Current Exhibition

Miniatures 2024

*_{Left to right: “Tap, Tap, Ding!” by Hunter Coleman; “waiting, wading” by Caroline James; “Dinner” by Jana Heckerman}*

On View from March 1 – April 28, 2024

Opening Reception: Friday, March 1 from 5:00 – 8:00 PM

Help us celebrate the little things in life!

Mayo Street Arts is pleased to present “Miniatures 2024” — salon-style group exhibit featuring 51 artists and more than 170 artworks.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Damon A. is a printmaker, painter, sculptor, and multidisciplinary artist at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Mika Altidor is a multimedia collage artist from Portland, Maine, who creates intricately crafted paper dolls often accompanied by phrases or slogans. Mika weaves together magazine images, text, and paper materials to create transformed representations of fashion and the body. Mika draws inspiration from a range of sources, including vintage advertisements and contemporary editorial magazines. As a self-taught artist, Mika invites viewers to witness playfulness, honesty, joy, and beauty through figures whose form oscillates between reality and imagination.
Jenny Beers is a collage artist who derives inspiration from the natural world and its cycles, colors, and textures. She explores themes of growth and decomposition, the human form, and the connections between all living things. (@Art_by_jennybee)
Caroline Bennett is a hobby artist and crafter who enjoys mediums such as block printing, film photography, and fiber arts. She has always been drawn to miniatures––growing up, all of the window sills and mantels in the house were lined with tiny trinkets collected by her mom and grandmother. She’s continued this tradition in her home as tiny versions of just about anything bring her immense joy. Her favorite miniature genre is FOOD! She had so much fun creating these wearable miniatures and is so pleased to share these food earrings with others. She is currently in a graduate program studying to become a registered dietitian nutritionist. She is passionate about making nutrition, food, and cooking more accessible to everyone, and fully plans on being the Ms. Frizzle of nutrition by rocking these food earrings while teaching people about nutrition.
Bill Cifuni’s image is from an ongoing series exploring his fascination and curiosity with cloud formations.
Hunter Coleman, a Portland-based artist, musician, and teacher, questions the relationship between functionality and scale. His drum instruction revolves around exploration, creativity, and play. With these principles in mind in ‘Tap, Tap, Ding!’, Coleman asks the viewer to interact with the instrument to discover new sounds and rhythms at an intimate scale. A drum set is designed with the body in mind. Drums, cymbals, and hardware are placed ergonomically with consideration of the feet and hands. The result of these functional choices is an iconic aesthetic design. What happens when the same design has to accommodate fingers instead of limbs? (@hunt4claycreations)
Lynne Cullen was taught to paint by her aunt, Frances Hurley at age 12. She then earned a degree in painting at UConn. She spent a couple of years in Australia painting huge banners for Greenpeace. She likes to paint big and draw small. She is very interested in textures and surfaces. By zooming in on an object, one can see its essential character.
Felting bluebirds allows Madelene Cyr to infuse the ethereal beauty of nature into tangible, tactile forms. Through this art, I aim to evoke a sense of wonder and connection to the natural world, inviting viewers to cherish the delicate marvels of avian life.
Jill Dalton is a mixed-media sculptor and jewelry maker living in Portland, ME. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited at DUMBO Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, OH, the Fuller Museum in Brockton, MA, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME. She has shown her work locally at Filament Gallery, June Fitzpatrick Gallery, and Whitney Artworks.
Chris Eaton is a Portland artist offering a collection of minimalist watercolors, mostly from a sabbatical in Spain.
Sarah Ford made a piece during lockdown when their world was as small as their bedroom. They created their ideal bedroom for my teenage self. They were never allowed to hang things on their walls so they did it in miniature 10 years later.
Anne Freedman is originally from Brooklyn, N.Y. Anne has been living and working in Portland, Maine for the last 25 years. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and worked in several art-related fields before pursuing a career in social work. Anne currently works on paper in mixed media and collage. She looks forward to engaging more with the local arts community.
