Anita Clearfield and Geoffrey Leighton from Litchfield, Maine profile aprolific Maine artist and activist in Natasha Mayers: an Un-Sill Live.

Mayers inspires audiences as a truthful, fun-loving role model.

Known as the "most committed activist artist ” in Maine, Senator George Mitchell called her a “state treasure.

” This film won the Made Here Film Festival Best Documentary award, when this brand-new event in partnership with VTIFF launched in early 2021.You can watch Natasha Mayers: an Un-Still Life and many other Made Here stories about the region streaming on Vermont PBS.org and through (car engine humming) (upbeat music) (anticipatory music) (shovel scraping) (paintbrush swishing) - I actually like the term "activist artist," much better than "political artist," mostly because people pigeonhole you that way.

(upbeat music) And I'm not just a political artist, I use my art to tell stories.

I use my art to make people think.

I use my art to entertain my community, and also to find out who I am.

(upbeat music) I fell in love with painting when I was teaching nursery school and the kids were painting and I just wanted to paint.

I would paint sometimes 12 hours a day.

And some days, I was painting so many hours, that in the morning it felt like the little fairies had come and finished my painting, I didn't remember at what stage I had left it, and sometimes the paintings just felt done by somebody else.

And it was always something exciting, magical.

And I usually have four or five, six paintings going at once.

(piano music) I like how things appear, you didn't plan on.

And now that I have cataracts, my God (laughs) I am seeing so many things in my paintings.

So you know, it's just like, this little smudge all of a sudden, determines what the painting is, 'cause I see something there.

(piano music) I love the give and the take, the painting talks to me.

(piano music) I'll avoid painting for the morning, part of the morning, often.

And like this morning, I went out skating from eight to nine.

It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, before the ice got too soft And then I'll avoid painting for a bit longer.

(laughs) And I'll finally sit down, and then I have to just always get up every 10 or 15 minutes, because I'm sitting on something that's not that comfortable and I'm getting older and stiff.

So, sometimes I'll take a nap at 10 at night, for half hour or an hour, and then I'll stay up till two.

Painting is, it's just that ultimate challenge.

I'm never satisfied.

I might be satisfied for an hour, or for a day or two or three.

But since I don't usually know what it's gonna look like ahead of time, there's always that excitement.

You know, creating something you've never seen before and trying to figure out what it's about.

(old-time TV music) Hey Kathy, why are we up so high?

- We're out to change the world, Natasha.

- Hey Kathy, you haven't seen what I did with the present you brought me.

- What present?

- You brought me a box of fluorescent paint.

- [Kathy] Wow.

- That you had seen a lot of them, and I went back in with a fluorescent paint.

(laughs) So I took one of those monochromatic ones, and I did put some fluorescent paint in it, but so-- - I like it.

- You like it?

- Well, don't you?

Why did you just put it here and not everywhere?

- So I go, so it wouldn't be quite such an overall pattern.

- It already is an overall pattern.

- But I thought if I put some around the edge and in here, that it'd give a little more push and pull to it.

- Well, what you get is a crowd feeling, but it could also be the same person over and over again.

I'm really tickled that you went back in some and added color.

- [Natasha] I'm giving them different faces and different shapes, but they're all chairs.

- [Kathy] They're not very different though.

- [Natasha] No, they're not.

White, they're all white.

- [Kathy] We might notice they're all white more, if one of them weren't white.

- Oh, uh-huh.

[Natasha] I sometimes feel like a painting doctor.

With other people, I can always tell on somebody else's painting, what's working, what isn't.

And on my own work, it's a little bit harder, but I'm always, always adjusting, you know, dissatisfied, adding, it might just be that I add one line to what I'm working on.

But we've been doing this a long time, Kathy.

I kind of forget where we're headed.

- Do you think it's like mine?

- Do you love it.

- I think it's wonderful.

It is both sweet and cruel.

Look at how nasty you made that guy.

I think we're on the right course.

- Okay, I'm following you though.

- I'm following you, Natasha.

- Then we can end up in circles then.

- I like that.

(birdsong) [Natasha] I went down to the river, and I picked fiddleheads.

My daughter, Sienna, do you remember her?

She's now mid-30s, but when she was about eight or nine, she started counting everything on the wall.

One, two, three, four, five.

She got up to 287 things on the wall.

