Architecture + Art #174

Scott Simons:

Ultimately, for me, it's all about the people and trying to touch people's lives. And I think the more you experience life, the more you can bring to that. The more you're sensitive to what happens to people when they go through buildings and use buildings, the better the buildings can be.

Mark Bessire:

Every artist has to make their own choice how to enter the art market. Whether you're going to make your own art for yourself and that's good enough and have another job, or you're going to pursue a gallery career or you're going to pay for marketing to get your work out there. Those are all different entry points into getting what you want. I'm not sure anyone is better than another one. It's so hard to get your art out there that any mode that an artist chooses, that's their choice. And I'm actually fine with that. I mean, it's up to the artist to make the choice how they're going to deliver their art to an audience.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 174, Architecture and Art, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 11, 2015. The creative process is necessarily an evolution. Artists and the community in which they create are continuously changing. Today we speak with architect Scott Simons and with Mark Bessear, director of the Portland Museum of Art, about designing updated spaces and programs that can absorb and celebrate change. You won't want to miss these intriguing conversations. Thank you for joining us. I always enjoy spending time with people who work in very different fields from my own, and these include artists and architects and other people in the design world. Scott Simons is principal at Scott Simons Architects. He has over 30 years of professional experience in architecture and design. He is a founding member of the Portland Society for Architecture, where he is a board member and past president. Scott has served as a design critic at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Northeastern University, among many others. Thank you so much for coming in and being part of our show today.

Scott Simons:

You're welcome.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Scott, you were one of Maine magazine's 50 people. In fact, you were on the COVID of Maine magazine last summer. Obviously, Maine magazine considers what you're doing, and I know Maine home design feels similarly, to be very important and considered as architecture to be very important. You found it important enough to go into it as a field. What drew you to it?

Scott Simons:

Well, I really came up through Studio World. My mother was a painter, and she taught me how to draw at a very early age, and I spent a lot of time in studios. So I was, from an early age, was very comfortable in studios and thinking three dimensionally. And I just assumed that everybody could do that. They could see the back of something by looking at the front of it. Of course, that's not the case. That was a unique skill that my mother helped train me. My father, on the other hand, was a lawyer and a judge, and he was very analytical. And so it was an interesting combination, my mother being very intuitive and my father being very intelligent, analytical person. So architecture is a wonderful combination of those two skills that I developed just by growing up in my family. So I didn't discover architecture until I was a senior in college. And when I did, it was a really. It just felt really comfortable. It felt like an obvious thing for me to be doing because I could really sculpt space. But also it involved lots of, you know, involved engineering, it involved mathematics, it involved light and materials. It was a great combination of things that I was interested in.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What did you enjoy doing when you were younger? What did you enjoy doing when you were in high school and in college before you found architecture?

Scott Simons:

Just making things, mostly. I mean, I drew really well from an early age. I could pretty much represent anything with a pencil, But I spent a lot of time just making things out of whatever materials were available, whether they were wood or ceramics or leather or whatever. Just making things. Paper, cardboard. So I took a lot of stuff, sculpture classes. I was also very interested in music early on in life and played in orchestras and bands. And music is an interesting counterpoint to architecture because there is a metric to architecture, and there's a lot of things that you find in music. Repetition, rhythm, counterpoint, all of those are concepts that work with. I mean, the architecture is all about this same things.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What instruments did you play?

Scott Simons:

When I was younger, I played percussion instruments. Everything, you know, timpanis, xylophones, snare drums, bass drums, everything. All those things in the back row of the orchestra. There's like 50 instruments back there. So I learned to play all of those.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So as you're designing things, is there a sound to them? Is there. Is there a sense that you have that there's something going on in the background in a metric, rhythmic way?

Scott Simons:

Definitely. Ultimately, the building has to stand up, and so it has to have a structure to it. It has to have a rationale to it that can be built. So you find the spacing, you find the searching through the design of the building and how it needs to work and how it needs to fit in its context. You find a rhythm to that, and there's sort of a logic to structural, you know, the structure of a building. And so just finding the rhythm that works with any particular building is an important early decision.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've been involved with buildings like the Portland Public Library, which was pretty newly redesigned within the last few years, I believe, also the Ferry Terminal, the Wayne Fleet Arts Center. You've been working on a master plan for the Portland Museum of Art. These are all public buildings that have kind of a diversity of uses. How do you take those uses and the way people are going to exist within a building? How do you take that into consideration in design?

