art honors : 2005 presenter comments

Below you will find the remarks of the each of the presenters for the 2005 MECA Art Honors Gala -- John Rohman, Anne d’Harnoncourt and Carl Little.

John Rohman, CEO of WBRC Architects and Chair of the Creative Economy Council

Presenting the award for Leadership in Arts Philanthropy to Governor John E. Baldacci

The interest that John Elias Baldacci has with the weaving of Arts and Economic Development started well before he became Governor Baldacci. As a US Congressman, he was consistently supportive of the goals of the Maine Arts Commission and recognized the valuable resource Maine has with is painters, potters, weavers, book authors and the entire arts community.

Now, of course, he has taken that support to an entirely different level. With the formation of the Creative Economy Council, Maine has been placed on the forefront of this very exciting economic development initiative. The media, including of course, very frequent internet spots, has been eager to promote this concept.

However, rarely does this strong interest rise to the Governor of a state. At a recent meeting in Washington, I am sure my pride was showing when a report from the National Governor’s Association highlighted innovative and exciting portions from Governor’s “State of the State Addresses” – top on the list was the State of Maine and Governor Baldacci’s endorsement and recognition of the role arts play in historic downtowns, youth retention and the economy.

As further recognition of the very successful Blaine House Conference on the Creative Economy, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies awarded the Maine Arts Commission its highly competitive “Innovation Award”. Governor Baldacci was sited as the force behind this exciting event.

With the long history and positive impact the arts play in the fabric of our communities it’s certainly not a stretch to see these as part of Maine’s “natural” resources as well as infrastructure for this next economy. The Governor’s support for both the MidCoast Magnet initiative and a Creative Economy Incubator in Portland are two more great examples of this understanding.

Please welcome to the podium a true supporter for the arts – Governor John Baldacci.

Remarks by Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director, Philadelphia Museum of Art were read by MECA trustee David Driskell

Presenting the Award for Achievement as a Visual Artist to Andrew Wyeth

Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to present this award in person to Andrew Wyeth, an extraordinary artist I have admired for over 40 years, whose profound, creative engagement with the landscape and people of Maine and of Pennsylvania has deepened into a complex and powerful visual meditation which has us all in its grip.

To present this Award from the Maine College of Art at an event which supports the College’s work with young artists in communities across the state gives it special meaning, for me and I am sure for Andrew Wyeth, for whom making art has been a vocation, avocation and passion for over seven decades.


Artists at any stage of their career draw upon three vital ingredients as they approach their work—each time they pick up a pencil, a palette of colors, a dry-brush. The first is their encounter over time with admired artists of the past—in Wyeth’s case,
Dürer and Rembrandt, Homer and Eakins, just to name four inspirations. Other art lovers envy painters their ability to brush aside the centuries as they confront what seems like a fresh solution to a problem they’ve been tackling in their own studios. Despite his inimitable, deeply distinctive style, Andrew Wyeth is generous in his admiration for, and abiding interest in, other painters’ work.

The second ingredient is the artist’s encounter with the world around them—the lay of the land, the quality of light, the faces and characters of their neighbors, the objects they treasure and in which they find stored-up meaning. Coastal Maine and Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley are Wyeth country indeed. We see the bare slope of a frosty hill or the flutter of a curtain in a sea breeze and Wyeth has been there before us, setting his stamp on our memories before they are shaped and reshaped by experience.

Like Cézanne’s beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence, or the Ampurdan plain of Dali’s working dreams, the rocks and windswept houses of Maine are icons for us now because Wyeth loves them and puts so much of himself into painting them.

And the third ingredient and most potent, is the artist’s own inner reserves. The talent, imagination and the relentless drive to set the vision down on paper (or wood panel): to get it right. The inner reserves, the wellsprings of Andrew Wyeth’s art, are inexhaustible.

Wyeth’s immersion in his art is complete, his dedication to his craft and to his inner vision is passionate, and his energy is prodigious. As the Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art preparing, together with our colleagues at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta,
a retrospective exhibition for next fall and spring, I can only marvel at those inner resources that enable Andrew Wyeth to absorb all that experience and yet tackle each new picture as if it were his first.