Katherine Gerwig is a multidisciplinary artist living in Portland, Maine. Using a repeating cast of characters: the hand, the figure, the moth, the house, she creates work that speaks to the multifaceted experience of being alive. Her work is inspired by a love of science fiction, a fascination with objects, and a drive to collect things. Embracing the darker areas of the emotional landscape and finding treasure in others’ trash, her current work uses discarded materials to ask questions about our consume-and-dispose culture and its impact on us and our surroundings. What is the relationship between our throwaway lifestyle and the way we interact with each other? How can we feel joy in the midst of overwhelming feelings of guilt, regret, disappointment, and helplessness? Who deserves health and safety? How do we judge each other’s lifestyle choices? Are we doing enough? Are we enough? (@cellyfrancis)
Robin Gleeson-Warren creates unique abstract works with oil paint and cold wax medium. Working with cold wax involves using palette knives, squeegees, brayers, and various found objects in a multilayered approach. Paint and wax are added and scraped into, layer upon layer, creating depth and texture. This happens expressively and spontaneously, responding in the moment as the painting slowly evolves. The building up of these layers over time creates a visual history that gives cold wax paintings a unique complexity. Robin’s compositions are fully imaginary, while deeply inspired by being in nature. Her goal is not to depict a specific scene or tell a viewer what to see but rather to evoke your personal feelings associated with ethereal and timeless places. Using texture and abstract compositions, she creates intimate and emotive images that encourage one’s reflection and interpretation. Through her work, Robin hopes viewers feel inspired and intrigued. Robin lives in Portland, Maine, and enjoys the city and wide variety of natural landscapes. Robin grew up in both New Jersey and Virginia before moving to Asheville, NC for college. Robin attended Warren Wilson College where she earned a bachelor’s degree studying Psychology, Fine Arts, and Philosophy. She spent many years working in the fields of mental health care and health care administration.
The process used in Roe Goldman’s work is a lace impression method. They lay a lace fabric or crocheted doily on a slab of clay and roll over it once more to press the fabric into the clay. These fabrics are thrifted or passed down from their great-grandmother. This work has a great sense of nostalgia having been created from a fabric passed down through generations. Their love for fiber arts and ceramics alike are greatly attributed to the love they saw their grandmother put into her work. This work strives to evoke a feeling of familiarity and comfort. Exactly how the clay remembers the texture and impression of the lace Roe’s work acts as a physical memory of the love their grandmother showed for them and their family. (@roesbud_studio)
Tim Greenway is a commercial, editorial, and fine art photographer. His photography has been featured in a variety of award-winning publications and he is the primary photographer for Mainebiz. During his 28-year career, his themes ranged from documentary stories on homelessness and drug addiction to professional sports, local entrepreneurs, and architecture photography. Tim’s current clients range from Maine’s largest companies to small businesses and sole entrepreneurs. Tim’s art photography has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibits.
Megan Grumbling is a puppet-curious poet, librettist, and essayist who loves weird art collaborations. One of her upcoming projects (with composer Marianna Filippi) is a composition for chorus and eight cellos written in the voice of a glacier.
