Friday September 6
7:00 at Blue Hill Public Library
Howard Room
5 Parker Point Road
Blue Hill, Maine 04614
Naomi Shihab Nye’s Foreword to A Quiet Book
In a season of little comfort for too many, a book emerged that feels so pure, so essentially honorable, I truly bow down. A profoundly warm meditation to hold us in a better space of thought, to calm our shaken spirits, and it is the book you hold in your hands. A gathering of miracles, really, by two gentle, visionary artists who love one another and have been creating every day for so long they probably forgot what it is like to be without that spark. Susan Webster’s exquisite, organic collages (made from fragments they said), but in a season like this, what else do we have? Bits and pieces of elemental beauty, better selves. Staring into them one feels that precious edge of quivering hope that lights up little children about to do something fun. A gracious opening day, a joy that belongs to anyone and is yet to come. And the companionable carefully lettered words (dotted! made from individual dots!) emerging from the magical pen of Stuart Kestenbaum offer such grounding phrases and lines, even breaking single syllable words which slows us down while reading, that a great smoothing of spirit occurs. You can’t rush this book and you wouldn’t want to. You want to absorb it, contain it. Somehow, it already contains you. Or, the person you used to be before everything felt broken. You need this book.
Stuart & Susan on the process
We started this series when we were at the Tilting Artists in Residency Program on Fogo Island in Newfoundland in June 2022. Our partnership and collaborations began years before the making of this book. We started by making exquisite corpse drawings while waiting for food in restaurants, and moved on to more complex matters like raising two sons. From the start, whenever we have made our collaborative art pieces, we don’t actually work together in the same space. We work separately, passing work back and forth, without conversation. Perhaps because we’ve known each other for a long time, we find being in this unspoken place allows us to communicate differently. As in any making process, there is something beneath it or within it that we’re trying to get at (or it’s trying to get at us). In this back and forth between our studios, we are thrilled when we discover something unexpected– something that is more than the two of us– emerging.
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015 and served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Craft Council and the recipient of a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has written “Stuart Kestenbaum writes the kind of poems I love to read, heartfelt responses to the privilege of having been given a life. No hidden agendas here, no theories to espouse, nothing but life, pure life, set down with craft and love.”
Susan Webster has received fellowships from the Women’s Studio Workshop (NY), been a visiting artist at the University of the Arts Borowsky Center (PA), Studio Artworks Center (Jerusalem, Israel), and developed a model art program in the prison system in Maine. She is dedicated to taking action to end domestic violence through community advocacy efforts and awareness, and is an advocate for reproductive justice through her art. Recent exhibits: Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design, Cove Street Arts, Portland ME, and BIENNIAL2020 at Center for Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME. Art critic Carl Little has written “Webster’s awareness of the preciousness of time on earth heightens both her personal sense of existence and the art she creates. Even as she acknowledges a ‘certain darkness, mystery, the unknown’ she celebrates life.”
This program is free and open to all. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.