The BTS Center
97 India Street • Portland, ME 04101
June 23, 2021
Dear Friends,
Last year I had the honor of performing for The BTS Center’s Summer Arts Series. This year I have the privilege of curating the series. Through The BTS Center’s online events, I continually meet participants who are passionate about making the world a better place and who appreciate going deep. I know many of you enjoy a good laugh too.
With this in mind, and along with The BTS Center’s commitment to human hearts renewed, justice established, and creation restored, I am thrilled to invite you to this year’s Summer Arts Series.
We will create a modern online arts salon. Salon gatherings in the early 1900’s brought together people who were asserting themselves in a society that was dominated by a handful of men in power. Women often organized these gatherings in their sitting rooms or bedrooms. They invited friends and then brought them together with painters, writers, and thinkers. Together they plunged into passionate conversations about art, politics, and the hot button topics of the day. Artists just beginning their careers and well-established ones were featured as special guests. Poetry, stories, paintings, and sculptures were the centerpieces of gatherings. The art opened up conversations that sometimes lasted all night.
We begin our Summer Arts Series on Thursday July 8th with Aminatta Forna, author of The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir, and Glen Retief, who wrote The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood. Both were born on the African continent and were eyewitnesses to violent struggles over power and freedom. Now professors of creative writing at universities in the USA, they provide keen insights into what it is like to be a foreigner in America. Aminatta and Glen are also close friends who enjoy lively conversation with each other. Seeing these two award-winning writers in action will be an unforgettable experience. The first 50 people who register for the July 8th event (or the whole series) will receive a free copy of Aminatta Forna’s new book of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion! (Limited to registrants with a mailing address in USA & Canada.)
On Thursday July 22nd we bring together two poets from two countries. Maya Williams (she/hers, they/them, and ey/em) from Portland, Maine, USA is a religious, queer, Black, Mixed Race, suicide survivor who is constantly writing poems. Pádraig Ó Tuama from Ireland, is a poet and theologian, whose work centers around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. He is also the host of Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios, a podcast that takes a deep dive into a single poem. Both Maya and Pádraig are mesmerizing when they read their poems live. We anticipate they will engage us in a rich conversation about identity, art, and overcoming.
Then on Friday July 30th Chilean-born circus performer Valentina Solari and US-born public visual and performance artist Eve Mosher will both join us from the UK to share the innovative ways they use art to engage communities in conversations about climate change. They are on the cutting edge of multidisciplinary art practices that merge with social activism. While taking on serious issues, their art invites audience members to dream, see the invisible, and to embody the world.
Each event will include time when the artists chat with each other. You will witness the special chemistry that happens when artists connect. We will also give you the option to join in your own small conversation groups to carry on the conversation.
This will be a salon for the 21st Century where brilliant people gather for meaningful and artful conversation. If you like, you can dress up in your most artistic or elegant garb and come with a mocktail or cocktail. You will think, laugh, feel, and come away enriched and more engaged in the world.
I look forward to seeing you at The BTS Center’s 2021 Summer Arts Series. It won’t be the same without you.
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Peterson Toscano
Program Consultant • The BTS Center
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Summer Arts Series 2021
July 8 • July 22 • July 30
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When friends gather, conversation happens. It can be around a campfire, in a restaurant, or over drinks in a cozy living room or backyard. During the Pandemic many of us sorely missed get-togethers that inspire thought-provoking conversations, deep insights, and great laughs.
For the Summer 2021 Arts Series, we at The BTS Center will create a modern online salon* with you and artists from four different continents. At each event you will meet two fascinating, accomplished, and engaging artists, and you will experience their work firsthand. Then these artists will dive into lively discussion and chat with each other about art and some of the issues that mean the most to us today—justice, climate, civil society, and more. You will be a fly on the wall as these artists spar, joke, and converse.
But why just watch the magic happen? At each event, you will have the option to connect with a small group to share your own thoughts and insights. We will end these gatherings with your questions for our artists. This will be a salon for the 21st Century where brilliant people gather for meaningful and artful conversation. If you like, you can dress up in your most artistic or elegant garb and come with a mocktail or cocktail. You will think, laugh, feel, and come away enriched and more engaged in the world.
We look forward to seeing you at The BTS Center’s 2021 Summer Arts Series. It won’t be the same without you.
*About salon-style gatherings: In the early 1900’s the world was changing quickly—politically, socially, and artistically. Starting in 1903, an American couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, organized literary and artistic salons in their Paris apartment. Little known creatives on the cusp of major breakthroughs filled the intimate space. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse turned up along with up-and-coming writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson. They shared some of their work and then engaged in late night lively discussions about art, politics, love, and the rumblings of massive global shifts already beginning to happen.