Jana Heckerman loves creating in all of its many forms. Originally from California, she has slowly moved eastward, first studying music and studio art at Kenyon College in Ohio and now living in Portland. Here in Maine, Jana works with local printmaker Ana Inciardi and she is currently featured in Creative Portland’s RESILIENCE exhibition. Jana’s artistic practice spans many mediums, from painting and printmaking to composing music, and she is always exploring new ways to create. Working on a smaller scale often helps me with art block. This past year, I’ve started painting small scenes of animals doing human things, greatly inspired by Richard Scarry. These low-stakes pieces connect me to how I approached art as a kid and remind me of the joy in creating.(@janaheckartman)
Lynne Herman of Feral Apparel explores dyeing, shibori, felting, embroidery, and other textile-based craftiness. (@FeralApparelEtc)
Bevin Holmberg is an artist living and working in Falmouth, Maine. She obtained a B.F.A. in Studio Art from James Madison University, with a concentration in photography, focusing specifically on alternative processes. She also holds a Master of Education in Art from the University of Minnesota and finished the program with summer study at Säterglänten Institute for Slöjd (traditional handicrafts) in Insjön and Stockholm, Sweden. While in Minnesota, she lived and participated in the Tilsner Artist Cooperative in St. Paul, worked as a sign painter, and taught drawing lessons to elementary-age students. Her most recent work has been a painted exploration of nature and folk art-inspired pattern. “I see personality in nature, and I am especially interested in pattern. For me, art does not need to be complicated if it brings someone joy.” (@mermaidmeadow)
Stacy Howe is an artist who produces assemblages and dioramas to photograph and/or draw. Using symbolic forms of the Gothic and employing the notion of the uncanny ornate figures become threatening and the banal otherworldly. She hopes to promote the allure of violence and the drive towards death to find comfort in the return to the primordial. (@S.R.Howe)
Jillian Impastato is an arts administrator and museum educator based in Waterville, ME. Throughout her career, she has called New York, Massachusetts, Norway (the country, not the town!), and Maine home. She loves intergenerational friendship, being outdoors, and collecting bookmarks. (@spilljill)
Dr. Dorothea Ivey’s artistry is philosophically-informed by David Bohm’s (1980) concept of fragmentation and wholeness, which posits when one thinks of totality as independent fragments coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole, they will eventually gain clarity of the big picture. This is informed by her lived experience as an African American woman raised in the South by a loving, single grandmother due to her parents’ challenges, which they have since overcome. As a qualitative scholar, she integrates phenomenology and the arts-based methods of collage and mixed media to investigate how wholeness and fragmentation interplay in individual and collective narratives.
Caroline James is an artist living in Portland, Maine. They use a variety of media, including gouache, colored pencil, marker, clay, felt, and found objects, to explore ideas of home, the tensions between past and present, and the intersections of emotional and geological landscapes. When not creating, Caroline can be found at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine where they work as a visitor programs associate. (@mudmist)
Sam Jones (b. 1988) earned his BA from the University of Southern Maine and his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Recent exhibitions include Estudio Abierto (Vigo, Spain), Cerulean Arts (Philadelphia, PA), 82 Parris (Portland, ME), Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia), PAFA Museum (Philadelphia), On Stellar Rays (NYC), Marginal Utility (Philadelphia), Prince Street Gallery (NYC), Automat Collective (Philadelphia), and Spillway Collective (Philadelphia). His work has been published in New American Paintings, Young Space, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and is part of the Horseman Foundation of American Art in St. Louis, MO. He is a former member of the artist-run gallery, Automat Collective, where he curated numerous exhibitions. Jones lives and works in Maine and currently teaches at the University of Southern Maine. (@sambernardjones)
Paulina K. is an artist at The Art Department who works in pencils, acrylics and ink. (@theartdepartment)
Natalie King (b.1997) grew up on the coast of southern Maine. She is a figurative painter, whose work illustrates her personal mythologies. Growing up in Maine made for a beautiful landscape of flora and fauna to draw color inspiration, materials, and energy from. This can be seen in the color worlds and symbolism surrounding her subjects. King is creating self-made ecosystems of joy and mysticism. (@nking.greenbean)
Destiny L. is a painter, printmaker, and musician at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Josh L. is a digital artist, printmaker, and game creator at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Alonso L. is a digital artist, draftsman, and painter at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Thy L. is a comic book artist, writer, printmaker, and sculptor at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Mike L. is a landscape painter, printmaker, and draftsman at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
David Lazarus is a full-time painter and printmaker. (@theartdepartment)
Emma Mclean is an artist and educator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As a disabled person, she is interested in art and accessibility in all its forms. Emma uses quilting, embroidery, and other textile arts to explore visualization of invisible things – like pain and illness. Her work is inspired by the many women in her lineage who made art, but would never call themselves an artist. (@emmamakesit)
Aaron Margolis (אהרן מאַרגאָליס), born 1982 in New York. A self-taught craftsperson and sculptor, Aaron has spent life scrounging for materials and ideas in an attempt to gain an understanding of self.
