COBALT Bioregional Learning Journey

September 11-17 2024

3-days of kayaking across CASCO Bay & 3-days of biking the watershed with representatives from orgnaizations committed to coastal conservation, resilience, and adaptation!

Want to see “Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People)” from a new angle, and consider the bioregional ecosystem of which Back Cove Trail is only a part?

We are thrilled to share this invitation from our partner COBALT Collaborative for Bioregional Action Learning & Transformation for a Bioregional Learning Journey September 11 – 17, 2024. The six-day experience is designed as one part expedition – and one part retreat to learn far more about who’s doing what/where and to what extent regarding coastal resilience – to map these actions to local climate action plans – to see if we are willing to collaborate on BIG IDEAS in the Casco Bay bioregion – such as large scale seagrass restoration – or tidal wetland/living shoreline demonstrations in places like Back Cove. Space is limited. Full schedule and registration link.

TEMPOart commissioned artist Pamela “Posey” Moulton along with Interim Executive Director Jess Muise are a part of TEAM ZOSTERA, Casco Bay’s Seagrass Stewards. Here in Casco Bay, and across the Gulf of Maine, eelgrass meadows (Zostera marina L.) are going through periods of BOOM and BUST.

This matters because they are the “keystone” habitat and are in need of our help to understand what is happening, why and what else can we do to help them thrive and expand. Interdisciplinary and collaborative, TEAM ZOSTERA includes divers, vessel captains, sea kayakers, mappers, engineers, artists, and people passionate about creative action to steward our shared home.

We are thrilled to share this video from Buoy Media capturing the creation, installation, and celebration of TEMPOart’s 2024-2025 temporary public art commission Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People).

Thanks to funding from the Maine Office of Tourism, we were able to commission Pete Fitz and the Buoy Media team. Thank you Visit Maine!

This summer, TEMPOart collaborated with The Telling Room to offer a Nature: Science, Art & Writing Camp for 16 youth ages 8-12. Through our education partnership, we engaged campers in a dynamic exploration of “Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People),” an installation at Back Cove in Portland by The Myth Makers, which TEMPOart commissioned.

Lead teaching artist Amy Kimball, who attended a hands-on workshop with The Myth Makers, brought these material skills and inquiry to the program, guiding the campers in activities that combined art, science, and creative writing.

This camp is one example of TEMPOart’s dedication to education and outreach partnerships that engage the community, particularly youth, in our work. By providing opportunities for hands-on learning and creative expression, we aim to inspire the next generation of artists, scientists, and thinkers, fostering a deeper connection to public art and the natural world around them.

TEMPOart was thrilled to be featured in Maine Home + Design’s beautiful publication in August 2024. Here is a stunning photo from Pete Fitz of Buoy Media and part of the article. You can read the full article here on Maine Home + Design’s website.

Photo: Pete Fitz of Buoy Media

“Visitors to Portland’s BACK COVE TRAIL will spot some new animal friends this summer: a pair of 20-foot-tall egrets performing their distinctive mating dance. The bamboo sculpture called Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People) is a temporary public art installation by internationally renowned artists Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein of THE MYTH MAKERS. According to TEMPOART, the nonprofit organization that commissioned the sculpture, “The collaboration between Dodson and Moerlein [grew] out of a mutual love of the wild: Dodson takes inspiration from the mysterious nature of birds that spark her imagination, and Moerlein takes inspiration from events in the natural world that leave visual marks and strike a narrative chord in the artist. Although monumental in scale, their ephemeral bamboo sculptures are temporary in nature. Made from natural materials, they are site specific and respond to their local audience.” Dancing for Joy will be on display until 2026.”

Thanks to Munjoy Hill News for covering the upcoming Portland Trails “Birds of Back Cove” Scavenger Hunt.

TEMPOart is proud to be partnering with Portland Trails on a brand-new family event, Birds of Back Cove Scavenger Hunt! On Sunday, July 21st, explore the Back Cove Trail like never before. You and your kids will search high and low for scavenger hunt items while counting the birds you see along the way. Your kids will also have the chance to make their own bird feeders, measure their “wingspans,” meet a youth bird expert, and more! The event starts and ends at our beautiful new Dancing for Joy installation on the Back Cove Trail.

See you there!

TEMPOart is thrilled that “Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People)” was featured in the first few seconds of a recent WCVB Channel 5’s program Chronicle program featuring the world class sports and arts here in Portland, ME!

TEMPOart is proud to be partnering with Portland Trails on a brand-new family event, Birds of Back Cove Scavenger Hunt! On Sunday, July 21st, explore the Back Cove Trail like never before. You and your kids will search high and low for scavenger hunt items while counting the birds you see along the way. Your kids will also have the chance to make their own bird feeders, measure their “wingspans,” meet a youth bird expert, and more! The event starts and ends at our beautiful new Dancing for Joy installation on the Back Cove Trail. See you there!

