The premier urban park in the heart of Portland’s vibrant Arts District. The park features local art installations, community events, free wifi and more!
This winter, through free public programming and accessible amenities, Friends of Congress Square Park will ensure that Portland-area residents have a place to gather, enjoy access to the outdoors as well as the performing arts, and joyfully connect with friends and neighbors – all to fight the ongoing loneliness epidemic during Maine’s darkest and coldest months.
From December through February, in addition to a winter market and other special events, FoCSP will host weekly S’mores Nights, with cozy fire pits and free s’mores for all. These intimate gatherings will also feature local performers, including The Lavender Choir, Mayo Street Arts, Pine State Pitches choir, Ideal Maine Band, and many more. Now in its fourth year running, our winter programming has become a lifeline for social connection.
Your partnership and support will allow us to keep this lifeline available for thousands of community members, and help us break down social barriers and combat social isolation during a critical time of the year.
It’s that time of year again! We’re looking forward to another summer full of events in Congress Square Park, with the grand return of our market series featuring local makers of all sorts.
If you’re interested in vending, please click here to fill out our application form. There is no tabling fee (though we welcome donations), and we are always excited to host vendors who have no previous market experience.
We are so ecstatic to announce the return of our beloved winter programming in Congress Square Park, featuring weekly S’mores Nights beginning in December, our Cozy Winter Market on December 10th, and monthly Sip-Offs showcasing local food-makers and their creative takes on sippable treats. (And, of course, a delightful list of surprises.)
But none of it is possible without support from folks like you! If your business or organization would like to empower this kind of joy for our neighbors, please consider becoming a sponsor.
Submit your short animation to Animation Planet! We are a regionally organized film festival with the mission to create a shared platform to showcase animated films made by local animators of all animation mediums and experience levels. We hope to create a pathway for animators to expose their work to the public and to build upon Northern New England’s community of animation creators and appreciators. Submission Deadline is Tuesday, August 1st, 2023 at 12:00am. Event date: Friday September 8th, 2023 at Congress Square Park. If you have any questions OR interest in volunteering to run a demo or workshop related to animation, please email animationplanetfest@gmail.com
Please read the information below and find the application form link near the bottom of this post.
Friends of Congress Square Park (FoCSP) is the 501(c)(3) non-profit place manager of Congress Square Park, an urban public open space in downtown Portland. We seek to create an inclusive, welcoming, and vibrant community gathering place accessible to all through neighborhood engagement, programming, and the arts.
Congress Square Park sits at the heart of the Arts District and is located in the most economically diverse and densely populated neighborhood in Portland. The Park serves as the backyard for many of its neighborhood regulars, and our community members rely on the Park as a place to meet, rest, and access essential services. We are seeking an installation that enhances the Park as a gathering place and bring the community together. We encourage you to imagine a work that not only maintains in the elements (rain, wind, sunlight, street noise, wildlife, and human activity) but perhaps also responds to and excels in such natural exposure. Please consider how the work will be viewed and experienced by visitors utilizing the Park, walking by on Congress Street and High Street sidewalks, and driving by as well. Material selection is crucial to the life of public art. Consider materials that can withstand not just environmental elements but human interference as well (please note the what works well/what doesn’t section).
Most areas of the Park including curved stairs, lower plaza, and light poles are available for placement of work. All Park furniture, umbrellas, and planters, as well as planted garden beds may be incorporated on a case by case basis. Mobile Park furniture can be moved to accommodate installations. Park entrance to the Westin hotel may not be blocked. Handicapped walkways cannot be blocked, and adjacent building walls cannot be incorporated. The stage cannot be used.
Details:
Installation period will be early July – mid September, 2023. Artists may propose any type of three-dimensional work for the Park, including but not limited to: sculptures, suspended objects, and mixed media installations The selected artist will be paid a $2500 stipend Artists are responsible for supplying their materials FoCSP will supply cross-platform marketing, COVID-precaution supplies during install/deinstall, access to electricity and water supply during install/deinstall, original design signage, and a representative of FoCSP will be onsite during install/deinstall to provide support Artist will be notified of selection status by April 20, 2023 Stipend will be distributed upon receipt of final materials, due May 15, 2023 Submission of application does not guarantee selection There is no fee for applicatioon submission
What works well:
Items hung/suspended out of reach (banners, flags, etc) Heavy, stationary items with strong bases Color!