Siena Mayers is a multimedia visual and performing artist, ESOL teacher and administrator with a passion for creating a better world through art and education. Having received her BA in “Art and Social Change” from Hampshire College in 2007, she went on to intern with Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping; toured with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and performed from a raft made of recycled materials floating down the Mississippi River with Swoon’s Miss Rockaway Armada. She has led workshops and helped create murals with underserved communities with Mural Arts in Philadelphia, facilitated art-making with adults with disabilities with Creativity Explored in San Francisco and Spindleworks in Maine, and directed plays performed by immigrant communities in Delray Beach, FL. Her work has been featured in such venues and publications as the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the UMVA Quarterly Journal, and the International Toy Theater Festival.
River Nation is a nonbinary artist who has operated their online store, ThisIsRNation, since 2015, making clothes, accessories, decor, and art prints. Originally from Alabama, they graduated with a degree in biology in 2016 and found their new home in New England in 2019. They have worked as a chemist for the past 5 years, while still participating in art events when time allows. (@thisisrnation)
Abby O. is a printmaker, writer, and illustrator at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Ryan P. is a draftsman, printmaker, and painter at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Doria P. is a multidisciplinary artist at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Mauren Puia of Alcove Jewelry makes handmade jewelry with silver, copper, gems and found stones – when I can from wherever I am. I am inspired by botanicals, texture, shadow, movement, and so much more. (@alcovejewelry)
Kyle Randall: “We are all lenses, filtering the world through our viewpoints. Kyle takes time every day to sit and look and to sit and draw. Through these two distinct activities, he reflects what he sees in the world around me.” (@ktrmakesart)
Playing for catharsis, and allowing the small miniature worlds to bring us the intimacy of our own lives. This series captures Kellie Ryan’s desire to imagine and move through the human experience through the eyes of the heart. Her passion is performance art and audience engagement, and yet in these small windows into the animate world of dolls, there lurks a viewer who connects to what is alive and familiar. When Kellie is not being an artist, which is ostensibly most of the time, she is helping people navigate their sexuality as a somatic focused sex educator and bodyworker. These photos are from a past life in many ways when she was a photographer with a macro lens camera that used something called film.
Brenda S. is a printmaker, painter and fiber artists at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
Amanda Saker is an artist living in Portland. She received her BFA in Game Art & Animation from MECA in 2020. When not creating, Amanda can be found tidepooling, wandering the woods, and marveling at the Maine coastal ecosystem accompanied by her dog, Pastrami. Amanda’s love of the natural world is evident in her work. Through many different mediums, she aims to capture the sense of awe she feels in exploring the wild landscape and the life within it. The ocean, and the life it brims with, is an especially important part of her life, and by extension, her work. (@amandasakerart)
Claire Christine Sargenti is an interdisciplinary artist known for her vulva-inspired imagery, often made in her signature colors of black, white and pink. Her artwork has been seen at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as in galleries, digital spaces and print publications nationwide. She is the creator of the world’s largest spinning vulva sculpture and occasionally moonlights as a street artist under the pseudonym PALEO. Some of her favorite pieces include the “Noble Moon Tarot Deck & Grimoire,” “Vagina Book,” “Pussy for President” and “Let Love Be Viral.” (@clairevoyantspirit)
Wild Earth Clay Co was started by Bessa G. Smith. Bessa is an Air Force Veteran, mother, and full-time art student in her junior year at Maine College of Art & Design. Her ceramic vessels celebrate mothers and their bodies during and after pregnancy. The vessels highlight the ways their bodies stretch, tear, and scar under all the pressure, and how they still have to remain functional. (@wild.earth.clay.co )
Meryl Troop is an ASL interpreter and artist.
Tyler W. is a writer, illustrator, printmaker, and musician at The Art Department who works in acrylics, pencil, and marker.
Phyllis W. is a painter, printmaker, and multidisciplinary artist at The Art Department. (@theartdepartment)
October Wilde is the moniker of Maine-based artist Lydia Brown. No one is ever just one thing and Lydia is never just one type of artist. Each medium has its own demands and limitations and she works within many as a means of personal exploration, allowing her style to be loose and ever-changing. With crocheting earrings she finds endless possibilities with sculpture and miniature. The true joy is in making that art accessible to anyone with holes in their ears <3