Scott Simons:

Well, it's really the starting point for the design. So we don't really start a project with an idea of what it might look like. In the end, it really grows out of a deep investigation of the culture of the place. So the more we learn about it, we spend a lot of time up front studying what's happening in a building, what's happening in that type of a building. Where there are shifts happening. For example, libraries are going through a paradigm shift. They used to be just a place for holding knowledge. You used to go in there, and it was a very introverted experience. But now a library is really an extroverted experience because you have the Library of Congress on your cell phone. So you don't really need to go to the library for a book. People read books on tablets. They read them. You can read a book on your phone if you want. But libraries are growing in their popularity in communities across the country. Portland is no exception to the rule. And so the idea was to find out what's going on. Why are they more popular? What are the activities that people are wanting to be at the library for and yes, they want to go to libraries to take out a book, but they also go there for a sense of community. It's like a gathering place. That's why the cafe is on the front. That's why we brought the whole library right out to the sidewalk. Used to be a void. You used to have to walk like 120ft to get to the door through a dark and really scary place. Was not a welcoming experience. Now it is. It's right on the sidewalk. You can see everything going on in the square. There's a lot of interaction between the sidewalk and people inside, inside, outside. And that was the paradigm shift in that case. And it took us a while to learn that. We've designed 21 libraries, so we've sort of seen this trend over the last 20 years. We've seen it evolve. But Portland is a much larger library and it's right downtown. So it was a great opportunity to really express that idea of information in the public realm versus on the inside of the library. We brought it right out into the public realm.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How does the library differ from say the ferry terminal building?

Scott Simons:

The ferry terminal, if you remember what it used to look like, it used to have the mechanical room on the end facing the water. So all we did, it's really a very simple idea where we took the waiting room and we put it on the end so you could see the boats coming in. Again, interviewing lots and lots of people, talking to lots of people that use the ferry on a day to day basis. There's a romance about the boat ride, but there was no romance in the ferry terminal. So what we tried to do is expand the experience so that you can see the boat coming, you can see the water, you can see the activity in the harbor while you're waiting for your boat. So it's really expanded the experience. So instead of it just being when you got on the boat and you get out on the water, it now starts long before you get there. You can read the mural in there about the history of the Casco Bay ferry line. So it gives you some sense of history about the ferries. You can see the boats coming and going in every direction. It's filled with sunlight. In the summer, the wall opens up. You know, you can feel the breeze, you can smell the ocean. So that's all it was. It was just that simple. Just get people out where they can see the water and start that experience of being on the water, you know, 20 minutes earlier and 20 minutes later on the other end. Expand the experience

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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Dr. Lisa Belisle:

i'm remembering myself back as a younger person visiting the library before it actually was renovated I don't know how many years ago, but it did feel like a sort of. It was very precious. It was a place where you go to see the precious paintings. And it felt it wasn't a place that I that resonated with me as a child. I went, I guess a few years ago with my daughter and they had really a wonderful person who was showing what art could mean to the kids. So really there is this reaching out to the children as opposed to the experience I had when I went which is this something kind of static sitting on the wall. And it almost feels as if libraries, art museums are trying to create more of a living space and more of a connection, especially with the younger generation.

Scott Simons:

It's the same as I think everything that I'm experiencing in my life as the accessibility is just our ability to access information and access elements of culture as well is Almost infinite. Now I can look up, you know, I looked up some of your shows to see how they went. You know, just like that. Took me two seconds to find them. And you can look up, you know, the Portland Museum of Art collection will be digitized soon and you'll be able to see the show or to, you know, looking at the show to get information as you walk around from your. Your own cell phone. So I think that that makes it more accessible. You don't have to have studied art in college to be able to understand the museum experience, to be able to walk through and see the Homers and see the Wyeths and things you can basically learn on your own, which makes it much easier, much less intimidating for people. And so it's not just a certain section of our community that's able to access the information. All it makes a broader spectrum experience for the community.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's been interesting for me to watch my generation, my children's generation, even my parents generation become so much more tuned in to the visual and even actually into the auditory. Because we have now we have Instagram, we have Facebook, we have people who are understanding that you can look at something and even though it may not be art, it becomes art once you take a photo of it and you upload it and then you have the audio. You know, you mentioned the radio show. So you can listen to podcasts anytime you want. You can decide that you want to hear more about something. And I do think that that multi sensory availability is really changing the way that not only we are accessing information, but the way that we're able to communicate with other people. So it's interesting to see because I think we've gone from. Well, it's. Things have really changed. What have you seen in your line of work in architecture? How have things been influenced by all of the new media?

