Portland Art Outside!

Public non-sanctioned art has always been about making a statement.  Over the past couple months street art in the form of large poster size images of people smiling, winking and frowning

appeared on Portland's city buildings, traffic abutments, city statues and even on the steps of Portland's city hall. 



Portland's Insideout Public Art on display in Congress Square



If you saw the images you know what I'm talking about,  if you didn't see them let me tell you it was hard for me to look away. The large images made me want to look more and try to figure out what the heck is going on? Who is this person?  Are they one of the 30 mayoral candidates that were running in the last city election?? Street Art that evokes ideas, thought, and perhaps mental chaos is in my opinion successful, if you can connect the dots quickly it's just not as effective.   A tip o the hat to the MECA students in pulling off their version of "Inside out" a cool thing about this format is the images are plastered up with wheat paste thus this art with all it's visual punch & power is only temporary.

What exactly is "inside out" is about using art to turn the world inside out, it all started with a French tag artist named JR that decided to go big or go home.  He plastered huge walls with images of people, no one super special, not a Mike Jordon or anyone that you would recognize just a building sized image of a person. He efforts received such notoriety and effected so many people that he was identified as a person who had indeed changed his world.  As a result of his actions he received a TED award.  There were youtube videos of his efforts and they have motivated hundreds of people to go out and change their world. 

The MECA students have documented the whole process from idea, installation and public reception in a film called  "Under the umbrella".  The film will screen at 7pm on 1st Friday February 3rd in the safe confines of the 2nd floor Osher Hall gallery in the infamous Maine College of Art.  **

WHY EXPLORE FIRST FRIDAY ART WALK  

and the Insideout documentary "Under the Umbrella"

GO BECAUSE YOUR GOOD MIND 
NEEDS GOOD ART! 

** what's really cool is this project had a lot of participants; Major support for Portland INSIDE/OUT comes from Creative Portland Corporation, Portland Color, and VIA The INSIDE/OUT MECA artist team is collaborating alongside Portland neighbors, organizations and building owners including The City of Portland, Creative Trails, Cultivating Community, Parkside Neighborhood Center, Company of Girls, The Telling Room, the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, Mark Marchesi, Pete Nenortas, Michael Berube, Parallax Partners, No Umbrella Media, Winky Lewis, and many, many more. 

 The Gallery Talk is made possible by the generosity of the 
WMPG Radio listening community.  The blog is the text version of the 
art rant heard every Thursday at 7am, 5 & 9:30pm on
WMPG college and community radio broadcasting
   from the University of Southern Maine

90.9 , 104.1 and streaming on the web at http://www.wmpg.org/  

Note: WMPG 90.9 fm has increased it's FM signal strength from 1100 kilowatts to  4500 kilowatts! Thank you for making that possible. This means that you are now able to hear MPG on your car radio from Brunswick Maine to Dover, New Hampshire.

  The station management, the University of Southern Maine & DJ's are totally pumped and excited about the ability to bring you fresh diverse live radio with a clean crisp sound!