The First Coast is a mobile studio / exhibition space that travels to year-round coastal communities in Maine during the off-season. Through interviews, exhibitions, and soundwalks, TFC engages residents in conversation about their community’s working maritime identity and personal perspectives of place.
The First Coast is an initiative to collect sounds, stories, images, and ideas that contribute to a collective coastal memory and seek to reconstruct existing narratives and mythologies of both Maine and Mainers.
Video by Timber & Frame Media
In The Human Shore author John R. Gillis quotes the late John Cheever when he describes the “second coast.” A “port of gifts and antique shops, restaurants, [and] tearooms,” the second coast is a waterfront built around the nostalgia for a working past, for the “first coast.”
Gillis goes on to write, “The surrealism of the second coast is more and more obvious, the product of inlanders’ imaginations, sustained by their needs and desires.”
The First Coast is an effort to explore the stories and changing identity of the Maine coastline by creating a body of multimedia work that expresses the needs, desires, and histories of year-round coastal Mainers.
The mobile studio / exhibition space, The First Coast, traveled to Stonington and Lubec in Spring 2018, Jonesport and Beals in October 2018, and Bar Harbor in October 2019. The first exhibit and soundwalk premiered in October 2019 at the Lubec Brewing Company’s Tasting Room. You can view an online version of that exhibit, and listen to the soundwalk here.
Stay tuned for information about The First Coast exhibits and events, workshops, and future collaborative projects.
Summer homes off-season, Stonington, Maine. Photo by Jenny Rebecca McNulty for TFC.
The First Coast documents community stories, through collaborations with year-round residents.
TFC documentarians and storytellers work with the community to identify storytellers, stories, places, and sounds to record. By giving ownership to residents, we hope that The First Coast tells stories by Mainers, for Mainers. These stories are meant to serve the communities in which they are recorded. If you or your organization would like to host a storytelling/material gathering workshop, collaborate on local story ideas, or tell your own story, please email galen@thefirstcoast.org (for more information about community partnerships please visit our Partnership page).
Lubec, Maine photographed by Greta Rybus for TFC, 2018.
This is a crucial time to preserve, celebrate, and critique the changes happening along Maine’s coast.
The First Coast draws attention to those communities who still have access and still rely on the sea through community-driven storytelling and material collection.
The work produced for The First Coast exhibit tour is not intended as a commodity for tourists, rather, it is intended for the people who live and work by the sea. It is an effort to preserve a collective coastal memory and living maritime history.
In 2007, the Island Institute’s mapping project “The Last 20 Miles” reported that there is “approximately 20 miles of working waterfront access remaining on Maine’s 5,300-mile coast.”
Stonington Harbor, late March. Photo by Justin Levesque for TFC, 2018.
Want to get involved? We'd love to hear from you. Email galen@thefirstcoast.org
Follow the journey on Instagram!