Scott Simons:

Well, when I am just reading my journals every month, they all come online, so I get them daily almost online. I could be looking at a project in Papua New guinea, or I could be looking at one in Indonesia or South Africa or Chile. It used to be that all I could see was the American starchitects. You know, the most famous people would make it into the publications. But now I can see fantastic work that's happening all around the world. And you realize it really is a global community. And it just, you know, I always make the analogy with music. It used to be the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. They were the ones that made it to the top. There's this huge pyramid and they Were on top of the pyramid and everybody was one layer down from there. Well now even in music as it is in architecture and with painting as well, or so many different creative endeavors, if you do a good painting, the world can see it. It's not that hard to get it out so people can see it. Whereas before you had to work your way up through the hierarchy. If you design a good building, the world will find out about it. If you, you write a beautiful song, people will hear about it. It'll just, you know, you've had that experience, I'm sure where somebody sends you a song, you can't believe it. It's just the most beautiful song or video or something. So it's changed, it's changed the way I think we experience culture. It's not, you don't have to go to it. It sort of comes to you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's been interesting for me to see recently there was a little bit of controversy in the Portland Press Herald about the way that we put art out into the world and the way, and the way that some art galleries want to stay with the old art gallery model and some art galleries are proceeding forward in a different way of putting art out there. Do you see any friction in the architecture world about sort of the desire to stay with what was and the approach that what used to be that sort of pinnacle where you work your way up and you have to do so many years of something before you have the right to, I don't know, design a beautiful building or get credit for it. Is there any sort of friction between the old guard and the new guard in the architecture world?

Scott Simons:

Yes, there definitely is. They always say architecture is an older man's profession. And I actually think I got a lot more work once I started having gray hairs because there's a lot of money involved. Buildings are expensive to build and they're complex. So I think there's just more comfort with someone that's had a lot of experience, especially with public buildings where there's a lot at stake, public money, larger scale projects and things like that. And when I was younger I thought it was. I was very frustrated by that. I felt like I had the juice, I had the ideas, I had plenty of motivation and skill. But now that I'm older, I can understand why if you're going to trust a 30 year old architect with $20 million to make sure the building is perfect and everything, that's a risk. It might be a safe risk with certain architects. Frank Lloyd Wright was extremely successful at a very early age. But most of us, it takes a long time to learn how to put buildings together well and to make sure that they perform and that they're inspiring. It's a very complex business, so it's not uncommon that really good architects are older.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Scott, after listening to our conversation, I'm sure people will want to learn more about the work that you're doing. So how can they do that? Do you have a website?

Scott Simons:

We do. We have a website, simonsarchitects.com and a fun way to follow what's going on is on our Facebook because we post a couple of times a week we post information and that can range from construction photos from a project that's under construction, to new publications, to new awards that we've received for work, to individual things that are happening with different people in the studio. So that's a fun way to follow too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, very good. I appreciate your coming in and talking to us today. I encourage people to find out more about your work with Scott Simons Architects. We've been speaking with Scott Simons, who is the principal at Scott Simons Architects and also designer of many buildings around this area and I'm sure beyond this area. So thanks so much for coming in. It's been a really interesting conversation.

Scott Simons:

You're welcome. It has been very interesting. Thank you.

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Dr. Lisa Belisle:

here on Love Maine Radio. It's always a great joy to have guests back in the studio who have spent time with us before because we all know that life is an evolution, and to have an ongoing conversation with someone is often even more valuable than an initial conversation. So today our conversation is with Mark Bessear, who is the director of the Portland Museum of Art. Mark has been a longtime friend of Maine magazine Maine Home Design, and has done quite a lot in the community. We're fortunate that you're willing to come in and have another conversation with us.

Mark Bessire:

Appreciate it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's worth a listen.

Mark Bessire:

I appreciate it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have a lot of good things to say.

Mark Bessire:

Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Mark, you've been working with the Portland Museum of Art for how many years now?

Mark Bessire:

You know, it's almost. It'll be six March 1, 2015.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's a, that's impressive.

Mark Bessire:

It's. It's one of those things where it feels like it's been a short time, and then some days it feels like it's been a long time. But I still pinch myself as I just, I think I have one of the great jobs in the state of Maine, which is representing great artists and great traditions. And our museum is so fabulous, and I love getting the opportunity to work with our members, with visitors from schools. It's really, as you said, actually it's a privilege that I get to serve our community as the director.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's also enough time now that you have been able to kind of sink into the role. You're no longer new, you've seen what things work, what things need to change, and you've been there for quite a lot of people changing.

Mark Bessire:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me what, what is going on with the museum these days that kind of reflects this ongoing transition that you've been able to be a part of?

