Transcription of Nat May for the show Good Works that Last #150
Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour has been a wonderful opportunity for us to showcase non-profits in Maine and specifically in the Portland area. One of my favorite things to do is to talk with people who have had some long term impact on their community, because their non-profit has been in place for a while.
One such individual is Nat May. He is the executive director of SPACE Gallery in Portland, which is a non-profit contemporary arts venue. Nat was one of the founders of the Bakery Photo Collective and has served on the boards of the Portland Arts & Cultural Alliance, Portland’s Downtown District, and Creative Portland. He is a founding board member of the Hewn Oaks Artists’ Colony. Thanks so much for being here today.
Nat: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Nat, you founded SPACE Gallery in 2002, so you’re coming up on your 12-year anniversary as a non-profit. That’s a big deal.
Nat: It is. Actually, I’m not a founder. I started helping out about six months after SPACE opened, and the friends who founded the gallery knew about my work with the photo collective and asked if could help them out a little bit. But yes, I’ve been there, I’ve been the executive director there for 10 years. It’s lasted much longer maybe than we thought it might.
Lisa: Tell me about the SPACE Gallery for people who haven’t had a chance to visit here in Portland.
Nat: The idea with SPACE is to have a bunch of different kinds of art, culture, and ideas happening in the same physical space. We have visual art exhibitions. We have two rooms. Within the context of those exhibitions we have live music, performance, artist talks, literary readings, film screenings, community events, etc., etc. Lots of things that you can’t categorize.
The purpose of combining those things is sometimes topical. We’ll try to have a film that addresses a topic that might be brought up in the exhibition, for example. It’s also a way of leading people towards something else that they weren’t looking for. For example, a lot of our film goers come because they’re interested in film, but we’ve sort of tricked them into coming into a gallery settings and they have to look at the work that’s on the walls while they’re waiting for the film to start.
I think over the last 12 years we’ve helped people feel more comfortable looking at something that they weren’t looking for originally.
Lisa: I had the opportunity to watch Gibson Fay-LeBlanc give a reading. He’s a poet, he’s been our show a couple of times. It was very interesting to be within that kind of social settings because there were all sorts of different people. It wasn’t just poets or writers or artists or photographers. There was just a really broad range of individuals who were coming together to experience something that they may or may not have had a chance to experience otherwise.
Nat: Yeah, it’s true. We have a varied audience. It’s a good blend of kinds of people and ages. I think the fact that the space is an intimate space … If we have a reading for example, we’ve got the chairs out and we’ve only got 130, 140 people in the room. You have close proximity to the person who’s on stage and close proximity to the people sitting with you. You never know if it’s going to be a high school student or a retiree or someone in the middle. We provide these shared experiences where people are laughing together or having a strong feeling about something the reader is talking about together. It really creates a pretty magical experience.
Lisa: I can definitely relate to that. I’m not sure what event it was but I believe it was either the principal or the superintendent in the Portland school system describing his background as being basically a high school dropout and coming from that place all the way over to his current position in education. You could just feel the energy in the room and how it really opened up people’s minds to the possibility that life isn’t necessarily a straight path.
Nat: That’s true. I remember that event and that story had a lot of tension to it but also some relief, I think, when he got to the end and talked about where he was. Everybody in the room was on the edge of their seat listening intently to what he was saying, really close with him I think through his journey. That’s a really great thing to be able to share that with somebody who’s opening themselves up.
Lisa: That does to speak to something that I think many people don’t always associate with art, and that is discomfort. That sometimes we like to believe that art is always going to make us feel inspired or feel awe, or there’s the beauty a Monet or a Picasso, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But sometimes it makes us feel strange or off.
Nat: That’s true, or it makes us confused even. I was talking with a friend last week who doesn’t know much about our work, and ask me if I considered us at SPACE to be in the entertainment business. I bristled at the word entertainment a little bit and she was teasing me and asking me why. It’s because I think of course we have lots of arts and culture that is entertaining. You go to the movies, you want to be entertained. We’re looking for something that is sometimes entertaining but sometimes challenging the ideas that we came in with or making us think a little bit differently about a social issue. Perhaps teaching us about something we didn’t know much about.
We really want the content of our programming to give the audience their own experience without us framing things too much for people. If somebody comes in and they see something in the gallery and they ask me what is this or what am I supposed to be looking at, I always like to ask them to look at it first and then tell me what they think their looking at before I’m trying to give them some secret answer. Actually the secret is I have my own experience, you have your own experience, but they’re both valid.