What doesn’t work well:
Materials within reach that can be broken (glass, soft plastic, etc) Loose or unattached items Materials within reach that are flammable Writing utensils
Required questions in the Application:
Preferred name Legal name Pronoun(s) Phone number Mailing address Web/social media handles you would like included in marketing Artist bio Title of proposed work Artist statement Physical description of proposed work Technical requirements Maintenance & safety plan Approximate dimensions of proposed work Materials Has this piece already been made Consent to press release
Required attachments in the Application:
Sketches or scale rendering of art work
Please review:
FoCSP Liability Info *This will require a signature only if you are selected. However, please review the document to be familiar with our policy. City of Portland Application for Temporary Art *This will require completion only if you are selected. However, please review the document to be familiar with the permit requirements. Map of Congress Square Park *Colored-in areas are not available for installation
If Selected you will be asked to:
Sign the FoCSP Liability Waiver Fill out a W-9 Participate in a scheduled Zoom meeting with FoCSP members and the City of Portland Temporary Art Committee for City permit approval Spend time in the park as your are crafting your work to observe how the community uses Congress Square Park
TO APPLY:
Fill out all information and attach necessary documents in the 2023 Art In the Park Open Call Google Form by April 5, 2023. Any questions about the application or installation series please contact Julia at art@congresssquarepark.org. Selected artist will be notified by April 20, 2023. Please note: Application acceptance must still be approved by the City of Portland.
The markets will be twice each month on Sundays from 11-3 starting on May 7th and running through the month of September, and will include a variety of local artists, makers, shops, and tasty treats. During the months of July and August, our markets will shift to an evening time slot of 5-9pm. And, of course, we also have our signature All Hallows’ and Cozy Winter Markets toward the end of the year.
As always, we will have lots of places to sit and linger.
There is no fee for vendors, but donations are greatly appreciated.
S’mores Nights are back! Join us every Thursday from 4-6pm starting December 1st all the way through February 23rd.
Cozy up around a fire pit and grab free s’mores fixins to craft your own treat! The Pink Waffle will also be on-site with hot beverages, and we’ll frequently have special guest food vendors and performers to enhance the vibe. (See below!)
S’mores Nights are free and open to all, with a suggested donation of $5. We’ll also have special edition S’mores Night blankets available for a suggested donation of $10. Click here to donate.
2021 was an incredible year for Friends of Congress Square Park! New events, new friendships, and a vibrant gathering place buoying the community through a pandemic. Check out the full annual report below.
Due to the success of our pop-up market series, we’re delighted to announce that we are bringing them back in 2022 and making them bi-weekly!
The markets will be every other Sunday from 11-3 starting on May 8th and running through the month of September, and will include a variety of local artists, makers, shops, and tasty treats. As always, we will have lots of places to sit and linger.
Our Board of Directors is delighted to announce that C.J. Opperthauser (pronouns: he/him/his) has been hired as the new Executive Director of Friends of Congress Square Park. C.J. started (remotely) at the beginning of the new year.
C.J. will be moving to Portland from Providence, Rhode Island, where he’s spent the past 6 years being heavily involved in the fields of placemaking, active transportation, and land use. After coordinating volunteers with WaterFire Providence, the famed art installation and beloved summertime event, he managed Grow Smart Rhode Island’s training program, was a CityWorks Fellow with DownCity Design, served as Events Chair on the board of directors of the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition, was a Programs Committee member of the Roger Williams Park Conservancy, and founded the pedestrian advocacy group WalkPVD. Through these roles, C.J. has served as a constant voice for safer, more vibrant, and more equitable public spaces and streets across the state.
C.J. grew up in Michigan and studied poetry at Central Michigan University, where he created and hosted an outdoor reading series, and Miami University in Ohio, where he also taught writing. His chapbook Cloud the Shape of Bedroom was published in 2016 by Tree Light Books, and he is a co-editor of the online literary publication Threadcount Magazine. While in Providence, C.J. helped execute many local public events, including the Providence Flea, Winter Lights Market, NecronomiCon, Jane’s Walk Providence, and Tour de Tentacle.
