Artist Toolbox Talk | Studio Practice
Thursday, November 21
Free | 5:00 – 6:00 pm | in-person at CMCA
Oasis, laboratory, playground: An artist’s studio is the beginning, middle and end of a deep, strong, gratifying practice. In this Artist Toolbox talk, multidisciplinary artist Marcie Jan Bronstein will bring you into her treasured, ever-evolving space. She’ll share energizing ideas for creating a vital, inspiring studio practice, even in challenging circumstances. She’ll also share how this dynamic studio practice helped generate CMCA’s ArtLab For All Ages program.
About the presenter
A graduate of The Fashion Institute of Technology and Hampshire College, Marcie Jan Bronstein‘s ceramics, painting, and photography have been exhibited, published, collected and commissioned for nearly forty years. Born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in the suburbs, imagination and creativity were an early lifeline. But it was in the years of living in Italy after college, and wandering the streets of Europe with a camera where core ideas about art-making began to take shape. With inspiration from early art heroes (Cartier Bresson, Paul Klee, Karel Appel…), a decade of darkroom-based, hand-painted photography followed. In 2000, she began a fifteen-year dive into the realm of negative imagery to evoke memory and the passage of time. This work is collected in the monograph Illuminating the Negative: Fifteen Years of Photographs. From 2011-14, she was lead art educator at the CMCA and creator of the ArtLab For All Ages program. An insatiable traveler with a great love for the sea, from 2014-18, she worked for Celebrity Cruises teaching watercolor painting aboard ships around the world. In 2021, she turned toward ceramics full-time and in the summer of ’22 was selected for a residency at the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts to explore painterly approaches to working with clay. In the winters of ’23 and ’24, Marcie was in residence at Momento Ceramics in Locarno, Switzerland. Last month, her Open Studio was part of the Maine Craft Weekend tour. Since 1996, she has lived and worked in a converted barn, with her family in Belfast, Maine.
Artist Toolbox Coordinator
Alanna Hernandez is an artist whose drawings and paintings deal with trauma and connection. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and now lives and works in Midcoast Maine.
The Artist Toolbox is made possible by major support from the Roxanne Quimby Foundation.