Mark Bessire:

It's a really good question. And I've actually, you know, I got my master's in art history and I had fellowships, etc. And Whitney and went abroad for a while working in Africa. But I've always been very interested in management. And one of the things that I found recently in the last few years is everyday management is being ready for change at all moments and being ready for opportunities to reveal themselves and to have the right team to grab that opportunity. As fast as you can. Our cfo, Alaina Murdoch and I talk a lot about museums and Moneyball, which is a book that I love and she has great respect for. And we're interested in data, but what we're really interested in is having the right team that sees something reveal itself and then go for it in that opportunity space and being sure there's time in your everyday kind of administrative work to be ready for that surprise. One great surprise was the number seven sculpture. We were considering the number seven by Robert Indiana to put in front of our building for a long time, and then suddenly one appeared and within six months a donor made a challenge and we went after it and the whole team was all hands on deck. And it's hard to gauge those long term and short term goals, but always knowing that you've got to be ready for anything that offers it to go for it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You recently also did some work with the Winslow Homer Studio. And that was a big project for you and has been successful.

Mark Bessire:

That was a huge project. I think that was in many ways a really great watershed. And it's something that Dan o', Leary, the previous director, began and really I think he put forth a pretty great vision of the relationship of the Homer Studio to the museum. If you tie all the little pieces, I kind of have a talk. I give. It's a stump speech about Homer's the DNA of the PMA. And so we're founded in 1882, he shows up in 1883. He has John Calvin Stevens redesign the studio. John Calvin Stevens was a founder of our museum when homer dies in 1910. In 1911, John Calvin Stevens first museum building connected to McClellan House opens. And then when the Payson family gives their Homer collection to the Portland Society of Art, that transforms us into the Portland Museum of Art. And suddenly we have the Payson Building. So when there was an opportunity to bring the Homer Studio back into the fold of the museum, it tied our two key people, which is Winslow Homer and John Calvin Stevens. The other piece is. It's very hard and a labor of love to run something as special as the studio. It's an incredible experience, but one that's really only made for 10 or 12 people. It's not like Disney art, where you just plow people in. I love Disney, but it's just not that environment. And you can go to Giverny, which is Monet's wonderful place, but there's thousands and thousands of people. It's no longer that intimate experience. And I think that we're More like going. If you go out to see Ghost Ranch or Abiquiu and the o' Keeffe Museum, this is kind of like that experience. And there's very few places where you can still go today and see a major artist site, studio, home, that changed their entire art. Because when Homer comes here, everything shifts. You know, I think his best art was made when he came to Maine. You know, the narrative goes away, the figures start to disappear, and the new religion is nature. And he's really pounding on the door to the 20th century, and I don't even think he knows it at the time. And I think you can go out there, see the studio and experience nature the way he did. It's pretty incredible. I get pretty passionate. It was a great project. We put a lot of effort into it. And I think now the great thing is we've made a little bit of a transition from focusing on, I think, the student studio. Our big focus right now is what we kind of say is kind of the mothership, which is our wonderful buildings in our collection. While we spent so much time restoring the studio and raising funds for it, we weren't spending as much time on our collection. And we're in a really wonderful project this, the collection reinstallation. So in 2016, we're going to shut down for about six weeks, and we'll reopen with a whole museum rehung from head to toe. Over time. The galleries have. They look wonderful, but they're very much kind of greatest hits. And the curator team we have now is putting together a full narrative of the entire museum collection. And each gallery will be based on thematic representations which ties to the collection. And even if you come over now, you'll see some little spots. We just rehung the European galleries to do some tests. The second floor gallery has this amazing gallery, kind of. We were looking for a gallery where if you were coming for the first time to Maine and you didn't know Maine had this great art traditions, you'd walk in and you'd see Homer, Henri Hopper, Marguerite Zorach, William Zorak, Andy Wyeth. You'd see all that work and go, oh, my gosh, I didn't know all those artists worked in Maine. And if you're a member and you come in, it's like comfort foods. It's like all your favorite artists in one room. And then you walk out to the museum and see the rest of it. We weren't really pushing that narrative. That's our best foot forward. So that's a Big effort for us right now.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I like the way that you're describing a visit to the museum as being, as being a narrative, as being a story, almost talking about it as playing a song that there's, there's sort of a relationship between sort of what you do at the beginning of the song, what you do at the end of the song. You need to tie these things together. But you also have to know that people are going to come in at different parts of the song.

Mark Bessire:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And they're going to hear things their own way. That's an interesting challenge.