Lisa: Is that something that is hard for people to understand? I think about something like opera, which I don’t know very much about. There are all these layers of critique about opera and there’s all this knowledge about opera. Just really pick any artistic idea. That if you’re somebody that’s just … Say you’re a doctor who’s never had a photography or an opera course, that it would be hard to go in and understand it because there’s something magical or special about that that all the other opera and photography critics understand but you. Do you feel like that’s something that happens?
Nat: Yeah, I think as a culture we’re oversensitive to our own understanding about things and that gets in the way of our experience at times. I think we are capable of critical thinking and perception, and if we allow ourselves the time to look and to experience then we can draw our own conclusions about what we’re looking at or identify our own feelings about what we’re looking at, and then our feelings are our own and they’re valid.
I remember we had an exhibit at one point that had some sound art. There was a video piece that had this kind of screechy sound component that we all were a little bit annoyed by, especially working in the office and hearing it day after day after day. But none of us wanted to admit that it was slightly on the annoying end of the spectrum.
We had this class from Southern Maine Community College come in. It was like an introduce to visual arts class and they came in to look at the show. One of the students said “Oh my God, that is terrible. That is so annoying.” I just really appreciated her naming what we all kind of felt but didn’t feel like it was appropriate to say. Of course people have more positive experiences too, but her read on what was happening with that, there was more to it, but her read was just as valid as someone who has a long art history background or who understands the context that that piece was made in, that kind of thing.
Lisa: I think you’re right. I think that maybe there is something to the kind of different levels of understanding or understanding things from different perspectives. It doesn’t make the things any less valid if they’re from one person’s perspective vs. another. It’s just you know things differently because of your own paradigm.
Nat: Right. We really try to create a variety of experiences and a variety of content that we’re sharing with people at the gallery. One thing people don’t always understand about SPACE is that everything’s fairly highly curated. We put a lot of thought into what we’re presenting to people. We’re not just sitting there in the office waiting for somebody to show up with their things to share. We’re out in the world looking for what we think is good and what we think is worth putting time and energy towards.
When people want to know what we’re doing or what they might like, I always feel pretty confident handing someone a calendar of what’s going on for the month for example, and saying “I don’t know what you’re into or what your interests are but I’m fairly confident that of the 20 events we’re doing this month, something here will interest you. You might not like it or it might not be your favorite thing in the world but you won’t leave regretting that you came.”
If people give us a chance and get to know what we’re trying to do in terms of the things that we’re presenting, I think that’s when they start to trust our judgment. People have looked to us for what kind of films they should be watching even if they’re not coming to the gallery. If later they’re looking for something to watch on video, they’ll look back at our schedule and see what did SPACE pick. If someone wants to go to the record store and buy a new record they’ll look back at our calendar and say “Who are the new bands that were playing at SPACE in the last few months?” That’s a level of curation that extends through and helps people figure out what they might like.
Speaker 1: There was a time when the apothecary was a place where you could get safe, reliable medicines carefully prepared by experienced professionals coupled with care and attention focused on you and your unique health concerns. Apothecary By Design is built around the forgotten notion that you don’t just need your prescriptions filled; you need attention, advice, and individual care. Visit their website apothecarybydesign.com or drop by the store at 84 Marginal Way in Portland and experience pharmacy care the way it was meant to be.
Experience chef and owner Harding Lee Smith’s newest hit restaurant: Boone’s Fish House and Oyster Room. Maine seafood at its finest joining sister restaurants the Front Room, the Grill Room, and the Corner Room. This newly renovated two story restaurant at 86 Commercial Street on Custom House Wharf overlooks scenic Portland Harbor. Watch lobstermen bring in the daily catch as you enjoy baked, stuffed lobster, raw bar, and woodfired flatbreads. For more information visit www.theroomsportland.com.
Lisa: We’ve spent time on this show talking with the founders of the Camden International Film Festival and various other members of, I’ll call it that generation. It’s interesting to watch the maturity that occurs over time when you actually are with a project that you feel really passionate about, but that needs to move and shift. Have you experienced that yourself over the ten years you’ve worked there?
Nat: Yeah, definitely. When you’re starting out you have some clear visions in your mind about what you want it to be but it’s maybe hard to verbalize and you haven’t seen it in action enough to be able to explain it to people, and you haven’t done it enough for people to have confidence in you. As you do more and you have more things to point to, more people see the success and want to get involved, and the more confidence you have doing your thing and the easier it is to ask people for help.