“I’ve visited Portland many times, and I’ve been consistently in awe of the array of dynamic, active public spaces peppered throughout the city,” C.J. says. “Congress Square Park has always been a favorite people-watching perch and spot to sip ridiculously good coffee, and I can’t overstate how thrilled and honored I am to be joining a team which has done so much good for the urban fabric of Portland and helped to cultivate community in this beloved public space. It’s truly a dream come true. I look forward to bringing a fresh perspective to the organization and enhancing our sustainability so that we can continue to provide this community with a vibrant place to enjoy the arts, grab a bite, and simply be together.”
Local artist Chris Miller developed Martha!, the final installation of the Friends of Congress Square Park Art In the Park series, FoCSP volunteer Julia Whyel had a remote interview with Chris to discuss his creative work.
Artist Statement: This installation is an adaptation of an artist’s book that I’ve been working on called Martha!, after the last known surviving Passenger Pigeon who died in 1914. The exclamation point is both for emphasis and the notation of a factorial, which is used to express large numbers in permutations and statistics. 7! for example, is equal to 7*6*5*4*3*2*1, or 5,040. Before their unexpected decline and eventual extinction, Passenger Pigeons were astonishingly abundant. Each page of “Martha!” shows 1!, 2!, 3!, 4!, 5!, 6!, and 7! birds, absent in flight. It’s a meditation and a recitation of big goings on; an exponential buildup and reciprocal count-down to zero. It’s a testing-to-failure of my own, for one, severely limited human capacity to comprehend vast quantities, to perceive truth at any considerable distance, to register gradual change and to reconcile singular identity with group identity. It’s a prayer for the overwhelmed and the imperfectly informed. Guilty, and guilty. There is however in these troubled times something hopeful about a counting book beyond comprehension. Enormous issues are on the table right now. I can’t imagine how we might achieve something like a just society, but I do believe that it lies within the realm of possibility. Wonderful, horrific and anything in-between, inconceivable things can happen so fast.
How did you become interested in passenger pigeons?
Parenthood is a big influence in my practice these days. My son has a sprawling interest in prehistory, we were reading about pleistocene megafauna and that research thread led to a list of more recent extinctions. There have been a few but the passenger pigeon comes up most in pop culture. You see a lot of articles about it because they were so plentiful. I’ve found drawings and read anecdotal stories about how they used to darken the skies, some accounts say they flew by in clouds for days on end, the sun would go down and come back up, and the passenger pigeons would still be going by. Then they disappeared relatively quickly. Extinction isn’t a cheery topic, but a lot of us are thinking on that scale these days I think.
How else does parenthood affect your creative practice?
It’s all consuming, for my family at least. I’ve got two boys, aged four and seven, they’re interested in everything. I get excited about the things they’re excited about. A question like “hey papa, are there any volcanoes in Maine?” can lead to a summer vacation in an unexpected place. It’s great to see the world through their eyes, and a lot of elements of my work probably come from that. A big interest in play, natural history. Sometimes their questions are wonderful prompts, they ask the craziest questions.
How do you approach design differently for indoors versus outdoor public spaces?
The thing about my work, there’s no bread and butter. Every project has its own unique set of requirements. So usually when I do something, it’s almost always something I’ve never done before, which I get excited about. My process and my education both started with building, having a background in sculpture and work in the building industry as a laborer, it’s a different starting place. Part of what I love about any project, whether it’s a residential interior that’s got some really unusual features or an outdoor sculpture installation, is just figuring out how the materials work, how to build things right so they’re durable, but also testing those boundaries a little bit. I decided on the materials for Martha!, when I saw nylon scraps on the laser cutter at my makerspace Open Bench Project, so I guess community is important in figuring out how to design for durability and how to understand materials.
Have your thoughts on public art changed at all this year?