Mark Bessire:

It is a real challenge, actually. And it's, you know, museums are. There have been a series of articles even more recently about visitor experience, audience engagement. And in Dallas now there's a real experiment about going free and what it means. And they're collecting data, you exchange data and then you get points, which gives you free parking and discounts in the street store. But really what they're doing is trying to get data to learn about visitors. And in the museum world, there's kind of a wait and see if this is the right model. Some museums inherently have a demographic where going free makes sense and some do not. You know, it depends on your visitation and how much you're depending on earned revenue. But museums are finally catching up to social media. And actually I think our social media program is very strong. It's building. I don't think, I think we're getting ready for the future because I don't think, as many people know, we have this whole social media machine running and it's a good investment now so that as it builds, we'll be ready for that next generation to address the audience directly through social media because it's much more participatory. And so what you'll find as we're redoing the collection, we're thinking more about the notion of learning than old school education. So instead of doing three part program, come in and learn about every Thursday at 12 about the Portland Museum of Arts collection. You're going to come in and you're going to have many other points of opportunities to have a staff pick come in and hear. One staff member could be security, could be administrator talking about a work of art. You could have a curatorial lecture, you could attach, talk to your phone and listen. You could be, you know, responding through social media. There's so many new entry points to the art world and museums are like barges. We're really slow to get it, but once we get it, we're full steam ahead. And so we're just getting into that mode. It's an exciting time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm thinking about my eighth grader, who I will sit next to her while she's doing homework, and she's pulling up something on the Gilded Age, and she is finding a picture of children who are in workhouses, and she's. And it is just like that. I mean, it's not. You don't start at the beginning of a workbook and move to the end. Instead, you find something and you kind of follow that theme for a little while, and then it takes you over here. It takes you over here. Not unlike the Internet.

[Unidentified voice]:

Absolutely.

Mark Bessire:

Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So, again, that is an interesting challenge to know where these entry points are and how you can help people reach them or how you can propel people forward from them. How's the process?

Mark Bessire:

You know, I think we're still learning. Museums are really good at collecting data and getting members. And what we now need to do is be better at listening to our visitors. You know, what are they interested in? What are the things that we can provide them at the same time while we're driving social media and having a conversation? I think museums are doing so well these days because it's still one of the few places you can go with an unmediated environment in which literally, you can have these points of opportunities to talk or to listen or talk about your experience in the museum, but you can still just walk up to a work of art, and it's you and that work of art. You can choose to read the label or just have that visual experience. There are very few unmediated experiences left in this world. And granted the moment you walk into a museum, it's slightly mediated because we're an organization, we have a mission, we have members. But it's one of the last places where you can go and find that quiet moment, look at a work of art and walk away. A symphony would be like that. If you're going in and you sit down in your chair and you're there to listen or to go to Portland Stage and sit down, you know, we feel very strongly that we still provide a unique experience and that no matter how digital we go and how much we're going to create those opportunities for people to approach us, the key experience is still you and the work of art.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

as you're talking about this, I'm thinking about some of my own museum experiences and being up in Rockland and seeing the photography of Paul Caponigo.

Mark Bessire:

Yeah, beautiful.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And really, really impacted by that in such a way that it almost like shifted the way that I was thinking for some period of time. And I that does go back to the actual impact of a face to face encounter with art, which is something that you can't really get off the computer.

Mark Bessire:

You can, I mean I think you can find entry points in the computer and find interest. And I think that's why museums have done well is because our websites are basically portal to drive interest. I mean clearly a lot of people just want to find out when you're open and how to get there and where to park and we're always going to provide that information. But you know, I know the library here has done such an amazing job and I can't remember I gave a talk on the death of the library in the museum. You know, 15, 20 years ago we were all going to be dinosaurs. And look what the library's done. You know, they've tripled their attendance, they've opened themselves up. The book is as strong as ever. It might be in a different form and one people might not love so much, but people are still reading. And the library, like the museum, I think is becoming much more of a community and collaborative environment where we have our hardcore books and reading, you know, art and viewing, but at the same time we don't have the capacity to compete in the entertainment industry for advertising. So the way in which we build audiences is we share audiences through collaboration. So if we work with the telling room or we work with space, or we work with Mecca or usm, they're sharing our audience, we're sharing their audience and we're broadening our capacity to grow. We don't have the money to be in the advertising arena. I'd love to have every PMA show on every bus and every location to remind you to come to the museum, just like the symphony or the stage. But the way in which we're finding a place for us is to collaborate and partner with other organizations. And sometimes it's a young organization to take space. They have a different demographic than the Portland Museum of Art. The space would love to have more of our demographic and we'd love to have more of their demographic. So why compete when we can share audiences and we can have some of our audiences learn more about space through the partnership? And then we can send a group down to a special space event and then they can get themselves attached to some other groups that they couldn't normally find. And I think we're very fortunate in Maine and in Portland where. Where the organizations aren't competing. When one of us does well, we all do well. I would love to. You know, watching Colby College Museum of Art is the greatest thing that could happen to Maine, having that collection grow. If someone's going to come to Maine to go to Colby to see that collection, they're probably going to come see us. They're going to go to Bowdoin, they might go to Bates. That's good for all of us. If the library is doing really well, that bodes well for the Maine Historical Society, you know, and I think there's an ecology in Maine that's very healthy.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It seems to me that with this shifting, with this moving, with this moving away from the old guard, just like moving away from straightforward print media or straightforward library, the way it used to exist, you know, a depository of books or straightforward, here's a museum, go look at a painting. I think there's some intense feelings that have arisen and the sense of who owns the art, who owns the art, who has the right to make the art, who has the right to determine whether the art is valuable. And it has created some strong feelings in the community. There was a recent article actually about art collector Main in the Portland Press Herald, which has created quite an interesting forum. And some intense things have come about as a result of this. So there's a quote from former gallery owner in Portland who was on the art scene for 15 years. And he says, with regard to the Portland Art Gallery, it's not curated. It's based on your ability to pay. Most people who come to town to visit in July or August will see this bright well lit space in the Old Port and think, these guys must be somebody. They are trying to become the face of Maine art. But their artists may not be the best and the brightest, they just have the ability to pay. And that to me, speaks to something. I feel like there's a deeper hurt. I feel we've had artists on our show. I've interviewed artists for the magazine. I know artists in my medical practice. I feel like there's a deeper hurt, that there's something precious that we're trying to put out into the world and somehow it's not being valued. And because this hasn't been working for such a long time, the standard gallery or the standard museum, people are angry and upset and not sure what the future holds.