Andrew Wyeth sets a remarkable example to us all—most especially to young artists—of a life lived deeply, informed by a keenness of observation of both the exterior world he loves and the interior worlds it evokes for him, and an unmatched determination to share his lifetime of knowledge, observation and excitement with us through his art.

May we all find that creative excitement irresistible as we salute one of the greatest artists of our time, and as the Maine College of Art presents Andrew Wyeth with its 10th Annual Award for Achievement for a Visual Artist. Andy, we love you!

Carl Little, Art Historian, Author and Director of Marketing and Communications for the Maine Community Foundation

Presenting the Award for Leadership in Arts Education to Ashley Bryan

In 1990 I wrote to Down East Magazine to propose that I write a profile of Ashley Bryan. Few assignments have given me so much pleasure and, frankly, turned out so well. I went out to Little Cranberry Island to interview Bryan at his home, and here are some of the things I learned about his life:

Ashley Bryan was born in Harlem in 1923 and raised in the Bronx, the second of six children of parents who were originally from Antigua in the West Indies. The home was filled with birds and books borrowed from the public library. Bryan’s father was a printer of decorative greeting cards. His mother loved to sing. She also made dresses and did crochet and embroidery work. When she died, her scissors were given to Ashley, who used them to cut the collages for Beautiful Blackbird, which won the Coretta Scott King award for illustration in 2003.

Ashley learned not to be afraid of being creative while attending a WPA-administered school in the Bronx. He won an art scholarship to Cooper Union, but World War II interrupted his studies. He served in a black battalion of the then-segregated U.S. Army, eventually assigned to a transportation corps that took part in the Normandy invasion. After the war he completed his degree at Cooper Union and enrolled at Columbia University on the GI Bill as a philosophy major, “trying,” he once remarked, “to understand why man chooses war.” He returned to Europe in 1950 on a Fulbright Scholarship, to further his art studies in France and Germany.

While in Europe he discovered the cellist Pablo Casals. In 1950 Casals had begun performing in France, just over the border from his native Catalonia. “I would draw from the musicians rehearsing,” Bryan recalls. “I was trying to find my way in painting. It was through my drawing of Casals that I got the first sense of momentum, of spirit, of feeling that was my own in painting and drawing. And that’s what I have built on ever since: a sense of rhythm, direction, and the interplay of form and motion in ensembles.” At the end of each series he would send Casals a small hand-drawn book made in the tradition of the medieval manuscript. He would also receive a kind thank-you from the master cellist.
Bryan’s career as an illustrator of children’s books began with a chance meeting with Jean Karl, the perceptive and supportive editor Bryan worked with at Athenaeum Books for three decades until her death four years ago. “She knew that I was so caught up in the community work,” Ashley once told me, “helping to raise my younger sister’s children, teaching full time and all of that, but she was always asking, “What are you working on now? Is that the next one coming? I don’t care if it takes you two or three years, but I’d like to see how you’re developing, what you’re working on.”

Beginning with the illustrations for a book of the Indian poet Tagore, Bryan went on to write, illustrate and create numerous books, including compendiums of African folk tales, collections of African-American spirituals and his own poetry. He introduced readers to wonderful characters with wondrous names like Upsulamana Tumpalerado. He revived myth and legend. Thanks to him, we know how the cat got his purr, why frog and snake never play together and how Lightning and Thunder ended up in the heavens.
Bryan has won numerous awards, including the Arbuthnot Prize, an international lifetime achievement award, one of the highest honors in children’s literature. He won that prize in 1990. Clearly, he wasn’t distracted by the sound of “lifetime achievement,” which might have encouraged a lesser artist to hang up his laurels and call it a day. No, Ashley Bryan’s lifetime achievements continue to unfold from year to year.

He also won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the only award of its kind to honor children’s poets, of which Bryan is one of the masters. Here is one of his poems from his book Sing to the Sun, based on a memory of his father, who was a musician:

My Dad
When my dad
Blows his silver horn
Folks follow the music
Dance on in

Not saying
Nobody else
Can play sax
But my dad
Can play sax
Like nobody else.

If you want to hear that poem and others performed by the master, you’ll have a chance tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. at the Portland High School where Bryan will be presenting “A Tender Bridge: African American Poetry, Spirituals and African Folktales” at the Born to Read Conference sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council.

