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Application Deadline: March 17, 2018
Archive for February, 2018
Monhegan Island
February 9, 2018The Arts=Economic Prosperity in Maine
February 8, 2018Luncheon with featured guests.
Photo credit: Chris Pinchbeck
Join the Maine Arts Commission, our new nonprofit support and advocacy group, ArtsEngageME, and two national guest speakers in the beautiful Summit Room at
12 – 2 p.m. on February 27, 2018.
celebrate
learn
advocate
The data proves what we know in our hearts and communities: Maine’s artists, arts organizations, arts educators and creative workers bring joy and prosperity to all areas of the state.
Tickets are limited: REGISTER TODAY
Featured Speakers: Randy Cohen & Dee Schneidman
Special guest speakers Randy Cohen, Vice President for Research and Policy at Americans for the Arts, and
Dee Schneidman from the
New England Foundation for the Arts will unveil Maine’s most recent arts
and culture economic impact data
from two 2017 studies: the national Arts and Economic Prosperity 5(AEP5) study by Americans for the Arts, for which the Maine Arts Commission oversaw Maine’s first statewide participation in collaboration with five regional partners, and NEFA’s
And introducing our nonprofit support & advocacy organization: Arts Engage MEBuilding an environment that engages all sectors, public and private, across Maine to promote the awareness and value of the creative and cultural sectors, and to invest in their sustainability. We envision a state that values the impact of arts and culture on Maine’s livability, vitality, and prosperity.
Arts Ed Grant Writing Tips
February 7, 2018South Carolina Arts Commission
Recently my colleague, Ashley Kerns Brown, Arts Education Program Director at the South Carolina Arts Commission reached out to our network of arts ed directors at the state arts agencies across the country and asked a really great question: In all of your years granting money into arts organizations and classrooms, what would be your number 1 tip for a classroom teacher writing a grant? From her knowledge and the responses she received she put together an informative blog post that is filled with great advice. She provided permission to re-post it so I’ve provided part of it below. I’m sure those of you who are writing grants will find it useful and will want to read the entire blog post on the Palmetto State Arts Education which is a network of professionals dedicated to
advancing learning in and through the arts for all students. Ashley serves on their board.
I was in graduate school when I wrote my first “big grant application” and was so confident I decided to share it with an advisor about 24 hours before it was due. You know, to get a little pat on the back before submitting. So imagine my shock when she called and asked, “Have you submitted this to the University’s Department of Sponsored Research?” Cue record scratch. No. No I had not submitted it to the Department of Sponsored Research. I had no idea what the Department of Sponsored Research was or how it was about to make the next 24 hours one of the biggest learning experiences of my life.
What I soon discovered was that our University’s internal process involved approval by the Department Chair (who was out of town) and the Dean (who was out on medical leave), more paperwork than the actual grant application itself (including a waiver for biomedical test subjects), and an average processing time of 2-3 weeks. The University recommended submitting grant applications to the Department of Sponsored Research a full month before they were due, and I had 24 hours. Over those 24 hours I made a lot of people angry, broke a lot of trust, and learned a lot of lessons.
Now that I am on the other end of grant making I try to share those and other lessons with teachers and arts organizations. I get how frustrating, confusing, and overwhelming grant writing can be and understand the urge to give up. But I also understand that grants can mean a child experiences the magic of theatre for the first time. They can mean an art teacher acquires the supplies to teach print making to a future designer. Grants can help narrow gaps, improve equity, and be the reason a child holds an instrument in their hands and thinks “I can do this.”
Below are my top tips for navigating the world of grants. Grant writing is a skill that improves with practice. So don’t give up – because you never know the impact your next grant can make in your program or classroom. Oh, and that first big grant I wrote? We did end up receiving funding. And I got to see firsthand how this frustrating, overwhelming, and confusing process can lead to life-changing experiences for students.
Before You Begin Writing
- Give yourself time. Make a calendar of grant-related dates that includes technical assistance sessions, internal due dates, and any follow-up dates (such as when final reports are due).
- Find the grant to fit the program, not the other way around. You don’t need to do programmatic gymnastics to fit a square peg into a round hole. If a grant isn’t the right fit for your need, it just isn’t the right fit – and that is ok.
- Have a short- and long-term vision. One of my favorite quotes is “Strategy without vision has no direction. Vision without strategy is a wish.” Know where you want to go but also know how you’re going to get there.