Mark Bessire:

It's definitely a sensitive issue. And I think, you know, the notion of who gets to show art, where they get to show it, who gets picked, who doesn't pick, who sells well, who doesn't sell well is really difficult. And there's no. It is. You know, you say there's a difference between art and science. You know, the art world is definitely a work of art. It is not. Not a science. And I think that there's multiple ways to enter into, so to speak, the art world. You know, there's the self taught artist, there's the over academic artist, there's the opportunist artist, there's the artist at the right place at the right time. There's the quote unquote, naturally gifted artist. There's the notion that artists should. Shouldn't make too much money. There's all these. I think artists have one job that more people put more baggage on. That's their own baggage about art. And it's not the artist's baggage. Most people come to art because it just was their kind of chosen field. Just like you might come to radio or someone comes to being a doctor. That's why they're artists. But there's something that people have a visceral opinion about what is good art, what is not, who should be an artist, what it takes to be an artist, and what's the criteria for becoming a good artist. The classic is, do you have to be really nice to be a good artist? You know, it's that minutiae of. I look at art and I really often the biography is interesting, but it's one element. If the biography is relevant to the making, to the piece that's actually provided, then it's relevant. Sometimes the biography has nothing to do with the type of art that someone's producing. And I think the art world has become particularly now because of the hype in terms of the values. If you look at the high end of the art market, it really is very tied into wealth management and major, major gifts from major people to major museums. It's a moment, and people look at it as being incredibly different. But if you look historically, you can go back to different periods. You know, 20 years ago, the art market had a big moment. You know, at the turn of the century, Americans were taking art from Europe and bringing it here. Before that, kings and queens were buying art. Before that, the church was a major player. There's an incredible longevity of the art world, and it doesn't necessarily have a specific trend that you can follow, but you can guarantee it will always surprise you. So in this time, I think it is so hard to enter into this thing we call the art world, Even though I don't really think it's so amorphic. I don't think there is an art world. People like to define that there's an art world as though it's a conspiracy or an establishment. It's so balkanized that there is no one centralized government deciding what is great art or not. And that's one of the reasons why I love our museum and it used to be, I think we're very proud to be, I think, aspire to be a great regional museum. That used to be a patronizing title for a museum. I like it because I think that we have a fantastic local story and local history that is part of a national conversation. Our region is relevant locally and also important nationally, and that's why Maine is so important. But in terms of looking more specifically at the context you're providing about artists in the marketplace, every artist has to make their own choice how to enter the art market. Whether you're going to make your own art for yourself and that's good enough and have another job, or you're going to pursue a gallery career, or you're going to pay for marketing to get your work out there. Those are all different entry points into getting what you want. I'm not sure any one is better than another one. It's so hard to get your art out there that any mode that an artist chooses, that's their choice. And I'm actually fine with that. I mean, it's up to the artist to make the choice, how they're going to deliver their art to an audience.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Mark, you have children.

Mark Bessire:

Two kids.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And how old are they?

Mark Bessire:

14 and 16.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do they have any interest in anything artistic?

Mark Bessire:

Yes, I think it's having grown up, what we do is go see museums or cultural organizations wherever we go, and we do a fair amount of travel together. So, indeed, what I'm wondering is, with

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

my own children, whether they choose to come back to Maine or not. And I know that you, originally, you're from New York. From New York, yes. So you. You may be fine with your children going to New York to live.