In 2003 Bryan was presented with Kent State University’s Virginia Hamilton Literary Award, which recognizes an American author or illustrator whose books make a significant contribution to the field of multicultural literature for children and adolescents. That year he also received the Katahdin Award from the Maine Library Association, honoring, once again, lifetime achievement. Finally, this year the Boston Public Library named him as one of its “Literary Lights.” He joined such notables as Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben and Ada Louise Huxtable in receiving this special recognition.

Bryan’s art, including his paintings, book illustrations and remarkable puppets made from treasures scavenged from the shores of Little Cranberry, has been shown across the country, including the new Eric Carle Museum of the Picture Book in Amherst, Massachusetts and the Farnsworth Museum here in Maine. Bryan’s neighbors, Dan and Kate Fernald, carry his work in their wonderful Islesford Island Gallery.

How did Bryan come to Maine? In 1946, he received a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the first year of the prestigious summer art school’s existence. On weekends he traveled to the Maine coast with friends and discovered the Cranberry Isles, that spruce-clad archipelago that, in the words of the late Ted Spurling, “fit into the Great Harbor of Mount Desert Island, nestling nicely under its shorter arm.” He first rented the home of artist Gretna Campbell on Great Cranberry and then moved to Little Cranberry in the 1950s, renting a room in a fisherman’s house, which had a large barn studio. He bought his own home on the island around 1980 and moved to the island full-time in 1987 after retiring from teaching full-time at Dartmouth.

“When I came to the island,” he once told writer Susan Shetterly, “I touched on the sense of community immediately. If you get off the boat with a package, you don’t have to struggle with it. It will pass to one person. It will pass to the other person. It will be a chain of hands. And it has nothing to do with what they think of you—it is reaching out in terms of this sense of community.”

“My neighbor, Emerson, died last year,” Bryan told Shetterly. “He was 88 years old. I’d bring him his mail and come over in the evening to watch the news with him. He was a farmer. He had rows of dahlia. Whenever the ladies would stop by, he would cut a bouquet of flowers. He was a wonderful man. The dahlia man. I paint those dahlias now.”
I would venture to say that Ashley Bryan is the very embodiment of community. He carries communities around with him. I tried to capture some sense of the Little Cranberry community in the aforementioned profile in Down East Magazine. I wrote:

“Wherever he may roam, Bryan’s favorite audiences are his Little Cranberry Island neighbors, including Dan and Kate Fernald, and their children, Erin and Malcolm. Their friendship is a living example of the island camaraderie Bryan celebrates. Ashley gives Dan, who is a fisherman by profession, art lessons; Kate counsels Ashley on the format of a book he’s working on; Ashley tries out a new poem on Erin and Malcolm, to whom he has dedicated books.”

Tonight Ashley is receiving an award from the Maine College of Art that honors his contributions to arts education. His whole adult life has been involved in teaching. He has been a professor at Queen’s College, the Brooklyn Museum, Dartmouth College and other institutions. He has also traveled this country and the world teaching people of all ages about the importance of community and color and creativity, through humility and art and extraordinary story-telling. I remember reading reports of his travels in Irene Bartlett’s weekly Cranberry Isles column in the Bar Harbor Times and thinking of that movie title, “If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium.” If you google Ashley, you will see what I mean.
Bryan once told the writer Donna Gold, “The arts are the most important thing for growing people and for creating a citizenry for whom you don’t have to make a jail.” He also once said, “Humanity as it is rooted in all cultures is the aim of education.” And I like this statement he made in 1992, speaking of the importance of story during one of his many school residencies:

“Story is a source of soul and spirit and integrity. It’s a repository of tradition and values. I look at the big shots involved in the savings and loan scams and insider trading. These aren’t ghetto kids, they’ve had the best of everything, and I ask, what was missing in their education?”

Bryan has advocated the importance of discovering ethnicity through children’s books. “Children should know about others among whom they are living,” he once said. There are lesson plans built around his books. At the same time, he has put the oral back in the oral tradition, with a voice and gestures that never cease to amaze audiences. Today’s hip-hop and rap performers could take a few lessons from this man, who has been playing with language and rhythm all this life. “I don’t just read the words,” Bryan says, “I try to roll them up to Heaven.”