- Look at previous grant awardees. Many granting organizations post previous award winners on their website. This can show you the kinds of programs or projects that have received funding in the past.
READ the entire blog post if you found the above helpful!
If you’re interested in applying for funding for the Maine Arts Learning grants please go to
Thank you Ashley for collaborating and your willingness to share the blog post!
Arts Learning Grants
February 6, 2018Maine Arts Commission grants – March 1 Deadline
The Maine Arts Commission (MAC) awards grants to artists, arts organizations, and arts educators through 12 different programs. The 2018 applications for six of these, with a deadline of March 1, are now open. The Arts Learning grant is especially for schools and educators working with students providing arts education.
Application deadline: March 1, 2018 at 5:00 p.m.
Maximum award: $5,000 (with a required 50% match)
SUMMARY
This grant supports schools, arts organizations/institutions and community-based teaching artists as they collaborate on the design and delivery of high-quality arts learning experiences for PK-12 students.
This program supports high-quality visual or performing arts education of PK-12 students and/or educators of this population.
There is a required 50% in-kind or cash match for this grant. (For example, an applicant asking for $5,000 must provide $2,500 of matching support.)
The funding cycle for this program is July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019. Funds will not be available until after July 1, and cannot be spent for activities outside the funding cycle dates.
GUIDELINES – PDF
ABOUT THE ARTS LEARNING GRANT
Funds are to be used to enhance PK-12 arts education through teaching artist programs, community arts education programs, curriculum planning, professional learning for arts educators, teaching artists and teachers of all content.
The proposal should include the use of best standards-based practices reflecting 21st-century teaching and learning.
PK-12 schools through their districts, community organizations, and cultural institutions acting as or in partnership with teaching artists are eligible to apply for the Arts Learning grant. Applicants are encouraged to select teaching artists from the Maine Arts Commission’s Teaching Artist Roster.
The Maine Arts Commission learned during extensive data collection over the past two years that students in Maine’s most underserved regions have fewer opportunities for arts education. The agency therefore is earmarking funds for these regions of Maine. During fiscal year 2018-19, a dedicated grant of $5,000 will be offered to a single applicant from Aroostook, Washington or Oxford County. All other application processes will remain the same for this opportunity. For more information please contact Argy Nestor, Director of Arts Education, 207-287-2713 or argy.nestor@maine.gov.
ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS
Your school district or organization is eligible to apply only if it meets all of the following criteria:
- Is a nonprofit organization, legally established in the state of Maine.
- Has a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, is a public school district, or is a unit of municipal, county or tribal government.
- Is in compliance with final reports required for any previous Maine Arts Commission awards received.
NOTE: An individual school must apply through its school district. As the legal applicant, all paperwork will be conducted through the Superintendent’s offices and communications and funds will go directly to the district to be delivered to the school. The Maine Arts Commission cannot contract directly with individual schools regardless of the project. It will be the responsibility of the project staff to communicate with the district office for the transfer of funds.
APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
Please log into our Grants Management System. Your account is free and you can browse grant guidelines and requirements for all programs without applying. Your account also gives you the ability to add your entry to our Artists and Organizations Directory and to post press releases and events to this site’s news and calendar sections.
ASSISTANCE
Agency staff are always here as a resource for you. We recommend contacting the correct staff person a minimum of two-weeks prior to submitting your application.
For general questions about the application or review process please contact Kathy Ann Shaw, Senior Director for Grants and Arts Accessibility, at Kathy Shaw@maine.gov. or 207-287-2750.
For specific questions about the Arts Learning application please contact Argy Nestor, Director of Arts Education, at argy.nestor@maine.gov or 207-287-2713.
Grant information is available in large print format by request. All Maine Arts Commission programs are accessible to people with disabilities. All programs funded by the Maine Arts Commission must also be accessible.
The Barefoot Artist
February 5, 2018The life and work of Lily Yeh
The documentary film by Glenn Holsten and Daniel Traub, The Barefoot Artist, will be shown on Thursday, February 8, 6:30 p.m., Sweet Tree Arts, Hope.
To read details below, click on the image.
Girls Rock
February 5, 2018Yard Sail reuniting to perform
The Maine Academy of Modern Music is pleased to announce that Yard Sail, the school’s very first all-girl rock band, will be reuniting for one night only to appear at the 2018 GIRLS ROCK! show at Port City Music Hall on Saturday, March 3rd.
