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SPIRAL Arts offers opportunities to people of
all ages and life experiences who are seeking hope, purpose, and meaning,
to create art in a supportive, spiritually centered, caring community.
Non-profit community arts
organization
SPIRAL Arts was founded in 1992, it is a small non-profit community
arts organization in Portland, Maine, which seeks
to make the arts available and accessible to people of all ages and from all walks of
life. In inter-generational classes and workshops, a deep and lasting community
grows among people of great diversity as they make and share art together.
Reaching
out to isolated people
SPIRAL Arts reaches out to city people isolated by poverty, racism,
classicism, loneliness, mental illness, special needs, AIDS, aging, terminal or serious
illness, abuse and neglect, sexual orientation, or religion -- whatever isolates an
individual, family, or group of people.
Innovative programming
SPIRAL Arts is a unique and innovative program. It brings
opportunities for art making to the people, helping them to discover resources for growth
within themselves. It seeks to work with those who are disenfranchised, isolated,
marginalized, and help them become integrated into a caring and supportive community.
Building community
SPIRAL Arts seeks to build a community grounded in hope that is
inter-generational, cross class, interfaith, multi-cultural and and multi-racial --
inclusive in every sense of the word. It breaks down barriers of stereotyping and
fear through creating in community.
Collaboration
SPIRAL Arts is founded on collaboration. The organization brings
opportunities for artistic creativity into the business world, demonstrating how the
creative process is the basis for creative collaborations, team building, and staff
rejuvenation. It provides opportunities for new and experienced artists to share
their gifts of artistic expression with people of great diversity, serving as companions
on the journey of creativity. Most of the artists who teach at SPIRAL Arts also take
other courses with the organization to nurture their own creative skills.
A model program inspired by
the liberation movements of the Third World
As a program, SPIRAL Arts is relatively inexpensive due to its
use of volunteers, interns, recycled materials, donated space from community
institutions. Due to nationwide publicity SPIRAL Arts has received calls from around
the country asking about the organizations model of transformation and community building
through the arts. In reality, SPIRAL Arts can be duplicated anywhere and adapted to
any situation, be it rural, suburban, or urban, secular or religious. The raw
materials of creativity and the limitless possibilities for collaboration are available
anywhere in our entire world. The people of the Third World, whose lives are
grounded in creative expression, whose liberation movements are often fired by art and
music, are models of this reality.