PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS 2020

About the Exhibition

Begun in 2016, PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS is a public project that engages local community in cross-disciplinary conversations and activities that navigate walking as creative provocation, practice and product. PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS 2020: ecologies of the local, is a project consisting of public artist led walks, talks, an exhibition, and community discussions presented over seven weeks in the summer/autumn of 2020 throughout greater Portland, Maine. The project invites audience to become viewer-participants in reflections, experiences, and conversations regarding our local ecologies and climate-related changes.

ARTISTS: Kim Beck, Susan Bickford with Rachel Alexandrou, Tracey Cockrell, Viviane Le Courtois, Elaine K. Ng, In Kinship Fellowship, Mihku Paul, Jan Piribeck, Julie Poitras Santos with Beverly Johnson, Asata Radcliffe, Todd Shalom, Brian Smith, Addy Smith-Reiman, John Sundling.

About The Curator

JULIE POITRAS SANTOS' site-specific practice includes video, installation, writing and public projects that include a walking component. The relationship between site, story and mobility fuels a range of research and production, including the relationship between natural histories and individual story; walking as a form of listening to site; and material agency in an age of climate change.

Poitras Santos has taught in the Studio Arts MFA Program at Maine College of Art for over a decade, and previously taught sculpture at Bowdoin College, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She lived in Barcelona, Spain for three years (2004-2007) and worked as the Artistic Director of the Art Residency program Can Serrat, in Montserrat National Park. She currently holds the position of Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, and lives in Portland, Maine.

Poitras Santos holds two MFAs, one in Visual Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder, 2000, and a second in Poetry from the Stonecoast Creative Writing program, 2013. She received a BS from Tufts University in 1990. Additionally, she has trained in the martial art of Aikido since 1991.