BELFAST — “Following the success of last year’s artist-in-residence program at Waterfall Arts with artist-researcher phenom Nina Elder, the community art center ushers another incredible contemporary artist to its facilities this September,” said Waterfall Arts, in a news release.

Multidisciplinary artist Pippin Frisbie-Calder will spend a month with Waterfall Arts, making art within the framework of her printmaking and studio-based practice, as well as engaging students from Belfast Community Outreach Program in Education (BCOPE) to explore climate change by selecting a locally threatened or extinct species and creating their own unique art projects.

This residency will also provide the artist with space and time to create artwork for a traveling exhibition titled The Future is in Your Hands. Frisbie-Calder will be designing, carving, and printing thousands of puffins and will offer a printmaking workshop and artist talk to engage participants in concepts of stewardship, human culpability, and climate change.

Her work seeks to investigate ecosystems and demystify scientific outcomes. By working with biologists and ornithologists, her printmaking explores issues of climate change, extinction, and humanity's complicated relationship with nature.

“I am so excited to come to Waterfall Arts as an opportunity to bring the climate conversation I have been working on in New Orleans to the place where I was raised,” said Frisbie-Calder, in the release. “When I was a child my father was the president of the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association in Maine and helped preserve hundreds of acres of river-facing land.”

One way that Frisbie-Calder has explored extinction is through work called Canceled Edition: The Art of Birding, currently on view at the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans. In this site-specific installation, she creates a simulated species extirpation (local extinction) demonstrating the possible effects of climate change on migratory bird species. Viewers are encouraged to participate in the installation by removing a bird from the wall and taking it home.

“Pippin is the perfect artist to continue our renewed interest in a Waterfall Arts residency program,” says Program Director Amy Tingle. “In fact, it’s exactly the direction we’d like to turn our future residencies, with community engagement and public events at the heart. As soon as I saw photos of Canceled Edition on Pippin’s website and understood her interest in human interaction with her artwork, I knew we had to bring her to Waterfall Arts. Her engagement with students from BCOPE is absolutely icing on a beautiful cake.” 

Frisbie-Calder hails from Damariscotta, and currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her prints and installations have been shown widely around New Orleans, most prominently as a solo show at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center. She has also exhibited around the world, ranging from Canada to Indonesia, as well as throughout the United States. She has held residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, A Studio in the Woods, Big Cypress National Preserve, Jakmel Ekspresyon, Haiti, and AS220 Galleries. By the time the artist begins her residency at Waterfall Arts, she will have completed teaching an intensive study abroad program course in the Department of Evolutionary Biology for Tulane University in Ecuador.

Pippin Frisbie-Calder is represented by LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans, Louisiana.

For more information about the artist: https://www.pippinfrisbiecalder.com/

Launched in 2000, Waterfall Arts is a community arts center that offers resources to arts enthusiasts of all ages and abilities. We welcome the public to engage in the arts through classes, exhibitions, art events, performances, public art projects, open studios (in clay, glass, print, and darkroom photography), residencies, and more. For more information, visit waterfallarts.org or call 207-338-2222.