In the November copy of Maine Women’s Magazine, SPEEDWELL’s managing director, Annika Earley, wrote about the legacy which the gallery hopes to create for women artists in Maine. Read below or find it here (pg 26-27):
The art world has a major equity problem. Only 13 percent of represented artists in U.S. museums are women, and only 15 percent of represented artists in U.S. museums are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. I could share a litany of statistics pointing to gender and racial inequities in museums, galleries, art auctions, and every other aspect of the art world. Women have been and continue to be excluded from the art historical canon. We at SPEEDWELL Contemporary, a nonprofit, artist-run space in Portland, have had enough.
SPEEDWELL was founded in 2015 by Jocelyn Lee, a powerhouse photographer, educator, and arts advocate who calls Maine home. With her stellar guidance, we’ve mount- ed over 30 group and solo exhibitions including works by Katarina Weslien, Abby Shahn, Adriane Herman, Juliet Karelsen, Alison Hildreth, Barbara Sullivan, Honour Mack, and Andrea Sulzer, among many others. The core curatorial framework of SPEEDWELL has always been to support artists who have made a lifelong commitment to their work. But in the spring of this year, we made it definitive: we support women who have made a lifelong commitment to their creative work.
Donna McNeil, Executive Director of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, considers SPEEDWELL projects to be vital for several reasons, explaining that “SPEEDWELL is singular in its mission to support women, diversity, and excellence. Their adamant solidarity with all women, but particularly celebrating the mature practitioner, sets a standard which pushes back against the predominant patriarchal muse- um/gallery system.”
We challenge the definition of the “mid-career” artist, a category defined by career achievements that are, for most artists, largely inaccessible. There are countless artists who have worked on their craft for decades but do not fall into the “mid-career” label, an important stepping stone in the current art world system. I remember reading an interview with Lee Bontecou in the Chicago Reader when I was in graduate school. Her attitude towards the art world, a world she is often described as having “suddenly vanished from” in the 1960s, was a revelation: “I just moved because I wanted to work, and also I was having a child and all kinds of things. My father was living with us at one point. A lot of things change in your life. And then I was teaching. I hadn’t backed away. You can’t be more involved in the arts than teach- ing. You’re working with other brains, you know. I was right smack in Brooklyn. People say, you dodged the art world. Well, heck, they were the art world. I was the art world. I didn’t dodge it.”
Bontecou’s notion of being in the art world wherever she was perfectly articulates the urgency of SPEEDWELL’s mis- sion of celebrating, elevating, and creating a lasting legacy for women artists. We pursue this goal in three categories: exhibitions, residencies, and our archive.
This spring our gallery featured a stunning solo exhibition by Katarina Weslien, and it will be showcasing two exciting group exhibitions this fall. Weslien’s exhibition, titled What did you smell when you were away?, opened our public pro- gramming after a year of COVID closures and delays, in mid-April.
The three projects included in Weslien’s exhibition were a collaborative series of photographs titled Walking Kailash: An Invitational Project that featured photographs of microscopic images of water collected by 20 artists from around the world, eight dazzling, large-scale jacquard weavings depicting empty temporary dwellings at the Kumbh Mela festival in India, and the Reciprocity Project’s collage-like pieces of delicate water stains and protective silk fabrics.
Witchgrass, a group exhibition featuring the work of Josephine Chase, Karen Gelardi, Hilary Irons, and Juliet Karelsen, opened on September 10th and runs through October 30th. Each of the artists responds to the intricacies, resiliency, metaphor, fantasy, and spirituality they observe in a vast botanical ecosystem through colorful and richly textured embroidery, sculpture, drawing, and painting.
We will close our year with tenera, a group exhibition featuring Leeah Joo, Crystalle LaCouture, Cindy Rizza, Barbara Sullivan, and Andrea Sulzer. Tenera features work that centers around care, craft, and color. Each of the artists exhibits a quality of tenderness in their work: some work with tenderness as content while others express it through their delicate and precise handling of their media. The exhibition will be on view from November 12th to December 30th, 2021.
We recognize that for an artist to make a lifelong commitment to creative work requires the precious resources of time and space. We established our residency program in 2019 to give artists room to make that commitment. The residencies, ranging from 4 to 8 weeks, are unrestricted: all we ask is that the artist make use of the space in the way that best serves them during their time at SPEEDWELL.
Our summer resident, the multitalented Rachel Gloria Adams, is a textile designer and painter living in Portland. She recently completed dynamic murals for the new Children’s
Museum & Theater in Portland and released the Summer 2021 collection for her clothing and home textile company, TACHEE, while in residence at SPEEDWELL. Our residency is nomination-based and selections for the following year are made each October.
Katarina Weslien, who was in residence at SPEEDWELL in 2019, feels that her experience at SPEEDWELL was an important part of the development of her recent work: “When I thought I reached the end of a body of work some years ago, Jocelyn Lee walked into my studio. She said, after observing photographs on my wall, ‘I think these can be bigger, and why not try some different paper? And by the way, the gallery is empty over the summer, and the Bakery Photo Collective a sliding door away.’ So started my two summer residencies at Speedwell. Without the invitation, imagination, and generosity, my recent work would not have ended in large jacquard weavings that eventually became a recent exhibition. Time and open space to bump into oneself are rare. SPEEDWELL’s generous offer of space and time transformed and focused my work, and for that, I’m grateful.”
Our newest path to our mission goals is the creation of an archive including exhibition catalogs and documentaries. We want to craft an enduring and tangible legacy for the artists we support, and documentation is critical for this endeavor.
It is our goal to provide artists with as many opportunities for visibility and support as possible, and we hope that the publication of a documentary and catalog with a critical essay will meet this goal in the most meaningful way possible. Maine is home to an incredible number of historic and contemporary women who make art. We are thrilled to begin building an archive that articulates their significant contributions to the visual culture of Maine and beyond. Our first catalog, featuring the work of Katarina Weslien, will be published in November.
SPEEDWELL gets its name from well-wishes one would extend to a traveler before a long journey.
The notion of moving forward with strength and hope feels especially important today. Charlie Hewitt’s illuminated Hopeful sits atop of our gallery for a reason. This is the ethos we are fostering: we meet artists at their needs in as many ways as possible, we celebrate and elevate the work of incredible women, and we are hopeful that our efforts will move us towards a more equitable art world.
For more information, visit www. speedwellprojects.com or email info@ speedwellprojects.com. •