Birds of Back Cove Scavenger Hunt

Sunday, July 21st from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Back Cove Trail

Ticket prices:

• Adults (18+) – $10
• Kids (3+) – $15
• Kids 2 and under – free

Reduced ticket price information: Is cost a barrier for your family? Please reach out to Bailey ([email protected]) for additional options.

TEMPOart is thrilled that Chris Miller of NPD Workshop has extended the temporary art permit with the City of Portland so that the animals of the Carousel Cosmos can live on the Western Promenade through November 2024! To celebrate, we sent Chris some of your frequently asked questions to keep learning about the inspiration for this public art installation and the artist that created.

What inspired you to make these animals in Carousel Cosmos?

The animals were inspired by all sorts of friendly monsters, like the ones in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.  Friendly monsters are great sounding boards.  They’re great foils and avatars for complex emotion.  They howl and roar the kinds of things that words can hardly say.  

The carousel was also informed by books about the history of science, especially astrophysics.  Probable Impossibilities, By Alan Lightman, is a great one.  It’s filled with beautiful thoughts about what it means to be alive and curious.  Dr. Lightman suggests that the apparent rarity of life in the universe, throughout all of space and all of time, is enough reason to feel kinship and solidarity with all living things, past, present and future.  There you have it.

How did you choose the animals?

Both of my kids went through minor dinosaur fascinations in recent years, so I had the chance to catch up on the fossil record with them.  The boys have moved on to other interests (Pokemon and MLB), but my dinosaur fascination is permanent now.  Every once in a while I stop by the public library to learn about new developments in prehistory.  From those worlds of fantastic creatures, enormous ice sheets, ancient supercontinents and treacherous, sweltering coal swamps, these animals were chosen to meet three criteria:

1.  They had to have roamed this very same place before us, a few thousand or a few hundred million years ago. 

2.  They had to resemble at least one constellation in the night sky, so as to have been characters in the first bedtime stories ever told.  

3.  They had to be surprising!  Some are long extinct and very different from anything wandering around today.  Some are living species that many people don’t realize used to live here, when this part of the world was covered by ice or water.  Some have been spectacularly misunderstood over the years.  During the sixteenth century, a lot of people seemed to think that whales and walruses had legs.  Some actually did have legs, about fifty million years earlier in their evolutionary development.  Here’s what Mark Twain had to say about things like that:  Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.  I chose the animals to be stranger than fiction.  They howl and roar about unimagined possibilities.

What were your influences for the depiction of the characters?

There are a couple of things to say about that.  

My kids have been great readers since long before they learned to read.  We’ve read so many children’s picture books together.  Our family is infamous at the South Portland Public Library.  We used to check out dozens of brightly illustrated  books a day, day after day and week after week for years.  Those years of bibliomania were my frame of reference for how the animals are depicted.  When I close my eyes I see bright colors, bold patterns and cute animals.  

Their appearance also has a lot to do with their relation to the human body.  They were designed as bench seating so people would have an excuse to interact with them.  They’re not behind velvet ropes in a museum.  They’re out in the wild, face to face with all of us.  Hugging is encouraged.  I tried to capitalize on the practical requirements of functional seating to make the animals even stranger and more whimsical than they might otherwise have been.

Method also had something to do with it.  Instead of first imagining the animals by sketching them out on paper, I started by whittling sketch-models from blocks of wood with a pocket knife.   The kids and I painted them one night after dinner.  The animal’s forms are basically those of handmade, hand-held wooden toys, and things of that description weave a certain kind of spell.  They can absorb a lot of good energy – a lot of  kindness, comfort and generosity.  The finished animal benches  are about ten times larger than those first maquettes, but otherwise the same.  I think it shows through.  Whittling, if you don’t know it, is one of life’s great joys.  That might come through in the finished products as well.  Of course the polar bear is a self portrait.  

How did you come up with the idea for a Carousel?

The carousel format was a many-layered thought.  It came from research and daydreaming in equal parts.  I learned a lot about the history, geography and design of the Western Promenade from a close reading of the masterplan that KZLA prepared in 2020.  They called out  a shortage of seating, so I decided to create more seating.  Crowds still gather on the Western Promenade to watch the sun set, which is such a beautiful and profound way to experience our motion through the universe.  The name Promenade itself comes from a history of spectacles, festivals, pageantry and fun.  The elliptical walkway at the end of West Street is a great place to go around in circles, which I thought was crying out  for some slightly more specific purpose. 

I spent a lot of time daydreaming with all of those things in mind.  I was out walking the dog one evening, daydreaming, and the notion of a carousel just fell from the sky.

What inspired you to become an artist?

