Let’s get growing (continued)

Eli Cayer, co-director MENSK, graffiti-inspired mural painter, "creative connector":

I’d try and start developing a place that was artist-friendly that maybe had some live/work space and maybe some show space, it’d be nice if it was downtown. This is a pipedream but at this point the ideal location might be the B&M Baked Beans factory because it overlooks the city — it says "Portland, Maine." I like places that are a little more comfortable to show artwork [than galleries are] — parks, mural walls — and I notice just from being in an artists’ studio, there’s something to be said about group activity. I think you might be able to combine all of these things — you have a space where people can live and work, you have a showing place, you also have a space that’s more businessy.

In the Portland area, most of the artists I know can’t afford to be here anymore and if they are they have to work so many service-related jobs they don’t have time to do their work. I noticed I felt I was the most creative when I was surrounded by other artists — somebody pops an idea out there and all of a sudden an idea that I had starts to mingle with it and all of a sudden you have this rollercoaster of ideas. If you can get enough momentum so larger things are happening, you influence greater circles of people and more things start to happen, it’s sort of building up that critical mass.

Rick Lowell, owner Casablanca comics, sponsors 24-hour Comics Day and other comic-art-related events:

The comics community and the games community could best be served if they had access to printing and publishing. The work is there, it just needs that next little bump to get it going. I’d like to see a publisher/clearinghouse type-situation of some of the local creators. I’m not saying starting a magazine or anything like that, but resources for printing and graphics technology. A lot of people at this rate are doing the Kinko’s thing. Even access to photocopiers would be a big thing. Scanners and prepress operation — a computer or two involved.

I don’t think it would take all that much to get all that going, just a resource where they can go and work on their material. I have all these people who come in who want to publish, want to self-publish, and don’t have a clue how to do it. We’ve had 70 different people do the 24-hour comics, so there’s a lot of people in the city doing creative work. People are definitely out there.

Sam Peisner, promoter of all-ages events, member of the Sauce:

I would love to see a venue open. There’s no actual all-ages venue where you can put a show on for an affordable cost. You can really see it in the level of the scene now. When the Well was open and the Skinny was open, there was a really thriving all-ages scene. You have to charge pretty steep ticket prices now. We try to go as low as we can, if it’s an acoustic show or something like that we’d probably charge in the $5 range, but low is typically around $7.

It’s tough to find a good show in town. I would really just like to see a great venue open up that would cater to all of the scene. My ideal space would probably be something about the size of the Big Easy — good stage, good sound system. That was one thing about the Well, it was a good space to play at but the sound system wasn’t very good. So around Big Easy size, like a really friendly environment that’s really welcoming. It wouldn’t be so much about how the place looks, it would be more how people work with bands and deal with promoters. Breaking in to working with clubs is really tough. I would love there to be a club here where the people are friendly, they want to help you get gigs, they want to help with your promotion or whatever.

Monica Wood, author, recently released Any Bitter Thing with Chronicle Books:

If there was something maybe modeled on that thing in New York City, the Writers Room. Writers rent a little space to work, so people who live at home but have a crowded apartment could go someplace to work. I would love to see some spaces for people who don’t have space. I think people in different arts inspire each other. Any artist colony I’ve ever been to, it hasn’t been just writers. It’s been writers and other artists. I can really see younger writers who don’t really have a writing community using that; it would be great.

Anita Stewart, Executive and Artistic Director of Portland Stage Company:

I would use the money as seed money for grants or loans to encourage projects that are incubating the arts and allowing new work to come forward. I think that is the best way to get the money directly into places where it will be used to further develop the arts. A place for resumes, a resource center, may function for some artists, but it’s not really allowing the whole community to participate. It’s my sense that there should be people from a variety of disciplines that make a panel that takes in grant submissions and distributes funds across a wide range of people, either to institutions or individuals.

We’ve tried in Portland in the past to create [the Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance] PACA, which was a government-run organization that was trying to be everything for everybody and in the end it was nothing to anybody. Everyone has needs and wants and desires but it would take millions and billions of dollars to serve all the artists who live here.

It’s a nice handsome sum of money, but you’d basically be paying for administrators if you had a central office. And who are the administrators responsible to? It’s going to be whoever’s yelling the loudest as opposed to everybody having an equal playing field. Everybody should put in their submissions and we can assess them and see who’s doing projects that we believe should be supported. It’s the best way of supporting artists. I think it would really spur artists on to think about what they are doing. This is one thing that they would be doing instead of one corner saying we need to focus on artists’ housing, a second corner focusing on marketing, a third corner saying we need to focus on artists’ grants and in the end you don’t do anything well.

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly@phx.com. If you’d like to comment on what should be done with the $500,000 for a creative economy incubator, please do. We can post more ideas at www.portlandphoenix.com