First Friday Art Walk: "Photos of the Year" & "Envision Resiliance"

Join us for February's First Friday Art Walk and the opening receptions of 2024 Portland Press Herald Photos of the Year & Envision Resilience. 

About the exhibits:

2024 Portland Press Herald Photos of the Year
Photographer and essayist Robert Adams wrote that "the job of the photographer is not to record indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope." 

The best images captured by Portland Press Herald photographers this year do just that. They are truthful yet manage to convince us of life's beauty. 

There is the soaring delight of a young couple swinging in a snowscape by Derek Davis, or the almost holy light falling on a woman searching for rats under a bridge by Greg Rec. A sublime beauty transcends its subject matter in Shawn Ouellette's photo of a surfer alone, looking out into an endless sea and sky. Ben McCanna's photo of hazmat-clad firefighters at a training exercise combines wit with a freshness of vision. And Brianna Soukup's graceful images of families dealing with tragedy show the love that binds them, and us, together. 

These are the photos from 2024 that left an impression on us.

Envision Resilience: Designs for Living in a Changing Climate

The Envision Resilience: Designs for Living in a Changing Climate exhibition is now open! Running from late January through mid-March in Portland Public Library's Community Gallery, the exhibition's opening celebration - a free community open house - will be held on Friday, February 7, 2025, in conjunction with Creative Portland’s First Friday Art Walk.  

Curated by local artist Brian Smith, the Envision Resilience: Designs for Living in a Changing Climate exhibition features innovative and adaptive architectural and landscape design concepts by student teams that took part in the 2024 Envision Resilience Portland and South Portland Challenge.

The Envision Resilience Portland and South Portland Challenge semester brought together graduate and undergraduate students studying urban planning, architecture, environmental justice, and landscape architecture to connect with community stakeholders for an iterative process of researching, developing, and proposing adaptive solutions for vulnerable sites along the cities’ coastlines. Participating institutions included Cornell University, Harvard University, the University at Buffalo, the University of Maine at Augusta, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, Yale University, and the program’s first international partner, the University of Toronto. Students immersed themselves in the culture, values, and history of Portland, South Portland, and the Casco Bay Island communities to develop innovative design strategies that address through the lens of climate and adaptation, challenges like affordable housing, transportation, urban heat, equity, local industry, and ecology.  

The exhibition serves as a call to action, encouraging the public to envision neighborhoods, working waterfronts, parks, housing, and infrastructure with hope. Punctuating the designs throughout the exhibition is a compelling collection of artwork by Lin Snow, whose work examines the natural world through a vivid chromatic lens. 

This marks the first in a series of displays throughout Portland and South Portland that showcase the students’ design proposals from the fall 2024 semester.