PMA Magazine

Originally from Lewiston-Auburn, Ayumi Horie (born 1969) is a full-time studio potter in Portland. She is recognized in the field of craft for championing the aesthetics of kawaii (the culture of cuteness in Japan), for her online presence and videos, and her political activism. She co-founded The Democratic Cup, a political project that seeks to catalyze conversation through collaborative cups made by more than two dozen artists, and co-created Portland Brick, a collaborative public art project that repaired city sidewalks with bricks made from local clay stamped with past, contemporary, and future memories in the India Street neighborhood in Portland. Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Art and Design. She is currently a trustee at the American Craft Council and the Vice President of the board at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She has received a Distinguished Fellow in Craft grant from United States Artists and was the first recipient of Ceramics Monthly’s Ceramic Artist of the Year award.

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Séan Alonzo Harris (born 1968) is a professional editorial, commercial, and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. Over the past 25 years, his work has been featured in a range of national publications such as The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Mother Jones, as well as in advertising campaigns and exhibitions at venues such as the PMA and Colby College Museum of Art. In these varied contexts, his work focuses on human experience and identity and examines how individuals who are often overlooked in our communities visualize themselves and how they are portrayed. He was awarded a Kindling Fund grant from Space Gallery and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for his project Visual Tensions pairing people of color with members of law enforcement. He has received several awards and grants for his work including Good Idea Grant and Arts in the Capital Program, the Broderson Bronze Award, and the VanDerZee Black Heritage Award.

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Jeremy Frey (born in 1978) is a Passamaquoddy basketmaker, who learned weaving from his mother and apprenticed at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (of which he is now a board member). Frey, who comes from a long line of native weavers, learned the traditional techniques of weaving brown ash and sweetgrass into baskets and now introduces new styles and techniques such as unique shapes and very fine weaves. Frey won Best of Show at Sante Fe Indian Market and at the Heard Indian Market in Fair in 2011 and 2015. This is only the second time that someone has won both shows in the same year and the first time a basket has achieved this honor at the Sante Fe Indian Market in its over 90-year history. He has work in the Smithsonian Institution as well as many other prominent museums around the country. In 2010, he was awarded a Distinguished Fellow in Theater and Performance grant from United States Artists.

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Originally from Old Orchard Beach, Cody Castle-Stack (born 1994) is an artist and a local arts organizer based in Portland. His artistic practice is an endless painterly exercise, a sandbox to form, and challenge his notions of creation. Together, his paintings aim to elevate immediacy and difference, and prioritizes aesthetic and conceptual variance over expressions of skill. In 2018, Castle-Stack co-founded New System Exhibitions, a not-for-profit art exhibition space in the beloved New System Laundry building in West Bayside neighborhood of Portland. The six co-directors, young artists themselves, operate a scaled-back exhibition environment where local emerging artists are given ample space to execute their creative vision and share it with their community. He has exhibited throughout Maine and has received a Mellon Humanities Fellowship and Nellie C. Watterson Fellowship.

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Painter Katherine Bradford (born 1942) lives in New York City with her wife of 30 years and spends her summers in Maine, where she lived year-round in the 1970s. It was at that time she began painting, and was one of the founding members of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA). She wrote art reviews for the Maine Times and had her first solo show at Corsican Pizza in Brunswick. She has since had solo shows at the Museum of Art in Fort Worth, TX, and at Sperone Westwater in New York City, among others, and has been featured in group shows at institutions such as MoMA P.S. 1, New Orleans Prospect.4, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She has taught widely, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work is included in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.

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