Yard Sail, winners of the 2017 MAMM SLAM, have been on hiatus since their bassist Skyler Cummings and keyboardist Esme Howland left Maine last Fall to attend Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The group last performed locally at theirSee Ya Later! EP release party in August.
ABOUT GIRLS ROCK:
Each March as part of Women’s History Month, MAMM hosts its annual GIRLS ROCK! concert. The event is a celebration of girls’ involvement in music and will showcase the talents of MAMM’s students who will be performing a combination of solo and full band sets.
In addition to the concert, MAMM also hosts a Girls Rock! camp each summer. Young female rockers get to spend a week building their skills, networking with other like-minded girls, and learning tricks of the trade from various women from Maine’s thriving local music scene.
Tickets to GIRLS ROCK! cost $12 in advance and $15 at the door and limited preferred seating tickets are available for $20. The doors open at 4pm and the music begins at 4:30pm.
NEW THIS YEAR: MAMM will be hosting a FREE afternoon matinee event prior to the Girls Rock! show which will feature the school’s new MAMMOTH programs, including the MAMMOTH Brass Band, MAMMOTH Rock Chorus, and MAMMOTH Strings.
The matinee, which begins at 1pm, will include performances by the MAMM’s after school MAMMOTH programs as well as the MAMMOTH programs held in collaboration with a number of the school’s partner organizations such as Portland Public Schools and Scarborough Strings. Each group will be performing their own pieces and will all join each other onstage for one epic performance!
MAMM’s Girls Rock! is made possible with the generous support of 98.9 WCLZ, Maine Life Real Estate Co, Coffee By Design, Maine Magazine, and Port City Music Hall.
Arts Ed Partnership
February 4, 2018Spring symposium
The Arts Education Partnership is pleased to announce that registration is open for the2018 AEP State Policy Symposium, taking place on March 10 at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C.
AEP, with generous support from Americans for the Arts and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, hosts this event annually, convening leaders from across the arts and education sectors for a day-long discussion exploring key policy topics impacting the arts in education.
Symposium attendees will leave with tools and strategies for implementing AEP’s 2020 Action Agenda for Advancing the Arts in Education. In addition to informative workshops, two plenary sessions will focus on key state policy issues: the inclusion of the arts in implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act and using data to inform policy decisions at the state and local level. Space is limited, so please register today!
What: 2018 AEP State Policy Symposium
When: March 10, 2018
Where: Grand Hyatt Washington, Washington, D.C.
Plant Kindness and Gather Love
February 3, 2018Conners Emerson School
What happens when you bring a music and a classroom teacher together around a creative idea? In celebration of Acadia National Park’s 100th birthday Rebecca Edmondson, music educator and with MaryAnne Young, classroom teacher from Conners Emerson School in Bar Harbor created a Maine musical for students in grades K-5. Plant Kindness and Gather Love is an original Maine Musical that integrates literacy, history, science and the arts.
Plant Kindness and Gather Love will be performed on May 8, 6:00 p.m. at the Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor.
Plant Kindness and Gather Love is a resource for educators that teaches about Maine, island life, nature and Acadia National Park. The content is suitable and adaptable for students is grades K-5 and includes 10 songs, stories, a reader’s theater script, student activities, movements/dance, and more.
Plant Kindness and Gather Love will be offered as an interactive 2 day teacher workshop at the Schoodic Institute, Acadia National Park on July 2-3, 2018. Participants will be granted 15 credit hours for the 2-day workshop, which includes other park outdoor activities. Families are welcome too, and may stay on through the 4th of July. There is much more to discover!
Plant Kindness and Gather Love story songs are a celebration of our natural world through an integration of Literacy and the Visual and Performing Arts. The integrated materials will, according to research, create intrinsic motivation, encourage learning for understanding, motivate students, and spark curiosity. Each story, song, and theater script will present facts in a musical manner and will dovetail with classroom literacy, music, science, social studies, history, and familiar surroundings of our young Maine explorers and stewards of the earth. Plant Kindness and Gather Love is a nature themed Maine Musical about island life, Acadia National Park and Maine.
Check out the video that provides information on the history and process of creating Plant Kindness and Gather Love.