And she said, "I quit."

(laughs) I'm lucky to have a lot of artists who are friends, and we've traded work over the years.

I've bought some work from the adults with mental illness that I work with at two social clubs.

My kids art work, of course, I love to live with.

So there's a lot of Maine artists in this room.

- And I've got actually several of your prints that I think I-- - Actually bought.

- Well, I actually bought, but I feel like I didn't give you enough for them.

- Yes, their monetary value... - We have trouble with, we don't like in a way selling paintings, because of the relationship between art and money, and all that stuff.

But on the other hand, when you can actually help somebody else by giving them money for their paintings.

- And I grew up in a very difficult household where my dad could not talk about money, could not bill his patients.

He just accepted whatever they gave him.

And I grew up with that same.

- And he was a doctor.

- Yes, a psychiatrist.

And he had this terrible psychological problem, not being able to bill (laughing).

And it was because he didn't know how to value himself and what he had to offer, I think, and I think I've...that's rubbed off on me.

I feel what I do is valuable, in starting Artists' Rapid Response Team and working with adults with mental illness and making my own work, I do feel that it's valuable work.

I just don't know how to put any monetary value.

I hate the notion that it has a monetary value.

- When I moved to Maine back in 1970 and came down to Brunswick to a meeting, and I think that's when I met Natasha for the first time.

She was so far beyond where I was in the use of art.

And I thought, "Geez, I'd like to do that."

I mean, it was the way that...the passion with which she was engaged.

It wasn't that she was making a lot of money, she wasn't.

You know, but whatever the issue was, somehow there she was either involved with people with mental challenges or putting art in a storefront about homelessness or marching in front of something, carrying a banner.

I thought, "Gee, that is my idea of what it means to be an artist."

(quietly emotional music) - I had my first child in 1981.

And while I was pregnant, the work became more symbolic of sparks going out and messages going out over the telephone poles.

And I started situating myself at the center of the world before the baby came and knocked me off center.

There was a period when I went outside and I did roads.

After 9/11, I did a whole series of maps, war maps, of what war might look like in Maine, because we were making war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So there's some maps of farms and cows upside down and bombs landing in little league fields and giant lobsters.

And I showed those at the Portland Museum of Art back about, I think it was 2005.

(bomb explodes) - [TV announcer] Overnight Airstrikes lighting up the Syrian sky.

(missile fires) (drumbeat and cars driving in slush) - They're having the christening today, of the Aegis missile destroyer.

(missile fires) I've seen on the news, pictures of people that are hit by missiles from these destroyer ships that are built right here.

I've been to more demonstrations than I can count.

I'm the one wearing the carbon footprint.

I remember getting arrested at Tom Allen's office long time ago, and it was on the news.

And I went to my mechanic, we always scrapped about political stuff.

And he was in the absolute opposite side of everything, but he saw me get arrested and he had a total change of attitude about me.

He really respected me for sticking my neck out, that to me was an enormous lesson.

People respect you if you stand up for things.

When I was standing on the sidewalk in front of a whole group of policemen, I was overhearing them talking about how... and one said to the other, "You know, this is what America is all about.

This kind of freedom of expression.

This is a good thing."

It was snowing, and it was slushy.

And the police thought it was too dangerous for us to be in the street.

(ominous music) So we moved toward the gate onto the sidewalk, but we never intended to enter the BIW property or to disrupt the christening event.

Nine of us got arrested.

(background talking) I never expected, I'd get so much help from the police.

There were two of them.

So there were four hands helping me untie the knots that held the carbon footprint under my chin.

(talking) - they can take care of it... General Dynamics owns BIW, and that's one of the 10 top weapons manufacturers in the entire world.

They could diversify.

Why aren't we launching $7 billion worth of solar panels?

And why aren't we launching a ship to go get rid of plastics out of the ocean?

People are gonna die from missiles that are launched by this ship, and the ship is going into the Kennebec River right here today.

I have to do what I can to stop it.

(serious music and drumbeat) We posted bail and they set a court date in a couple of months.

I don't know if I'm gonna have to go to jail and how long they could keep me.

- For me, and I assume for Natasha, the only way we can be in the world and understand what's going on and help to mediate how we feel is to make pictures about it.

If you let what's happening in the world totally into you and you don't have a way to transfigure it and then move it back out, it'll destroy you, I think.

