 Maine furniture-makers. The poets and players were charged with identifying a painting to which they feel an affinity and then interpreting the work in their medium.
These collaborations resulted in a traveling exhibition that is touring throughout Maine. The musical and spoken components of the exhibition will be played on ipods as the viewer sits in the hand-crafted chairs and experiences the paintings and sculptures firsthand. The exhibition is designed to be mobile so that it can travel to even the most remote towns in Maine, providing Maine residents with powerful and inspiring presentations of Maine talent. With the proper funding, the show will also travel to schools across the state providing young people of all ages the opportunity to see the wonder and beauty of painting, song and verse which will inspire their careers. Plans are currently underway to create an exchange of Painters, Players & Poets from around the world.
In this time of the much-heralded Creative Economy, an economic engine that will continue to drive the Maine economy, Painters Players & Poets is a keynote celebration of the diverse, creative and artistic community that is Maine. This project will promote our state as a cultural destination that recognizes and nurtures the need for art.
The featured collaborations include:
Paul Sullivan with Cynthia Stroud
Con Fullam with DeWitt Hardy
Noel Paul Stookey with Becky McCall
Dave Mallett with Robert Shetterley
Andy Happel with Sean Beavers
Martin Steingesser with Monica Kelly
Peter Harris with Barbara Sullivan
Brad Terry & Paul Sullivan with Dahlov Ipcar
Susan Webster with Betsy Sholl
Daniel Minter with Bayou Swamp Swamis
Bradford Sherman with Mekeel McBride
Juliet Karelsen with Jeffrey Thomson
Janice Lynch with Jonathan Edwards
Fred Lynch with Beth Wiemann
Kate Cheney Chappell with Cindy Bullens
Kathryn McKay with Elizabeth Tibbetts