Professional Membership

Featured Member

Bertha Voisine, third from left, of the St. John's Valley in Maine, was the only remaining person in her community who knew who to make traditional braided rag rugs. Funding from the Maine Arts Commission has allowed her teach and train a large group of other women, ensuring the survival of this traditional craft.

Inspired by the success of their Traditional Arts Apprenticeship program, the Maine Arts Commission recently launched a small pilot program designed to encourage communities to develop innovative ways to sustain traditional arts. Sustaining Traditional Arts in the Community will provide communities with grants of up to $2,000 to support programs, activities, or events that strengthen and help ensure the survival of valuable traditional arts in the community.

The Maine Arts Commission has been supporting the perpetuation of the traditional arts through their ongoing apprenticeship program. However, in an effort to expand the scope of their work and save valuable arts and traditions from extinction, they've created the Sustaining Traditional Arts in the Community program.

Traditional arts are skills and aesthetic knowledge handed down in an informal fashion in the process of day-to-day living; they are practices passed on within communities, reflecting that community's shared cultural heritage. Learned through performance or example, they are arts that emanate from the community and the community's experience, and often reflect a traditional view of the world. Examples of traditional arts range from boatmaking techniques and old songs passed down within a community to an Ethiopian coffee ceremony. The Arts Commission is hoping that the innovative program they've developed will beget inventive programs across the state and start new traditions of strengthening communities and saving endangered arts and cultural knowledge.

For more than 30 years, the Maine Arts Commission has been helping artists and arts organizations bring more music, poetry, painting, and other arts activities into the lives of people in Maine. The Maine Arts Commission works to advance the arts by supplying services and results-oriented funding to artists and arts organizations, and by supplying helpful resources about the arts to the general public. The Maine Arts Commission is an independent state agency funded by the Maine State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.