Mark Bessire:

My family's still there, so we're there

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

a lot, so that is fine. But it also. And my family is from Maine. I don't know where my children will end up. Two of them are in college, one is younger. But I would like them to be able to come back to Maine, to have the opportunity to be what they would like to do, to be. To do so. If they are artists, I would love to have them come back to a place where it is possible to engage in art, engage in music, and make a living at it. So I think for me, seeing that so many people feel passionately about art, they value it at the pma, they want to go to Mecca, they want to become artists themselves. And that this exists, there's a groundswell, and it's an ongoing thing since the time of Winslow Homer and before. That gives me great hope.

Mark Bessire:

I think there's great hope. I think in the long run, the most productive conversation that we can have for the art scene in Maine is thinking about broadening the base of collectors. And collectors is kind of collectors is like a word. Oh, I'm not a collector. What I really mean is people who want to have art in their home these days, you can buy a postage and frame it for the same price. You could buy a nice small work on open studio night. So buy a nice poster at a museum for 40 bucks, go have it framed, and before you know, costs more to frame it, go out and look at works of art. They don't have to be expensive. Buy a small drawing, get it framed, put it on your wall. I think the real conversation around town and around Maine has to be about breaking the boundaries between the experience of entering into a space where art is available for sale and the purchase and helping artists and dealers and create the relationships and moments where we can attract more people to purchase art. The only way the great art of Maine will perpetually be great is if we continue to have and support living artists. And to me, that's much more important than any conversation we can have. And that's one of the reasons why we do the Biennial and like the conversation. You're talking about. The Biennial always sparks a lot of emotions, whether it's the Carnegie International, it's the Whitney Biennial. Everybody loves to go, and most people love to critique it, but they still want to see what's up. And the bottom line is we're looking for the best possible work to show, and often people find fault at it. A Biennial is an imperfect be. It will always be. It's just what it is. But we still think it's relevant to our community to do a Biennial. And I think, again, it comes back to personal choice. But I think anytime we can get more people to be out there thinking seriously about buying art, we all win.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I appreciate your thoughtful answer to that question. I know it's a complicated thing to kind of wrap your wrap one's mind around. For me, it still does come back to what art does for us and the fact that art inspires us, that we actually feel something, it actually can contribute to wellness, or maybe not.

Mark Bessire:

Yeah, I think it can.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But hopefully it can contribute to wellness. So it's actually important to have great art, whether it's in our home or in a museum or even expanding out into the community at large, because it does something good for. For us. Your thoughts?

Mark Bessire:

I think it does. I mean, I think that, you know, in particular, I think contemporary art, which I think can be a little bit more difficult to approach sometimes, because the contemporary art world today, again, whether it's conceptual, it's performative, it's performative based photography, it's drawing, it's a new photo process. The wonderful thing about postmodernism is that it opened up all these possibilities for new media, changing styles and trends. And it's harder to read, I think, for the casual visitor of contemporary art, because there's so much information and it's really much more about a conversation. Contemporary art is much more, in a way, engaging traditional art that had a narrative base or had a perspective, or it looked historical, or it was about a moment you can sit and front of and really read in many ways, the intention of the artist. And there's depth to it. There's always farther you can go. But contemporary art is much more conversational. It asks a lot more of the visitor. You really have to take your time and figure out why did they choose that piece of wood to put it together, why is that part of the canvas finished and this one's not. Every aspect of that work of art had an intention, but it's a little bit harder to access unless you're willing to take the Time to have that conversation. And I think in many ways, you know, we said. We talked about wellness a little bit before, but I think there's a component in the arts and culture where wellness has a role to play. And I think that's going to the theater and watching the stage and seeing dialogue. I think it's going to symphony and listening to music. I think it's going to the library and participate in conversations about books. I think it's going to the museum and taking your time and slowing down and looking at works of art for a visual response and that conversational aspect. And when you go to these places, you're going to places where inherently there's a social aspect. And so it's looking at a specific part of culture, but it's also participating in a greater social fabric. And so Free Fridays to me is like kind of the ultimate wellness moment where you can go alone, you can go with a buddy, you can take a date, you can take your family, you can see a museum, you can go to a gallery, you can shop, you can grab a bite to eat, all of those things. In about five square blocks in Portland, in every other block, you're going to find a friend you haven't seen for a week or two months. And there's a wellness to that whole culture of getting out. You know, that interaction with people, that unexpected sighting of an old friend, a conversation with a friend over a work of art, trying a new restaurant, seeing somebody, knowing the waiter or waitress. There's that whole social interaction that I think the cultural location, I think now is a place where that can take place. And I think as we talked about libraries changing and particularly museums, we are becoming more social spaces. And as we're developing a campus master plan, the one thing we recommend recognize is we love all three of our buildings. And they're, you know, 1802, 1910, 1983. Claphouse next door is 1840, and the studio is 1883. But we do not have the spaces to provide our growing membership and audiences for social interaction. The Great hall was actually built to be free, not to have a store and not to have a cafe. So we're placing into a space a store and cafe, which are now expected in every museum. And we now have events with our contemporaries. We have 300 people at an event. We can't even hold them in the museum because we have too many members. We want to do collaborative events where we might get messy. Museums really don't like messy events. We need a space where we can come together and Maybe make food, because food's becoming such an art form. Form, but we don't have that in our space. So as we think about the future of our museum, we need to not only think about the museum and the basics of storage and art study room to show works of art to classrooms and education. We need more space for collaborations and partnerships. And I think the library has shown us how positive an experience you can transform a building. We all dreaded going in, but loved the experience. Opening up, making it more transparent and making it a community based institution has changed, you know, Monument Square in Portland forever. And I think the museum wants a piece of that change. Luckily, we're not in a hurry. We've got great resources in terms of our properties, but we're trying to think about how a museum should look like in 25 years and how do we build out to that model so that we can meet the needs of our members and our visitors.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It really makes me happy that you have so many members of your Contemporaries group, which is a younger crowd, that you can't actually fit them in your space anymore. That's not a bad problem to have.

