Guide covers area’s culture

Coming soon, to a school, library or artist near you, is the Hancock County Cultural Directory, a compendium intended to encapsulate the area’s vibrant arts and culture scene.

After more than a year and a half’s effort, the area’s cultural assessment spearheaded by the Maine Arts Commission is being set to print in the form of a 30-page guide to the county’s artists, arts organizations and school arts programs. Included will be information on accessing state arts funding, and a listing of where to see percent-for-art projects commissioned by schools.

According to Marion Stocking of Lamoine, chairwoman of the commission’s Community Arts Committee, the guide to be distributed later this month will be a crucial networking tool. “There are a lot of people who have maybe a little shop or gallery that nowhere near supports them. Most of them don’t know who else is out there,” she said.

While intended primarily for use by the arts community, the guide also is very much aimed at schools, said Stocking. A related commission initiative seeks to ensure that arts-in-education funds are distributed evenly across school systems statewide by 1998.

The Hancock County cultural assessment was funded by a $20,700 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, administered by the Maine Arts Commission.

In response to the idea that arts funding should, to some extent, reflect community standards rather than emphasize individual artists, the Maine Arts Commission has shifted focus in the past five years to funding more collective initiatives, said Stocking.

Recognizing that many of the state’s resources had previously gone to southern Maine, the Community Arts Committee thus far has identified four other geographic areas to focus on, including Hancock County, Lewiston-Auburn, Rangeley and central Aroostook County.

When the Committee held a “town meeting” in Ellsworth early in 1996, participants singled out developing a cultural guide and forming an arts council as their highest priority. Largely a volunteer effort, the guide’s compilation proved to be a time-consuming project, said Stocking.

Participants at committee and subgroup meetings offered names of visual artists, musicians, performers and organizations to contact for listing information.

The process bogged down when artists failed to respond to the initial inquiries they were sent. “You know artists aren’t going to fill out forms,” Stocking quotes a committee member as saying. “You’ve gotta do this by telephone.”

Many weeks of volunteer calling finally netted the requisite information regarding what the listees offer and how best to contact them. In the end, what had been envisioned as 200 listings blossomed into more like 700.

About 2,000 copies of the guide are being printed. Any copies available after an initial distribution to the committee’s mailing list may be ordered through the Maine Arts Commission, said Stocking, who says the guide may serve an economic development function, even though that was not the original intention.

“Certainly people getting into cultural tourism will be able to use it,” said Stocking, who called that phenomenon “the big coming thing.”