The arts in your neighborhood Carol Noonan looks to tap in to the growing trend of community centers BY SARA DONNELLY

Singer/songwriter Carol Noonan and her husband Jeff Flagg live in a 200-year-old farmhouse on the crest of a wooded hill in Brownfield, about five miles from the New Hampshire border and 40 miles from the nearest city, Portland. Life in this western town of 1200 residents is predictably sleepy — the main street has more houses than shops, the biggest controversy around here these days is whether or not to pass a zoning ordinance (Brownfield is one of only two municipalities in the state which is unzoned), and, for fun, most enterprising Brownfielders hop in their cars and head for destinations like Fryeburg or North Conway, New Hampshire.

Brownfield, like countless other rural towns and villages across the country, doesn’t have what you might call a nightlife or arts culture. But all that will change if Noonan has her way. See, Noonan and her husband, who already have made a name for themselves around town for the popular parties they throw at their quiet little farmhouse on the hill, want to establish a grade-A community arts center right here in Brownfield, right on their property in fact, and they’ve already got permission from the zone-free town Planning Board to do it. It will be called the Stone Mountain Arts Center and Noonan hopes it will put Brownfield on the map.

If Noonan’s Stone Mountain Arts Center flies in Brownfield, it will join some 50 other community arts centers scattered around rural Maine, from the Maine Acadian Heritage Council in Madawaska to the Fiddlehead Center for the Arts in New Gloucester to the Eastport Arts Center in Eastport. The programming at these arts centers is as varied as the people in the towns they serve — some offer performances like vaudeville shows and local theater, others sponsor classes with established artists, some have programs for children. All, according to Alden Wilson, Director of the Maine Arts Commission, perform the same important function for their communities — they bring the arts home.

"There’s been a growing interest in arts centers" over the past 10 to 15 years, says Wilson. "The result is the growth of the numbers of organizations that have been sustained. People want to have arts opportunities in their communities; they don’t want to have to drive 50 or 60 miles. They want to have activities in their own backyard."

According to Keith Ludden, the Community Arts and Traditional Arts Associate at the Maine Arts Commission, the stock of rural arts centers is growing yearly. He says these arts centers are shaped by the personality of their directors and the talents of those nearby. Because the population supporting these centers is relatively limited, they fall or fly by how they relate to the community.

A quick review of some of the state’s established arts centers shows the effect the director and the location has on the programming: The Denmark Arts Center, in a tiny farm town east of Brownfield, is run by Mari Hook, a former teacher and a dancer who has lived in Denmark for almost 15 years. The 75 members of DAC participate in theater festivals, contradances, and annual agricultural events like Sheep Fest. In mid-coast Maine, on the campus of the original Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Montville, the Arts Center at Kingdom Falls is run by artists Alan and Lorna Crighton. The Crightons’ center capitalizes on the artistic history of the campus and the rich reserve of artists in neighboring Belfast to offer eclectic arts classes and artist residencies to dozens of participants each summer. In New Gloucester, back in Southern Maine, Jacinda Cotton-Castro and Mary Jo Marquis, with combined experience in arts education and Internet business and marketing, focus their efforts on children. The women run the sleek Fiddlehead Center for the Arts which enlists artists from the surrounding communities to teach art classes, primarily for grades K-12, for an area teeming with young parents looking to culturally enrich their kids.

Ludden says all communities have a place for the arts, although the relationship between an urban arts center and its community is often different than that of a rural arts center and its flock.

"I think you might find a stronger relationship with an arts center in a rural community," he says. "Because they would have fewer things like it in their community and they would have a little stronger feeling about their arts center."

The founders of the Fiddlehead Center for the Arts might agree. Cotton-Castro and Marquis discovered a community of small-town parents who were chomping at the bit to enroll their students in Fiddlehead arts classes right from the get-go. Fiddlehead serves residents of Gray, New Gloucester, North Yarmouth, Freeport, and Windham; 80 percent of the center’s students are children. Since opening in 2002, Fiddlehead has outgrown two locations and nearly doubled its roster of class offerings. This year, Fiddlehead will open its first satellite site in Scarborough. Co-founder Cotton-Castro anticipated that the response from the rural towns would positive, but she never thought it would be so strong, so early.

"I was surprised at how quick it happened," says Cotton-Castro, sitting in the pastel-painted hallway of the arts center. "We’ve gotten so large, so fast."

But, despite the fast-forward, Cotton-Castro says it’s easy to see why Fiddlehead is popular. It’s not about rural or urban, as far as she’s concerned. It’s about a return to community amidst some very rocky times.

"It’s a revelation of where we are in our society after 9/11," she says as a woman from town swings open the front door, grins broadly at her, and walks her pudgy three year-old into the facility’s dance room. "People are going back to the community. We’re realizing that time spent with each other is a really important thing."