“One of the great things about living in Bangor is that we feel like we are on the cusp,” Susan Potters told the group gathered for the quarterly meeting of the Bangor Region Arts Council. “We are the ones making it happen, and it’s very exciting and it’s a challenge.”

The cusp Potters referred to is the resurgence of visual art that appears to be occurring in the Bangor area. Potters, who heads the regional office of the Maine Alliance for Arts Education, was one of about 20 people who took part Tuesday in a council-sponsored discussion titled “Visual Arts: Area Renaissance.”

Susan Maasch, owner of the Clark House Gallery, said that her first year in business had been difficult. However, she called this past year “tremendous,” adding that she had sold 21 paintings since opening her current show the first of week of April.

Nina Jerome, an artist who has lived and worked in Bangor for many years, had exhibited her work at the University of Maine Museum of Art, but never in her hometown until Maasch opened her gallery. She was one of three working artists who attended the meeting.

“It’s nice to hear people who aren’t artists talk about wanting more visual art in their community,” said Jerome. “I haven’t heard a conversation like this, and to have people working together is new.”

The council was formed four years ago under the auspices of the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce. John Rohman put the arts on his agenda when he served as chamber president in 1997. Now a member of the Bangor City Council, he is advocating that the city designate an arts district in a portion of the downtown area. Preliminary talks have begun with the city’s department of economic development, he reported.

“Bangor’s in a situation now where we have a downtown that’s starting to turn around, but it needs help,” he told BRAC members. “You have a city council and a city government that’s really stepped forward with space and dollars. There’s no difference between some of the things we’re talking about and Cadillac Mountain Sports.

“Cadillac Mountain Sports doesn’t own that building. The city of Bangor owns that building, and now we have a cruise boat coming in here that’s subsidized by the city of Bangor. Those are economic development features that are good, legitimate things. … The arts community can have those kinds of things, but it falls on our shoulders to do it.”

Christopher Crosman, director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, pointed out that the increased number of schooners anchored in the harbor and the for-profit galleries in downtown Rockland, along with the town’s efforts to promote cultural tourism, had helped increase attendance at the museum.

In addition to the museum’s recent acquisition of the Wyeth family’s work, the Farnsworth purchased the former Newberry store on Route 1, Crosman said. “That is 10,000 square feet of dynamite space that we hope to dedicate to exhibiting the work of Maine artists who are at mid-career like Nina Jerome.”

The University of Maine has commissioned a feasibility study to look at the possibility of constructing a new visual arts complex, according to Wally Mason, director of the UM Museum of Art. Mason recently started a “Friends of the Museum” organization, which has enlisted nearly 100 supporters in its first year.

“I came here from the University of Idaho in Moscow,” he told the group. “Their gallery program was located downtown and the university was about .6 miles away. The community had significant ownership in the gallery program. … My feeling is that the UM Museum of Art is a well-kept secret. As we look at the possibility of a new facility, maybe we need to be thinking boldly, rather than the way we traditionally think about academic institutions.”

Alicia Anstead, a NEWS reporter who has covered the area’s visual and performing arts scene for the past 8 years, was invited by the council to share her observations on the state of the visual arts in the city. She quoted Vinalhaven artist Robert Indiana, who said about Bangor: “It’s a city of absolute mystery. I just can’t imagine why little old Rockland should have an outstanding museum like the Farnsworth and you never hear a thing about Bangor.”

“This is a town that sustains a symphony, a theater, a ballet and the major performing arts center in central Maine,” Anstead said. “… Bangor may want more, and not just in these little secret spots, but in a real setting where that absolute mystery that Robert Indiana talks about will be explained and expanded and provoked and assured.”

Participants in Tuesday’s discussion expressed their support for, as well as their belief in Bangor’s ability to become a cultural center and showcase for all the arts.