The MAINE MASTERS PROJECT is an award-winning video series sponsored by the Union of Maine Visual Artists, a not-for-profit educational organization established in 1975. The Maine Masters Project was launched in 1999 and has produced a series of compelling profiles of some of Maine’s and America’s most distinguished and often less recognized artists who articulate the importance of art-making. There are currently twenty completed films. The nineteenth film, titled TRUTH TELLERS, about former UMVA President, artist/activist Robert Shetterly and his project Americans Who Tell the Truth, is now in distribution across the U.S. distributed by American Public Television. Its educational distributor is Bullfrog Films, Inc. Can also be found in Maine from kanelewisproductions@gmail.com The most recent project is CARLO … and his Merry Band of Artists, premiered in July 2024 at the Maine International Film Festival and has since been seen at eight international film festivals in Greece, Eastern Europe, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, Canada, France, New York, and Hollywood. It will soon become available via our portal: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/CARLO

The purpose of the series is to support a vital contemporary artistic community and to inspire all people to create art and to recognize the value of art. Through our outreach program, screening series, broadcasts, festivals, and presentations in community libraries, museums, colleges, and art centers – we are successfully reaching adults. Through our curriculum guide series, now available on painter Stephen Pace, we are beginning to reach a younger audience of high school and college students. We are now in collaboration with Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to create a Resource Guide companion to a shortened, 15-minute version of our film I Know a Man … Ashley Bryan. that will reach younger students in schools. Our Vimeo portal is now offering several of these films closed captioned and streaming on demand at this link: http://www.vimeo.com/kanelewis/vod_pages

Project Goals:

• To build an archive of video profiles of Maine artists in their studios discussing and showcasing their work, thoughts, creative process, sense of community, and reasons for living and working in Maine. The project was born out of a sense of responsibility to Maine’s cultural community.

• To document fine artists who live and work in Maine, many of whom in relative obscurity. In so doing we are helping to encourage and support Maine artists; 

• To inspire young people to consider the wonders of creating art and to understand better the life of an artist;

• To raise public and student awareness about these artists’ work and to strengthen the connection between artists and their Maine communities; 

• To convey the integrity and seriousness as well as the imagination and fun of the artistic endeavor; 

• To place into context the artist's role in the intellectual and cultural fabric of the larger community; 

• To help non-artists better understand the artistic impulse and the work; and 

• To create an educational and cultural resource that public schools, universities, libraries, and museums can employ to study contemporary artistic expression.

Sponsored by the Union of Maine Visual Artists, an educational organization promoting Maine art.