“At every moment,” Bryan once noted, “I strive for connection. If you are in the moment, you are stretching out to reach that which you recognize in others. Whether with a child or an adult I am striving for an exchange. That’s my secret.”

I admit that I have taken advantage of Ashley’s willingness to connect, inviting him to tell stories at the Somesville Library, to exhibit his artwork at the Blum Gallery at College of the Atlantic—his first one-person show in Maine—and to open his home on Little Cranberry to a group of visitors from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Not long after I joined the staff at the Maine Community Foundation four years ago, I invited Ashley to share his thoughts on community with a gathering of friends in Northeast Harbor. It was at that gathering that Brooke Astor, the doyenne of New York society, arrived, a little late, walked into the living room where we were seated and declared to everyone that she was a hundred years old. She received a round of applause and then sat there mesmerized as Ashley spoke of his childhood in the Bronx and performed poetry by Langston Hughes, Eloise Greenfield, Gwendolyn Brooks and other African-American poets whom he has championed for decades.

Two springs ago, Letitia Baldwin, the arts editor at the Bangor Daily News who has long family ties to Little Cranberry Island, called me to say she had heard rumors that Ashley was turning 80 that summer and that the island was planning something big to celebrate the occasion. She asked me to write a birthday tribute to Ashley so I arranged an interview. He had just returned from South Africa and the first thing he told me about were the children he had taught.

“I worked with them with poetry, the Black American poets. And it was a grand time. They taught me so much. It was extraordinary because when I would pitch a line or so, they could play with that line. They wouldn’t let me go on to the next one till they had finished playing with it. Then I’d pick up and go to the next line and the same thing would happen. There were poems where they were chanted back, but wherever there was a suggestion that you could improvise on the line, they did. It was just a wonderful experience.”

Ashley also spoke of Maine and how excited he always is to get back to Little Cranberry: “I’m always happy to return home because to me the island is home. And I experience everything that I believe in by being here. In my work, the walks through the woods and in the families, the community of the island.”

I asked Ashley if he ever felt cynical about the world.
“I always have hope,” he told me, “because I stay with the examples of people who, despite tremendous odds, never became cynical. They have a greater faith and belief in what it means to be human, and they also have a sense of some force beyond themselves, that they respect, that they recognize and they thank in whatever way, whatever form. There is a bigness to whatever happens and to break it down and become cynical or vengeful or those things—it’s not really what it’s about.”
Of course, I also asked Ashley about his age, politely.

“Yes, I will be 80,” he told me, “and people are making a lot of it. When the children ask me, I always ask them how old do they think I am, and I go through this whole routine. I am 5, I am 15, I am 55, I am 65, and that I am all those years because I draw and I write for all those years within me—so whichever number you pick, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Usually I sort of scoot away on my birthday so that no one will find me. But this time there’s just this whole thing and my family and all and they all want to come. I’ve decided I just better face up to it and not carry on because when I start saying things about it, they say, “Oh, shut up, we’re comin’.” So.

Then Bryan spoke of his health. “I’m fortunate in that I’ve been well. So I have been able to just continue what I do. Actually, my travel schedule would be daunting to anyone. I’m fortunate that I sleep well and wake up fresh. I can manage whatever comes up in a day.”

I’d like to conclude with some words from the acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who has called Ashley Bryan “a luminous force of nature.” She writes, “Each hour with him feels like dipping into a deep pool of wisdom and care. He is ageless and tireless. I have seen him receive a standing ovation at a college and an elementary school on the same day. I have seen him work overtime—tirelessly, for hours—attending to art students and their own questions, portfolios, and needs. He is a great spirit who never closes the door on anyone. His generous heart finds a way to replenish itself, through the love of what he does and the passion for humanity and connection.”
“I have wished many times that Ashley were running the world. It would be a happy world. No one would be having wars.”

So, Ashley Bryan embraces the world and the world in turn embraces this man of peace and love and learning. I have saved his letters over the years. Almost all them carry a salutation like “bright greetings” or “bright wishes.” So in presenting Ashley Bryan with the Maine College of Art’s award for Leadership in Arts Education, I say to him “bright greetings,” “bright wishes” and thank you, my friend.