When we were starting with SPACE, I remember the first grants I was writing even to the Maine Arts Commission, their grant form required that you check a box naming one discipline that you worked in. Was it dance, was it film, was it theater, was it music, was it visual arts. I would always write at the bottom of this list, I would draw a little box and I would write multi-disciplinary and I would check the box, and I would write a little note saying “You have to change your form because we’re working in a different paradigm.” Eventually they recognized that that was a valid way of working.
It was hard in the beginning to explain what we’re doing. Even today people come in and they say “I don’t get it. Are you an art gallery, or are you a film venue, or are you a music venue?” Because we’re not used to that blend. If you experience how that works together a few times, it becomes obvious that it’s a workable system.
It took us a few years I think to try to get people to understand what we were doing, and the effect of that was that people started validating our efforts by giving us good feedback and supporting us with donations. We started getting more grants. We’ve learned I think how to ask for the help that we need because we are a non-profit. We do require significant sources of non-earned income – grants and donations – to be able to do what we’re doing. It’s never easy to ask for that help but it becomes maybe less hard than it was back in the beginning.
Lisa: You’ve continued to expand the work that you’re doing beyond the state of Maine. You’ve started now reaching out and working with individuals and groups across the country that are trying to do something similar to what you’re doing.
Nat: We were really lucky in 2006 to be invited into a program run by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. They were giving grants purely for capacity-building for visual arts organizations. Capacity-building meaning support for infrastructure, for physical improvements, for technology, for consulting. Not program dollars, not staffing dollars.
We ended up getting about 150,000 dollars from the over the course of a few years towards those things. I always explained it as money that if you were running a business you would have found that money at the beginning before you opened your doors so that you could open the correct way, but we just opened without any resources and then eventually had to catch up.
As a member of this group in the initiative, we made connections with our peer organizations all around the country, with art spaces in San Fransisco and New York and Chicago, but also in York, Alabama and Tulsa, Oklahoma and places that you don’t think of as art centers. Through that I’ve been able to develop a connection to my peers who are running these spaces.
We’ve decided we really need a more formal way of communicating with each other so we’re trying to start a national network of artist-centered spaces and projects that is a real connection point. We’ll have some conferences, different kinds of gatherings. We’d like to work together to commission research about the kind of work we do and maybe put out some white papers that explain the value of the level of arts engagement we’re working with. Everyone understands why museums are important but not everybody understands why the artist-centered alternative spaces are important.
We want to band together maybe to talk about what we’re doing and have some of the larger national funders pay attention to what we’re doing. We’ve actually already gotten some funding interest for it even though we’re just at the very beginning stages of what we’re trying to do. It’s really been helpful for me to make these connections with these other people because there isn’t another space quite like us in Maine, so it’s been hard to have the right reference points along the way to know if we’re doing things well. Even still within this national group, no one’s quite got the blend that we have. No one else is doing 200 events a year and 20 exhibitions with the size staff that we have or the size space that we have.
Lisa: I’m impressed with what you’ve managed to achieve and I’m excited to see what SPACE Gallery is going to continue to achieve over time. Nat, how do we find out about SPACE Gallery for people who would like to learn more about donating money or watching a show or getting involved in some way?
Nat: Sure, the easiest thing to do is to go to our website, which is space538.org. There you can look at our calendar of events and see what our exhibitions are. You can make a donation online. You can sign up for our mailing list. You can learn about volunteering. If you want to just pop by, we’re at 538 Congress Street, right between the Maine College of Art and Reny’s. We love having people pop in and ask us what’s going on.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Nat May, who is the executive director of the SPACE Gallery in Portland, and also one of Maine Magazine’s 50 people in the July issue. Thanks so much for the work that you’ve been doing and for bringing arts to this part of Maine and the world. Keep up the good work.
Nat: Thanks so much for having me.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 150: “Good Works That Last.” Our guests have included Deborah Walters, Jane Gallagher, and Nat May. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit doctorlisa.org. Read about Nat May on the July Maine Magazine’s 50 people list.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downlodable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Get Twitter updates by following me as doctorlisa, and see my daily running photos as Bountiful One on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
Also, let our sponsors let us know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Good Works That Last” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth Maine; Apothecary by Design; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage; Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial; Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms; and Bangor Savings Bank.
Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture, and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our online producer is Kelly Clinton. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is available for download free on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.