Belfast center announces September's artist-in-residence - Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel

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Artist Pippin Frisbie-Calder delivers an artist talking during the solo exhibition Resurgence at LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans. Frisbie-Calder is a printmaker and environmental artist/activist from Maine, living in New Orleans, and will be in residence at Waterfall Arts in September. Submitted photo

Following the success of last year’s artist-in-residence program at Belfast’s Waterfall Arts with artist-researcher phenom Nina Elder, the community art center ushers another incredible contemporary artist to its facilities this September.

Multidisciplinary artist Pippin Frisbie-Calder, who grew up in Damariscotta, will spend a month with Waterfall Arts, making art within the framework of her printmaking and studio-based practice, as well as engaging students from Belfast Community Outreach Program in Education to explore climate change by selecting a locally threatened or extinct species and creating their own unique art projects, according to a news release from the community arts center.

This residency will also provide the artist with space and time to create artwork for a traveling exhibition “The Future is in Your Hands.” Pippin will be designing, carving, and printing thousands of puffins and will offer a printmaking workshop and artist talk to engage participants in concepts of stewardship, human culpability, and climate change.

Pippin’s work seeks to investigate ecosystems and demystify scientific outcomes. By working with biologists and ornithologists, her printmaking explores issues of climate change, extinction, and humanity’s complicated relationship with nature.

“I am so excited to come to Waterfall Arts,” Frisbie-Calder said, “as an opportunity to bring the climate conversation I have been working on in New Orleans to the place where I was raised. When I was a child my father was the president of the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association in Maine and helped preserve hundreds of acres of river-facing land.”

One way that Frisbie-Calder has cleverly and impactfully explored extinction is through work called “Canceled Edition: The Art of Birding,” currently on view at the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans. In this site-specific installation, Pippin creates a simulated species extirpation (local extinction) demonstrating the possible effects of climate change on migratory bird species. Viewers are encouraged to participate in the installation by removing a bird from the wall and taking it home.

“Pippin is the perfect artist to continue our renewed interest in a Waterfall Arts residency program,” said Program Director Amy Tingle. “In fact, it’s exactly the direction we’d like to turn our future residencies, with community engagement and public events at the heart. As soon as I saw photos of Canceled Edition on Pippin’s website and understood her interest in human interaction with her artwork, I knew we had to bring her to Waterfall Arts. Her engagement with students from BCOPE is absolutely icing on a beautiful cake.”

Frisbie-Calder lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her prints and installations have been shown widely around New Orleans, most prominently as a solo show at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center. She has also exhibited around the world, ranging from Canada to Indonesia, as well as throughout the United States. She has held residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, A Studio in the Woods, Big Cypress National Preserve, Jakmel Ekspresyon, Haiti, and AS220 Galleries. By the time the artist begins her residency at Waterfall Arts, she will have completed teaching an intensive study abroad program course in the Department of Evolutionary Biology for Tulane University in Ecuador.

Pippin Frisbie-Calder is represented by LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans.

For more information about the artist, visit pippinfrisbiecalder.com. For more information, visit waterfallarts.org or call 207-338-2222.

Artist Pippin Frisbie-Calder with her work “Canceled Edition: the Art of Birding,” in 2019. “Canceled Edition” is a site-specific installation of hundreds of handprinted birds, with the viewer invited to remove a bird from the wall to take home to simulate a local extinction. Photo by Meg Turner