And Were off!

This is the first of many (probably) rambling, stream of consciousness accounts of this project’s origins. My name is Padien Haviland. I am a 34 year old trans artist based in Portland, Maine. Earlier this year my friends Hale, Sampson and RBoots, collectively known as the Brazen Bandits, had a month long exhibition at Space Gallery. It was a glorious 30 days of interactive programming, artist talks and queer community building. During one of their panels, they spoke to the difficulty they had finding a space for their exhibit. I won’t speak for them but I’ll summarize; every year, there are fewer affordable, accessible spaces for artists (especially minority artists that don’t meet “Big A” art’s institutionalized expectations) to create and to exhibit their work.

Portland is seen as an artist’s city. Folks visit because they know they’ll find multi-genre art experiences in open studios, gallery experiences, restaurants and music venues. As Portland becomes further gentrified, these spaces will get pushed further and further out. Ironic but a tale as old as time and as true as dirt. There will still be restaurants but they’ll all be owned by restauranteurs from NYC and Miami. There will still be music venues but they’ll be bigger and louder and owned by folks based in Colorado and conglomerates based goddess knows where. There will still be galleries but the chances of seeing your neighbors picture in the artist’s bio will be slim to none.

Sorry, sorry… I had to let that go to a darker place than I actually believe we’ll see to prove a point; now, more than ever, we need to start resourcing ourselves and our children and our friends to find sustainability and community in art practice and in life. Hateful speech and hurtful legislation be damned; they only mean anything if we let them.

I run Dear Dairy Ice Cream out of a studio on Presumpscot Street, just off peninsula. For years, I’ve been staring at the second story of the building next to ours dreaming about building a space to expand access to other queer folks to grow into a practice that supports them the way this space has grown to support me.

I left the artists talk that second day of the Brazen Bandits residency at Space, drove back to Presumpscot, jimmied the lock on the door labeled “ATTIC, ACCESS LIMITED” and turned on the lights to what I had decided that night would be the future home of Queer•y; a queer art resourcing center.

My landlord at Dear Dairy owns that building too and I told him I let myself in to see it the next day so, please, don’t call the cops. I knew he wouldn’t mind. I do think that the poetry’s hard to ignore, however. If we want to live in a city full of art made by the people living here, we’re going to have to break down a few locked doors, we are going to have to get creative and we are going to have to be together to do it.

Queer•y is many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars away from being a reality but I believe that it’s vital to talk about the things we want to exist; by doing so we breath life into them, we set a compass point to follow and we have the conversations that shape them.

I can’t wait to shape Queer•y by way of a conversation with you

Love

-Padien