Dear Alumni and Friends,

Merrill Hall is where some UMF administrators have their offices, but it is also home to the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. So a visitor may be greeted by the sounds of a table saw from a sculpture class, or a choir, piano or jazz ensemble rehearsal. There are often pieces of sculpture decorating the halls, paintings put up in the bathrooms and festooning the ceilings, and students sitting on the floor, sketching the halls in perspective. There are sometimes also artistic smells—glue, paint, clay. Sometimes there are artistic messes, too. I welcome all this as evidence that learning and experimentation in the arts are alive and thriving at UMF.

With the construction of the Emery Community Arts Center, soon to begin, UMF’s commitment to the arts will become even stronger and more multi-faceted.

Art is one of the key elements of the education we aim to provide for our students and for the entire community. Making art involves many facets of our embodied intelligences—we see, we do, we practice, we get better, we perform. Art can let us be shocked by the new or revisit the familiar in a new light. A theater performance can bring us to tears or cheers as the players evoke our sympathetic imaginations. Many theorists of language now believe that singing, dancing and other expressive behaviors actually enabled early humans to develop the ability to think and speak, imagine the future and remember the past. If that is true, art has a good claim to be the basis of our humanity!

As we begin construction of the Emery Community Arts Center, perhaps later this year, I am looking forward to the many new ways the greater Farmington community and western Maine will have to experience the arts at UMF. We will still have Nordica and the Alumni Theater as important venues for music, dance and theater. The Art Gallery will continue to be a wonderful space for displaying exciting new work in the visual arts. But the Emery Community Arts Center will have new possibilities and spark new ideas for performances, exhibitions, and art experiences that may defy categories. It will be designed to be flexible, and, if we are lucky, it will make us all think new thoughts and do new things. It is a lot to ask from a space, but meeting the creative challenge is ultimately what art is all about. And meeting challenges is the UMF way!

Sincerely yours,
Theodora J. Kalikow, President