The start of a new arts center celebrated

FARMINGTON – A crowd applauded as ceremonial ground was broken today to celebrate the construction start of the new 15,000 square foot Emery Community Arts Center on the University of Maine at Farmington campus.

“This is a great day,” said a smiling Theo Kalikow, UMF’s president, “It’s been 10 years in the making.” It was a decade ago when it was first announced that $5 million had been anonymously given to the university to create an arts center with the stipulation it be named for former Farmington residents Ted and Marguerite Emery, both arts enthusiasts and beloved members of the community, and that it should be shared by UMF and community artists.

“The anonymous donor trusted us to figure it out,” Kalikow said referring to the process in finding just what this community arts center should look like.

The arts center’s design, created by designLAB Architects of Boston, was based on years of visionary work by a committee made up of a cross section of art-involved community members and UMF faculty and staff. The result of their work is a building that will offer studio, stage performance and gallery spaces that will provide the latest in multimedia technologies. The center, to be completed one year from now, will be constructed between UMF’s Alumni Theatre and Merrill Hall.

Janet Mills, Maine’s attorney general and a Farmington native, remembered taking Mr. Emery’s math class and the late Mrs. Emery’s busy involvement in the community and community chorus. She said the arts center will be just that – a community arts center.

“In this new place—“The Emery” no doubt it will be called—there will be songs sung, space created, histories recited, rhythms reborn; love illuminated; dance, duets and drama, poetry applauded, videos and montages; multimedia, movement and music,” Mills said. (Ms. Mills speech, in its entirety, is posted below.)

Alison Hagerstrom, executive director of the Greater Franklin Development Corporation, reminded those attending, art’s reach encompasses not only an essential, unique cultural aesthetic, but an economic one as well.

“The culturally rich arts economy we already have will be enhanced by the Emery Community Arts Center and that will benefit the Farmington community and greater Franklin County,” Hagerstrom predicted.

Afterward, Bill Berry of Farmington, a former geology professor who worked for Ted Emery at UMF beginning in 1970, said the arts center honor couldn’t have gone to a more deserving person.

“He was a superb administrator, a real people person. He inspired everybody who worked with him,” Berry said. 

Through all of this, Ted Emery stood smiling in the sunshine. Before the speeches started, he said he was pleased an arts center would be standing completed and ready to open in a year on the spot where he stood now.

“It’s not every day you get a building named after you,” Mills reminded her former math teacher. At that, he smiled some more and said, “That’s true.”

EMERY COMMUNITY ARTS CENTER GROUNDBREAKING
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010
SPEECH BY ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET T. MILLS

Nearly six decades ago the Emerys entered the life of this community.

Ted Emery – high school teacher, freshman basketball coach, a community leader, engaging director of the Pilgrim Fellowship, baritone, father of four, a person who was popular with students and parents alike.

I remember his confident smile; square-jawed, intelligent, self-composed, patient, teaching math to some of the most stubborn public school learners.

It is from him that I learned the difference between an isosceles triangle, an equilateral triangle and a scalene (or “wicked crooked’) triangle; I learned that triangles are really in the makeup of all things, that they are everywhere, and that I needed to understand them.

It is undoubtedly because of Mr. Emery that a number of my high school classmates did well later in life… that Roger Austin became a first class doctor, that Hugh Campbell became an engineer, Betty McCleary earning her MBA from Harvard, Alden Smith an appraiser, Sue Grant a successful businesswoman.

And because of him I got over my fear of math so that I have been able to calculate billable hours and work on state budgets.

Later Mr. Emery, switching from town to gown, had an important role in upgrading faculty and programs at UMF. He chaired the combined math & science dept. (imagine, sort of like combining English and history), then served as academic vice president, and acting president at around the time Judith Sturnick arrived here.

He was part of dramatic changes on this campus.

At the same time, Marguerite emery was the original ‘super woman’ – den mother, teacher, conductor, mother of four busy boys, choir mistress,… I remember her pale arms waving in the air, baton tilted at the sky, focused and always in charge; her smile rivaling her husband’s, she was enjoyable company, good natured but no nonsense, always on time and in tune,…brown hair pushed back behind the ears, defiant of bobby pins and makeup. And when she ever slept no one knew.

It is because of her that I still begin to harmonize when the national anthem comes on before a ball game, going into my mid-alto default mode, second nature, enjoying it, still performing for Mrs. Emery.

She was part of the change in our growing hearts, a community icon, like our friends Bill & Irene Berry— good friends of the Emerys—who are here today.

Our community is rich in culture, far beyond its population and its geography, the expectations of the Delorme Atlas.

It has taken many dedicated hard working individuals to put this community on the map, to make it known to the wider world that we care and appreciate music, theater, visual and fine arts, that we have one of the best public school music departments in New England, that we are a place where every child learns strings, wind, percussion and song.

It has taken strong, talented and persistent people to create this culture: 

Musicians like the Beacham family, the Gellers, the Sytsmas, Joel and Patricia Hayden, Dennis Hayes and Karen McCann; Jane Parker, Steve Pane, Lily Funahashi, Phil Carlsen, Dan Woodward, Bruce Mcginnis, Steve Muise, Carol Shumway, Coleen Hickey, and all those who have taught, learned and played at UMF’s summer music camps and jazz camps.

It has taken theater professionals like Nick Scott, Deb Muise, Andy Southard, Jayne Decker, Bobbie Hanstein, Dan Ryder and, for many years, Randy Emery, Ted & Marguerite’s second eldest son.

We’ve been blessed by mulitdisciplinary teachers like Margaret Gould Wescott, Sarah Maline; art teachers and artists like John Scarcelli, Donna Seegars, Tom Higgins, Janice Scott, Jack Schneider, Melanie Farmer, Marni Lawson, Ron Parlin, Annette Parlin.

Their love of the arts will be the foundation of this great glassy edifice.

Now we will have a locale to display our community and collegiate talents, a place for us to come together, to teach and show students and strangers alike the joys of performing, of listening, of seeing things in an uncommon light, of stretching the arms of the soul and of growing the imagination, freeing the spirit.

This place will bridge two historic chambers— We will keep and connect with the old—the black box “Alumni Theater,” where plays have been performed on a shoe string in an old basketball court, the intimate setting for thousands of remarkable performances, rehearsals and lessons in live theater,— and the Nordica Auditorium, where the voice of the great diva has echoed for the nearly ten decades since her death on a faraway island.

What makes a campus? What makes a community? 
The bricks & mortar and the history,
the architecture and the humanity,
the people and their appreciation of life, work and art.

In this new place—“The Emery” no doubt it will be called—there will be songs sung, space created, histories recited, rhythms reborn; love illuminated; dance, duets and drama, poetry applauded, videos and montages; multimedia, movement and music.

Time will be suspended, perceptions changed,
the indoors brought out of doors, and the outside in,
minds and souls expanded, dreaming, doing and growing.

A ‘green’ building, fitted with nature,
these walls will have new angles,
and the lives within them too.
And there will be,
I am sure,
abundant harmony, and…lots of lovely triangles.

Let us break ground together and bestow our many blessings and the good will of those who went before us on the edifice we are about to build here.

Thank you.