I mean, if you really feel it, I mean, I think that's why so many people have to be in denial because they have no way to process what's actually going on.

One thing artists do is make pictures about it.

So they take that difficult experience and then shape it and then move it back outside of themselves.

[Rob] Right, is everything in here possible for the show?

[Natasha] Oh yeah (laughs) I have a show coming up at the Harlow Gallery, and it's hard for me to know what to put into a show.

So I asked Rob to come over because he has such a good eye.

- I mean, I would include this, for instance.

It's different than the others, and often a lot of your work is about the relationship of the oppressor to the oppressed, and how both the oppressor and oppressed are enslaved then.

I mean, here, I mean, in order-- - They're attached.

- Well, they're attached, I mean in order to be the wall, you have to stay in place.

You can't move.

- [Natasha] Yeah.

- [Rob] You're stuck.

- [Natasha] Yeah.

- As difficult as a lot of the subjects that Natasha deals with, as difficult as those subjects are, in the process of lifting that burden outside of herself, she is able to add into it, all these different aspects of her personality.

So it's got humor, it's got anger, it's got love.

It's got outrage, it's got grief.

It's got all those things...become part of it.

I mean, after that, you know, cooking inside of her for a while, it then becomes this product for other people to look at and think about.

I would maintain that all art is political.

I mean, you choose to paint landscapes when the house is on fire, that's pretty political.

I mean, what you're suggesting is, "Oh, this will look good behind the couch," and the couch is going to be gone soon.

So yeah, all art is political, but the artists who do that work, do pay a price for it because it isn't a commodity.

By doing political art, you're usually choosing not to sell your work.

People don't buy political art much, so it is hard, but on the other hand, she's free.

I mean you choose, you know, when you choose to make these kinds of statements, you get a different kind of freedom.

You aren't afraid of going anywhere, you know, and using-- - Well, they take me.

You know, it's not like I had that idea ahead of time.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- It was like, I just wanted to continue that tie right down.

I wanted it to make them exposed, take their pants off.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- And so it came to me in the painting, you know, the painting process.

- Yeah, right.

- I was doing really serious, deadly serious, dead body work before -- (nervous laugh) corpses and people...The Disappeared, I did a big series about "les desaparecidos" of Latin America, and probably the biggest change for me was going to Bread and Puppet Circus in Vermont, somewhere in the '80s and seeing how the puppeteers from Latin America all were funny, all used humor, all used satire.

Now, some of them had to, in order to get past the censorship.

All the North Americans and Europeans were deadly serious.

And it was such a great lesson that you could actually tell a better story and get more response and be more effective if you could somehow find a way to use humor.

(gong sound) Which way is better, Deb?

- [Deb] Can you do it this way?

Probably, the other way, yeah.

(traffic) Great, here are more of these.

- Thanks.

Yeah.

[Deb] There's that wall there, and we could put something up there too.

- And that one.

Or it could go, we could have this military section, all these military guys in hoods.

(tense music) Well, the "Men in Suits" started about a year before "Occupy."

It was the time of the big crash.

And I saw how the banks were responsible for all this and the "banksters."

And it was at Space Gallery.

And I showed about 250, 300 postcards that had little tiny men in suits all over the world.

Just kind of taking over.

After that whole postcard series, now, they're inhabiting my paintings and they swarm and they swindle and they plot and they trade and they gamble in the paintings and they loom over people and they commandeer the landscape and they get away with doing whatever they want to do.

(dramatic music) So, you know, this is quite a few years now that I'm stuck on these men in suits, and the subject continues to interest me, especially with the White House now under control of somebody who's in a big red tie.

So you know, a lot of it has to do with having a vocabulary that's unique to me that I don't get tired of.

Did you see that guy out there?

That was my scarecrow in the garden all summer, scarecrow.

Oh, you know, it's always a great thing to get my work out of the house and to see it up, to see it as a body of work.

And then of course, I love an opportunity to see my friends because I don't give parties anymore.

So it's nice for people to come.

(sparkling music) (footsteps) (foghorn blowing) I've been working for 37 years with adults with mental illness, and their work, their art work has shown me the way oftentimes to use my artwork to express my feelings.

Hi.

Come on in.

I had to do the PR.

I had to make the lists of what kind of food, I had to ask people to help which is hard for me to do.