It definitely has. My attitudes about it have shifted, in a visceral way. Experiences of quarantine and having those fears that we’ve all felt, especially in the early stages, got me thinking in different ways about what it should be and could be. That will keep evolving. But I had the urge to put a bunch of stuff out there, I had a creative burst and had the impulse to make things more deployable, less expensive. It’s got me thinking about what art can be out in the public sphere, especially in these challenging times.
You have a permanent installation in Bramhall Square on Congress Street, and that also has an animal element to it.
It’s a lot of the same material that inspired that. It features a lot of pleistocene megafauna like wooly mammoths, giant sloths, giant beaver. It’s a much different work, it’s an illustration, like an interpretive kiosk of the local history of the area. It’s drawn in charcoal in a pretty illustrative style and it’s captioned with a legend. It’s also an unusual use of materials, it’s a vinyl vehicle wrap printed from an original drawing to scale.
What are the connections of design and technology in your practice?
Some areas I’m really interested in focusing on are housing, it’s a much different approach than public art, but a lot of the same challenges that come up in public art come up there. I practice architecture in a limited way, I’ve worked for architects. Housing has been a special interest of mine because it’s something in the built environment that incorporates so many other things through the lens of domesticity. It’s also a problematic thing these days, we live in this incredibly overheated housing market, we have an enormous population of unhoused people, I’d like the opportunity to focus a lot more on those problems going forward.
Before Martha! was an installation, it was and is a book project, can you talk about the book and the potential of doing a printing?
This goes back to my kids being my conspirators, it is a counting book. I’m not sure exactly when the project started but it was in the early days of quarantine when everybody was having a rollercoaster of emotions. I was doom scrolling, worrying, being up late at night trying to get my head around all these things, around the numbers that were in the news. The mortality rates, the numbers of people marching in the Black Lives Matter protests. These huge, extremely consequential numbers everywhere, and the numbers kept changing and eventually they disappeared from your consciousness, these numbers started to flatten out into ‘big’ and ‘bad’. So Martha! was a counting book of enormously consequential numbers. It was an accordion book first, my hope is to cut a small edition and sell them with half the proceeds going to a worthy cause. I almost arbitrarily picked the Good Shepard Food Bank because when we were installing the piece in Congress Square Park I saw one of their vans pull up and they handed out meals. I know they’re serving the unhoused community in Congress Square Park, and it seems like it would be a fitting thing to try and support their activities.
For the past 6 years, April has been a month of great anticipation in Congress Square Park. Each year, our dedicated park volunteers come together after the cold winter months to wipe away the winter grime, clean out the flower beds, and get the Park ready for the upcoming season of art, eating, movie-watching, gardening, dancing, lounging, and above all — gathering with our friends and neighbors.
This April, we have found ourselves in uncharted territory as all of us deal with stay-at-home orders, homeschooling, isolation, and threats to our health and livelihoods.
As a result, Friends of Congress Square Park has decided to cancel all scheduled events at least through the end of June. We are also postponing the return of amenities like tables, adirondack chairs, and benches, likely until the end of June as well. We will work closely with the City of Portland and the Parks Department to determine when it is safe to bring back amenities and resume programming.
We know that for many of you, the Park is your outdoor living room and urban oasis. While the Park won’t be quite as colorful at least for the beginning of the season, we are committed to keeping the Park clean and working on the gardens so there will be natural beauty and color to brighten your day as you pass by or step outside for fresh air.
Together, over the past 6 years, we have created a beloved community gathering place – a place where neighbors can feel engaged and have fun. We’ve shown that well managed public spaces are essential for our mental and physical well-being, and that vibrant public places promote equity, improve community resilience, and strengthen local economies. The current physical isolation and business shut-down reinforces all of these lessons.
While we are forced to hit pause on our 2020 programming, please know that we are thinking about you and that you are not alone. We hope that the friendships and memories you have made in the Park will help to sustain you during this difficult time. We will be working on ways to bring some of those memories, art experiences, and social connections to you through social media over the coming weeks, so please stay tuned.
We will continue to work behind the scenes to plan for future programming and expand our organization’s capacity. Above all, we commit to continuing to care for this gem at the heart of our city so that it is ready to welcome us all back together as soon as it is safe to do so. Until then, thank you for being part of our park community.