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Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief:
Two friends on moving to America and writing during a time of climate change
Thursday, July 8, 2021
7:00-8:30 pm (Eastern)
(Limited to registrants with a mailing address in USA & Canada.) Send questions to aram@thebtscenter.org.
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Born on the African continent, Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief were both eyewitnesses to violent struggles over power and freedom in their countries. As writers who have lived in the USA, they provide keen insights into what it is like to be a foreigner in America. |
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Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna, OBE (born 1964) is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
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Glen Retief
Glen Retief grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era, where he was involved in national as well as LGBT liberation movements. His book The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood (St. Martin’s Press, April 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award and was selected as an Africa Book Club Book of 2011. He has published short stories and memoirs in journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and Hotel Amerika. He writes an occasional column of personal essays for the South African newspaper, The Daily Maverick; teaches Creative Nonfiction at Susquehanna University; and is currently a 2021-22 Fulbright US Scholar in Mamelodi, South Africa.
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Maya Williams and Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Poetry as an Art of Survival
Thursday, July 22, 2021
4:00-5:30 pm (Eastern)
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Maya Williams (she/hers, they/them, and ey/em) from Portland, Maine, USA is a religious queer Black Mixed Race suicide survivor constantly writing poems. Pádraig Ó Tuama from Ireland, is a poet and theologian, whose work centers around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. Both Maya and Pádraig are mesmerizing when they read their poems live. We anticipate they will have a rich conversation about identity, art, and overcoming.
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Maya Williams
Maya Williams (she/hers, they/them, and ey/em) is a religious queer Black Mixed Race suicide survivor constantly writing poems. She graduated with a Bachelors in Social Work and a B.A. in English in May 2017. She graduated with a community practice-focused Masters in Social Work and Certificate in Applied Arts and Social Justice at the University of New England in May 2018. She is currently in Randolph College's low residency Masters in Fine Arts for Creative Writing focusing on Poetry. She has competed locally and nationally in slam since her freshman year at East Carolina University under the slam team Word of Mouth in Greenville, North Carolina. While with them, she has placed in the top 20 at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) in 2015, and opened for folks such as Indira Allegra, Neil Hilborn, and Angela Davis. Maya lives in Portland, Maine, where she was recently named as the city's poet laureate.
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Poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama's work centres around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. Working fluently on the page and with groups of people, Pádraig is a skilled speaker, teacher and group worker. His work has won acclaim in circles of poetry, politics, religion, psychotherapy and conflict analysis. Pádraig presents Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios a podcast that takes a deep dive into a single poem. With 4 million downloads of its first three seasons, Poetry Unbound from On Being is a powerful example of the appetite for poetry in dispersed and diverse populations.
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Valentina Solari and Eve Mosher:
Art in Motion, Body, and Place
Friday, July 30, 2021
4:00-5:30 pm (Eastern)
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Chilean-born circus performer Valentina Solari and US-born public visual and performance artist Eve Mosher will both join us from the UK to share the innovative ways they have used their art to engage communities in unconventional conversations about climate change. They are on the cutting edge of multidisciplinary art practice that merges with social activism. While taking on serious issues, their art invites audience members to dream, to see the invisible, and to embody the world.
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Valentina Solari
Valentina Solari started doing circus in Chile at the age of ten and through the years explored different movement techniques, sports and art forms. In 2015 she moved to Bristol to study Circus and Physical Theater at Circomedia, graduating in 2018. Valentina has performed at a variety of events both big and small — from small community projects to big festivals. At the moment her major interest is to create work that plays with the deconstruction and reimagining of circus skill and performance, as well as making artwork about the climate crisis.
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Eve S. Mosher
Eve S. Mosher is a cultural change entrepreneur working at the frontlines of climate change and the urban environment. She creates space for imagination and putting forth possible futures. Her work explores individual agency in transforming the systems that have led to this moment. She is uplifting what is possible through creative engagement, multi-sensory collaboration and radical imagination. She has been creatively working on the climate crisis since 2007, but none of her previous experience, accolades, press or degrees have adequately prepared her for the moment we are in.
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Allen Ewing-Merrill
Executive Director
Kay Ahmed
Office Manager
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Nicole Diroff
Program Director
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Aram Mitchell
Director of Partnerships & Formation
Ben Yosua-Davis
Director of Applied Research
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Our mission is to catalyze spiritual imagination with enduring wisdom for transformative faith leadership.
We equip and support faith leaders for theologically grounded and effective 21st-century ministries.
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