The Portland Press Herald recently interviewed Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein of The Myth Makers, the artist team behind TEMPOart’s 2024 commission Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People). We love this excerpt here from the interview sharing how a site visit inspired the piece that will be landing June 13, 2024.

Read the whole article “Meet the artists (and the egrets) coming to the Back Cove this summer” on Portland Press Herald or below.

“How did you conceptualize this piece?

Moerlein:
We always start every piece that we do with site visits. It’s really important for us to be connected to the site and make sure that whatever we decide to build is connected to the site. So we drove up on a beautiful day and hiked around the trail. It was in the fall, and it was really exciting to see the great egrets were in such abundance. It was kind of odd. We hadn’t seen that in a while, that many of them. We must have counted 10 or 15 of them. Of course, it was in the fall, and it must have been all the babies were out. But it was just delightful. We saw them and were just very intrigued. And we looked at the site, and it’s well located. The beauty of doing the great egrets is they’re white. They’ll be very visible against all sorts of surfaces, but they’ll also have that ephemeral, translucent quality that our sculptures have.

And we always try to attach an avatar, a person that somehow represents the extravagance of the bird or the unique qualities. … With the great egrets, it came to mind the couple that was the first couple to be married under the same sex law. What was really interesting about that was that law was enacted by the will of the people. The people refused to let it get smothered in the Legislature. … So they put it on a citizens petition, and it was put on the ballot.

The idea basically is a blending of the joyful dance of the great egret and the joyful dance of the great egret and the joyful response that society has when people are allowed to marry who they love.

Dodson: It’s a Portland, Maine, story. Public art, it often has a purpose. It’s not just decorative. The work we do allows us to often draw upon local stories and tell them or retell them or bring them to light in new ways, and that’s really important.”