But, you know, plus, all this matting, shrink-wrapping and framing.

For years I've told almost everybody, when they ask me about it, I say, "This is what keeps me honest as an artist."

And by that, I mean that I need to have a little more touch, be in touch with my own art.

I need my work to resonate a little bit more maybe with other people.

(speaking faintly) - That's a bureaucrat.

Natasha drew some pictures of business people.

So I did one of my own.

- [Natasha] I love this work, I love this work.

(birds chirping) (spoons on dishes, murmuring) [Marguerite } And so, as a sculptor, I'm not going to go into an open space and plop something down and call myself a public artist.

I'm gonna go and see what needs to be done and then respond to that and work with the people.

- Well, I don't know if it's a question of age now, a matter of age, that collaboration is so important to me now.

It brings me so much pleasure.

I love the point at which when we started this Artists' Rapid Response Team, the first year, we kind of, we signed the banners, I think, with our names on the back.

And then, and then I think by the end of that first year, we stopped signing them.

- Yeah.

- It was anonymous.

You know, it was wonderful that we didn't take credit, you know.

(bright upbeat music) I helped start an amazing group of artists who get together once-a-month and we call ourselves the Artists' Rapid Response Team.

And we make banners for all our progressive issues in the state.

I brought artists together from the Union of Maine Visual Artists and from other venues and different groups and that work that we've done together has always been the most satisfying to me.

And so this seemed like the perfect way to get people together, to do something important, to do something that's really helpful, that's a way so we don't have to feel guilty about not going to meetings and not going to demonstrations that we could make something for all our favorite causes.

I think, we've made over 400 banners so far.

Activism right now is just too hard because it's just too many issues.

So (laughs) how do you choose an issue these days?

How do you feel effective?

Have you chosen a couple of issues.

- It's all important.

I mean, it's just very difficult for you then.

But I do feel like it ought to be local on some level and concentrated, I mean, focused.

- That's one of the things that draws me to you, is that level of place.

And I rooted myself here and I painted, helped people in the town paint the history of the town on the telephone poles, and-- - [Lucy] I love this.

But all three of us are negotiating this business about being in a place and being responsible and caring most about the place and also trying to deal with the larger world and-- - And bringing that larger world into the local.

Because I really care what happens in my community.

And then a lot of the work that I've done as an artist in residence with helping communities and school kids make murals -- over 600.

- Okay, everybody, to table.

Grab a chair.

- What a lovely group.

We've got a great day ahead of us because we've got three students from the University of Maine at Orono come down to paint a banner for the Earth Day Committee.

- [Student] "Earth Day, Every Day" was sort of the general theme that we're thinking about -- It's like a big banner to have hanging down in Pickering Square to just sort of help draw people in and let them know about the event.

Any guidance that you guys have to offer us, like that size right there, I don't know if that's what you normally tend to do, but that's like perfect, yeah.

- [Natasha] That's a little bit bigger than a normal, but we can think about it... - [Student] Okay.

- [Artist] That one's a little too long to carry in a parade.

- Yeah.

so, the shorter ones are easier to... - [Student] Okay, yeah, we're flexible.

- [Natasha] So we've got to cut, you guys can cut and measure a seven foot, and then you're gonna work on gun control, you're working on this... - Nothing about us, without us, is for us.

And I always repeat that in my lectures, saying, "Get it?

Nothing about us, without us, is for us," because I think it's just a brilliant phrasing of what we all care about -- is that really, it's difficult to work with communities and it's much harder to do what all of us are doing.

I mean, to work with people who have to be worked with on a really equal, respectful basis for a long time before they are willing to work with you.

- You know, it is hard for me as an artist to have that patience to listen and to wait and to trust.

- Trouble is, we're so good at preaching to the choir, the activists are - Oh, we're good at that.

I'm so good at that.

(all laughs) - We're the choir.

- Most people appreciate something handmade.

They appreciate something that looks like people made an effort that it's unusual.

Sometimes it's humorous.

We reach people in ways that are low tech.

It's very direct.

You know, you make something beautiful and you can hold it right at the front of the march.

And people want to be seen with it, people want to photograph it.

I'm really glad when young people work with us.

I worry when I think about the future, who's going to carry on this work?

It's really important to have young people come and join us.

One of the banners we made was for the immigrant community in Maine, and it had painted lobster buoys hanging on a lobster shack and each one represented a different country.