It’s worth saying that my artistic practice went quiet for many years.  There were too many other things going on in work and in life.  Until just recently, I didn’t feel like I had accrued enough life experience to say anything especially worthwhile.  It’s only within the last ten years, since becoming a parent, that I’ve started seeking out and getting these kinds of commissions.  Parenthood came with some bizarre side effects.  First I experienced an unexpected feeling of openness, followed by a clarity of purpose.  Then I came down with an alarming hyper-sensitivity to truth and beauty.  Raising kids turns out to have supercharged my imagination and amplified my sense of wonder.  Those things are contagious after all, and worth trying to spread around and share for their own sake.  I feel compelled to do that.  

Art of any kind is still just one facet of my livelihood.  I’d love the opportunity to make more art.  In the meanwhile I’m still trained as an architect and still love to practice architecture in different capacities.  Before architecture I worked as a fabricator, building interesting and challenging things for other artists and different organizations.  It wouldn’t be so terrible to do that again in the future.  I love solving mechanical and construction-related problems.  I love learning how to use new tools.  I love the athleticism of hard physical work, at least sometimes.  I love making messes and making noise, getting dirty and getting sweaty – then cleaning up, washing off and sleeping well.  

On the other hand, sometimes I have the sudden and overwhelming need to know something about a random topic like botany, astrophysics or Mesopotamia.  I’m always looking for new things to read.  I’m always looking for new ways to justify my nonsensical reading habits. I love to think, to write and to engage in conversation.  I love to look at art and to experience art that other people have made.  There’s so much knowledge out there.  You could live for a thousand years and never run out of things to see, to read or to learn.  

What else but art could a person make, to scratch all of those different itches at once?

Does location (or possible locations) impact your strategy/thinking for the size and medium of the installation?

Yes, probably to a fault.  I love a great site, and don’t even know how to make anything that doesn’t respond to cues from some specific place.  If you study architecture they drum that into you.  Someday, maybe soon, I would love to take some time to figure out a more object-centered studio practice.  I tried it briefly about 20 years ago, and might take another crack at it.  

After site and location, materials are my next favorite obsession.  They can be a huge challenge for public installations, which need to be somewhat blast-proof.  Temporary public art can be even trickier.  Every material has its own unique set of mechanical properties and working characteristics.  Every material has its own history, context,  personality and soul.  Every material has traits that you can address with a calculator, and others that you certainly can’t.  

What’s your next project?

My next project is to find permanent indoor homes for seven large, colorful wooden carousel animals, which are only scheduled to stay on the Western Promenade until November.  They’re made painstakingly from painted ash wood, which unfortunately isn’t durable outdoors in the longer term.  Ax handles are sometimes made of ash wood.  It’s extremely dense and tough, but not especially weather-resistant.  The animals will need to move indoors somewhere.  After that  they should last another century or two without any problem.  One of the particularities of my agreement with TEMPOart, is that TEMPOart has never owned the animals.  They belong to me and will continue to belong to me, heaven forbid, unless I can find them new, permanent indoor homes by November.  If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly.  

The Children’s Museum and Theater of Maine, here in Portland, is interested in finding donors to help them acquire two of the animals.  If anyone is curious about those sponsorship opportunities, again please send me a note.  Since they were made in a public spirit, it would be great for some of them to stay in public settings.  

Besides arranging wooden animal adoptions, which has proven to be surprisingly time consuming, I’m also working on a tiny, interactive museum of natural wonder.  It’s very small for a museum but fairly large for a sculpture, about fifteen feet tall if you count the tips of the tails of the mice on the weathervane.  It will be covered in scales and branches.  It will have three doors, forty dormers, thirty-one eyes and a planetarium.  It’s a permanent public commission on the University of Maine campus in Farmington, due in early August.  

Last but not least, I’m still waiting for the green light to put an enormous sleeping bear in Bramhall Square, which will be one part of a more extensive renovation of that space.  Recently I’ve heard that the Bramhall Square renovation has been pushed back to 2029 on the city’s schedule, though that might be a placeholder.  There’s some hope that the groundbreaking will happen sooner.  Fingers crossed.

Pineapple on pizza?

Absolutely.  I would eat it with ham or Spam, freshly picked or from a can, with a fox or on a tram.  Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far.  Aloha!

Photographer Paul VanDerWerf shared this beautiful capture of Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People) at night.

Save your best shots as we prepare for a photo contest with great prizes to celebrate your creativity in response to our public art commission.

*Note that we incorrectly credited this photo with courtesy of The Myth Makers in our summer newsletter and apologize for the error.

Thank you to David Wade for capturing the spirit of our free Community Opening for “Dancing for Joy (By the Will of the People)”. Thank you to The Myth Makers for presenting, to performers Alejandro Graciano, and to our event sponsors and partners Kennebec Savings Bank, Little Lad’s, Loquat, Art Mart, The City of Portland.

We are looking forward to a year of incredible photos sharing your visit to the Great Egrets… what doorway did you move through?