Co-Founder

About:

Hale Linnet (b. 1990 Worcester, MA) is a Maine-based figurative painter and sculptor who creates socially conscious work around themes of bodily autonomy, gender, pleasure, and self-excavation. Hale holds a degree in Public Health, and uses their experiences in community organizing and abortion access to inform their art-making practice. They create collaborative art and have received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts for community sculpture projects centering the diverse lived experiences of menstruating bodies. Hale currently lives in Old Orchard Beach, and works out of their studio in Space538 of downtown Portland, ME. In addition to their studio practice, Hale teaches trauma-informed yoga to queer youth and works with unhoused teens.

Website: haley-linnet.com

Artist Statement:

 I look to my art practice as an exploration of the question “How can I contribute to the world I want to live in through what I do with others in my community every day?”  I view art as a world-building tool, particularly creative collaboration as generating pathways to freedom of expression and connection to ourselves and each other. 

As a painter and sculptor dedicated to visual story-telling through the figure, I choose the materials, three dimensional or two dimensional, that best serve the narrative I’m expressing. The stories I’m most interested in communicating serve to elevate life’s mundane moments to the realm of the sacred through earnest visual representation.

Co-Founder

About:

Sampson Spadafore (they/them) is a white, neurodivergent, queer and trans person currently living on unceded Wabanaki tribal land. They are a theatre artist, poet and writer with a BFA in Musical Theatre from Nazareth University. Some credits include Heath in Pony (Portland Theatre Festival), Emmett in Legally Blonde (Portland Players), Carolyn in Song of Bernadette Jones (Fresh Fruit Festival), and Bee Doyle in Floyd Collins (Nazareth University). They've also been seen in the PortFringe Festival performing solo in their original works T4T: Theatre for Trans (2023) and Where Grief Sits (2024). They are currently working on The View Upstairs as assistant director to Tommy Waltz with the SecondStory Theatre Company. Sampson thematically focuses their work, whether that’s performance or writing, on trans and queer identity, liberation, the body, god, grief, and healing. He was the recipient of the 2022 Bodwell Fellowship through the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Hewnoaks Artist Residency.

Website: sampsonspadafore.com

Instagram: @sampson_spadafore

Artist statement:

I work and play in the realm of libratory movement. My writing and performance is based in my own personal experience and identity, and while not representative of the whole of the trans experience, is a piece of the larger consciousness raising movement that has spanned hundreds of years through trans cultural icons, trans innovators and advocates, and the average every-day, working-class trans person. I create for my community, and for everyone else. For those who love me and hate me, because I believe in their liberation too.

Theatre is a spiritual space for me and it is where I find myself the most comfortable and energized. Just as ancient humans once used the stage to tell the stories of and honor the gods, we humans today play as a way to see the divine in one another. My humanity is on full display when I’m on stage. I use song, dance, poetry and speech to engage, confront, and challenge audiences. I like to hold a mirror to society and ask them questions that may scare them but lead to their freedom.

Co-Founder

About:

RBoots Shertzer is a 60 year old queer/ transmasc. artist deeply committed to community and the arts. Their Life has been truly dedicated to creating a voice and vision of change through art, and political action. Boots is an old queer punk rocker. They have passionately created, curated, painted, sculpted and screamed in studios, galleries and the streets from Boston, NYC, Washington D.C., Oakland, CA, Providence, RI, and now Portland, ME. They have struggled for many years, with and through issues around addiction, madness, gender and sexuality. Like so many women, queers, and artists, Boots was institutionalized at 14, and on their own at 15. They have both suffered the depths of anxiety, depression, demonic paranoia, mania and illness and too believes that this wild, terrifyingly beautiful, unruly voice is the source of their art. Boots is moved, challenged, perhaps even possessed in their attempts to understand and articulate the world around them. Their work is about relationships and the tension between internal and external worlds, the sacred and the profane, evolution, decomposition, transformation, metamorphosis, release, redemption, loss, trauma, anguish, recovery, healing, sex, power, passion and pain. They have been Clean and Sober for 35 years. they have come to believe (out of necessity and survival) in the power of art, passion, love and rage, reaching deeply into their experiences, creating these powerful images that draw you in and leave you changed somehow. Boots is inspired by a long history of fighters and creatives and the tenacity and dedication of the fierce love art warriors in their life. Boots has come to believe it is in this… powerful honoring, creation and community, that all of our survival depends.

Website: brazennectar.wordpress.com

Instagram: @brazen_bandit

Artist Statement:

I have lived on the edges. Struggled and fought, pushing boundaries from both within and without. I have watched my queer-trans-community, brothers, sisters, lovers, in all our joy, beauty and passion, and I have seen suffering and anguish. I am compelled to give voice to all I have experienced and witnessed. My work attempts to embody my struggle and rage, our beauty and fierceness.

I work with combinations of texture, materials, and raw emotion. These images are both beautiful and harsh, holding the sacred and the profane, at once fragile and violent. They are caught in flight, somewhere between heaven and earth, release and transformation. Embattled in pain, raw, exposed, pushed to the edge of the canvas. Their gaze dares the audience to explore their wounds, struggle, and healing; a reflection, an invitation, a challenge to climb inside the ache. My work questions the bounds of connection, beauty, gender, sexuality, love, and passion.