Open Source Art History
February 2, 2018Website information
Carol L. Douglas is a plain air painter who lives in Rockport and has a website called Watch Me Paint that explains her work very well. As part of her website she posts to a blog daily which has some very interesting topics including “how to’s” that you might find useful.
Carol offers courses in her studio and on location including these for the summer Ocean Park, ME, on the American Eagle schooner out of Rockland, and one out of Schoodic Institute, Acadia National Park. You can check out all of her summer courses offerings.
A blog post provided by Carol on January 17 called Open Source Art History was brought to my attention by a friend of Carol’s who sometimes paints on location with her. I emailed Carol and she provided me permission to re-post it. Instead of just linking to her blog, I have included it below. Within the post there are several resources that are all available online. Great examples of how so many resources that have been around for many years have found their way to the internet.
Carol returned my email quickly so I suggest you contact her directly if you have questions about her course offerings or other website information.
Open Source Art History
An easy, interesting, free site for learning art history, available to everyone.
A reader asked how she could learn more about art history. My normal answer would be to go to the library and take out a copy of Janson’s History of Art. But she can’t do that.
A while ago, another reader sent me this listing of free art-history courses online. Most of them are narrowly-focused, making them more interesting to the enthusiast than to the beginner. But the list led me to SmartHistory. It has a detailed set of syllabuses that takes you through the development of western art, from the Venus of Willendorf to Pop Art. (Those of you looking for an analysis of the last fifty years will have to wait.)
These are:
History of Western Art and Civilization: Prehistory through the Middle Ages
History of Western Art: Late Gothic to Neoclassicism
Modern Art in the Europe and North America
A syllabus is an outline for a course, a description of where you’ll go and how you’ll get there. You get them the first day of class, put them in the front of your binder and refer back to them when you’ve forgotten something. SmartHistory’s are interactive, so they end up driving your learning. You walk through them step-by-step, just as you’d go to lectures at university. I sampled several lessons and found them complete, interesting, and thorough. And there are graded quizzes.
Smarthistory started in 2005 as an audio guide series for use at the Metropolitan Museum of Artand the Museum of Modern Art, and as a resource for college students. It has now published 1500 videos and essays on art and cultural history. While these include the art of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania, they’ve not yet written syllabuses for non-western art.
“Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content,” they wrote on their webpage.
That, to me, gets to the heart of the matter. Individuals and institutions may own individual paintings, but nobody owns our history or our heritage. Doling it out at $25 for a ticket to the Met or $100 for an access code to a textbook is contrary to our goal of building an educated, thinking society with common values. A person who follows these syllabuses meticulously is going to learn everything they’d study in a college survey course in art history.
Smarthistory launched its first custom-designed website in 2007. Between 2011-2015, it was supported by Khan Academy and remains its official partner for art history. And this is the first I’ve heard of it. Somedays I feel like the last one to the party.
Thank you Carol Douglas for allowing me to repost!
Falmouth High School Art Exhibit
February 1, 2018Grace Restaurant, Portland
As part of First Friday Art Walk in Portland the Falmouth High School Advanced Art Students will have their work on display at Grace Restaurant, 15 Chestnut Street, Portland. This is also a fundraiser for ShelterBox and Furniture Friends.
On Friday, February 2, 2018, from 5-8 pm in the event space at Grace Restaurant, accompanied by a student jazz ensemble, Falmouth advanced art students will display special pieces of artwork they created during their first semester.
What makes these pieces unique is their purpose, as well as what influenced the artists’ work. Prior to painting, these artists met with a diverse group of powerful guest speakers who discussed what home meant to them. Among these speakers were a Sudanese immigrant, a Hurricane Katrina survivor, elders who currently reside in assisted living, and the executive director of Furniture Friends, a local volunteer organization which collects and distributes gently used furniture to those who need it.
These poignant, thought-evoking conversations prompted the artists to think about what home truly means to them, then express that meaning in their artwork. Additionally, these speakers inspired the artists to donate the proceeds raised from the prints sold at this event to Furniture Friends and ShelterBox, two organizations dedicated to creating homes in Maine and around the world respectively.
The artwork displayed is designed to inspire the viewer to think of what home means to them, and also to raise awareness and a reminder that after news of a natural disaster has slipped from the headlines, pressing issues regarding the human cost of a lack of housing remains. At 5:30 pm the FHS Chamber Singers will perform two selections from the balcony in the restaurant.
me arts ed 