Mark Bessire:

We even have six members from the Contemporaries group are now on our board. And one of the fortunate things, and I know cultural organizations in particular, very interested in the intergenerational kind of exchange because kind of the old school cultural organizations are worried about the future. And we have faced that by putting a lot of time and energy in building our Contemporaries group. And we have a wonderful steering committee. It's really run by the group, which is also that kind of engagement with the audience. What does a young group want out of the museum? They help us create the programs that they want, and then we create the space to do that. And in many ways, it's kind of the farm team for our future, and that's a real asset for us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Mark, I know that there are multiple different ways that people can be a part of the museum that can support the museum. I know that you have the Contemporaries group, you have your director's circle. People can just. They can become less than that, more than that. There's lots of different ways. How do people find out about the Portland Museum of Art?

Mark Bessire:

I mean, I hate to be traditional, but you can definitely go to the PortlandMuseum. You know, go to our website, which is fresh and ready for you to come. Enter, and please go there and learn more about the museum. Again, our social media platforms are growing, so find us on every social media platform and follow us and help us be the museum that you want to have. And the other thing about access is we are incredibly fortunate to have free Fridays. And Cyrus and Patty Hagee as well as ll be support Free Fridays. And in many ways, it's the greatest gift the museum, I think, gives to the state of Maine. If we do roughly, you know, 130, 160,000 people in a year. Right now, 30, 35% of those people come in free on Friday nights. So that's, you know, again, roughly 25 to 35,000 people have a free experience at the museum. And, you know, to have donors and supporters like, you know, the Hagen and also L.L. bean, it changes our environment. We've got some great. Maine is losing very few corporations, but the ones that are staying put, including Unum, are so supportive of our community, and they should be really recognized. And I don't want to, you know, have this being advertising, but it's really important to recognize those organizations and families that are supporting the arts in Maine, because without them, we could not be as strong as we are.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I know that Maine Magazine and Maine Home Design feel very strongly about their support also of the Portland Museum.

Mark Bessire:

Absolutely. We love to partner with you all and really do feel that in some ways, we share a vision of communicating to new audiences and broader audiences that the identity of Maine is based in tradition and old culture, but that we are so, so alert to whether it's farming, food, issues of the ocean, education, cultural organizations. We're actually in a really great position to lead the country in so many ways. I find it phenomenal that we have so little bureaucracy that you can get things done here. You don't need to wait for someone to tell you it's okay. In Maine, if you've got a good idea, you can go do it. And if you really want to go see someone, you can. It's probably one of the few states where, if you had a great idea. I don't want to have everyone call Senator, our senators King and Collins, but if you had a great idea, you can go talk to your legislators. It's not that hard. Things can get done here because I think there's such a thin bureaucracy. And if you really have a great idea, you can accomplish great things.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Mark, it's been a pleasure to speak with you.

Mark Bessire:

Thank you, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've been talking with Mark Bazir, who is the director of the Portland Museum of Art, and I really. I look forward to seeing all the wonderful things that you'll be bringing into the Portland community as things continue to evolve.

Mark Bessire:

Please come visit.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine radio show number 174, architecture and art. Our guests have included Scott Simons and Mark Bessear. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on itunes. Follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Architecture and Art show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.