So you saw the flag of a country painted on it.

And then somebody said, "Why don't you paint real buoys?"

This is a symbol of Maine, the lobster buoys are everywhere in Maine and tourists who come to Maine buy these things.

So we thought that if we put a flag and make one buoy per country, there's more than 70 countries that you guys come from, that we would paint flags on the buoys and we will hang them.

Come on over guys.

I've got to assign you a country.

I think there's somebody coming from Jordan.

And you?

- Turkey.

- Turkey?

There was an exhibit of 400 years of immigration in Maine up at the Maine Historical Society.

So we thought, let's work with a bunch of kids, in an afterschool program.

And these kids were all children of refugees and immigrants.

Our goal was going to be the 78 countries represented in the Portland School System.

(people chattering) - [Male] He's doing the lines with a charcoal.

(people chattering) - And we hung them right on Congress Street in Portland.

And they stayed there all through the winter, snow and rain, and we had some hanging from the tree, but they were all in front of the Longfellow House on that amazing iron fence.

And so we kept making more, we kept making more and we made a complete set for the Jetport.

And everybody arriving at the Jetport, will go right by the banner that we made and they'll see 78 buoys hanging along the windows as they exit.

And so we kept making more.

We kept making more, and we made enough to hang in the skywalk at USM.

The day after the election, hundreds and hundreds of post-it notes just started appearing hanging on the windows below these buoys, welcoming refugees saying, "We've got your back.

We love you.

We'll take care of you.

We won't like ICE get you."

You know, all sorts of messages of hope.

(clanking ladder, chain) Finally, the day came for our trial.

- Hearing in court is now in session.

The Honorable Justice Daniel Billings presiding.

- [Judge] That's not how this is supposed to work.

The city, in considering whether it's a lawful order or not, has to consider the bigger picture and not simply focus on the views of BIW.

- [Natasha] After the first day, the judge dismissed it because he said, "There's not a case here anymore."

When he realized that the Bath Police Department was virtually working for BIW, Bath Iron Works, and we had a right to be there, but I'll keep protesting.

This is my neighborhood, my community, and it's building these warships and these are the best boat-builders in the world.

I wish they were building something that wasn't so destructive.

- All rise.

(audience cheering, clapping) (missiles firing) ('splat' sound effects) (birds) (murmuring voices in distance/water splashing) - So we're gonna go up and over the cat.

Every year, there's a 4th of July parade here in Whitefield and being in it is one of the favorite things I do as an artist.

A bunch of us get together to plan a theme for the float and then we march in the parade.

One year, it was about "Saving the Bees," and another year it was "Buy Local."

And the theme another year was "Climate Change".

And another year we did drones with a surveillance theme.

Sometimes we're just silly that way and sometimes it's poking fun at issues, and a way to get together with other friends in the community and do something that would be meaningful, not just fun, but layer it, with a little meaning, layer it with a little more serious meaning as these years got more serious.

So here I am, I'm drawing a Trump guy with a wall.

So thinking that that was gonna be it.

And here, I'm drawing some guard towers, - oval round eggshell.

This will help hold it stiff.

(laughter) And there'll be a hole, face hole cut here.

I've got a lot of props, I've got a lot of ideas and I don't know how many people are gonna show up and a lot of people just don't let me know until the night before they'll call up and say, "Oh, could I be in it?"

That's the role that I play.

Maybe the trickster role, maybe a little bit the prankster and the jokester.

(upbeat music) ...kind of be moving slowly.

Okay, it has to lay... - Pull it down more, and it should go maybe in-between your legs, yeah.

(drum marching music) (engine roaring) (crowd/sirens) One year somebody threw eggs at us, but most of the time people are curious, they might love us, they might hate us but they come to see what we're gonna do.

(drumming marching music) (Yankee Doodle fife & drum music) When somebody gets in touch with their creativity, I think that that's when they feel they have a power and they have a sense of themselves and that they can do anything.

And if you can create something out of nothing, you have the power to affect change, and to feel good about who you are.

So that's been a motivation for me for many years in teaching and that's where I have a lot of hope that this younger generation, is going to be telling the truth, is going be asking important questions, is going be making us change our ways, and we have to follow them.

(Yankee Doodle marching music fades...to skates on ice) (upbeat piano music)