_ABOUT
Hannah Elizabeth Bevens is a Performative Public Service Worker. Drawing upon their professional training, education, and lived experience as a sensitive and curious person, Hannah has developed a practice that provides necessary services for the public community to promote supported risk taking and creative problem solving skills in a diverse and trusting social landscape. Hannah believes that by performing services to engage community in gentle acts of simple, social interaction and understanding while in public settings and contexts, we can form a future where stress and pain feel less uniquely isolating and more as an opportunity to hold and be held in the process of releasing individual and collective suffering.
For deeper understanding:
Performative
To perform is to carry out an action or task with the added intent of presentation or expression. This could be getting dressed, asking for a desired item, or walking from one place to the other. These simple activities are not only to fulfill a need or want— one needs to be warm and protected, one needs to feel and satisfy desire, and one needs to move about the landscape. These are also activities that present a choice for how they will be carried out by the person doing them. How will I dress to show my personality and temperament? How will I ask for a beverage from the clerk to show I am grateful? How will I walk through this field to show I am mindful of the space around me? These are opportunities to communicate emotion without language, yet still informed by our biography and understanding.
In performing public services, I work to use the opportunity for showing equitable care, compassion, trust, fortitude, and patience.
Public
A way to describe the space and context accessible to a community as an equal whole. When we engage in our public spaces, we are inherently asked to consider our surroundings— the environment, and fellow human beings and creatures who live within it. This is not for shame or pride, but simply because it is our responsibility to act in degrees of service to each other. In practicing this through thoughtfulness and respect, we uphold our responsibility and assist, with a natural equity, in the maintenance of a constantly shifting emotional landscape, weathered by chance.
In performing public services, I work to consider my story and yours, in relation to the equal, whole story, so that the public context provides a foundation for equitable action where necessary.
Service
A service is an act done for the benefit or aid of another individual, organization, or specific demographic. This word carries a deep history defined by the forced sacrifice of individuals based on fabricated and divisive systems, still in existence today, to promote and secure assumed privilege established by greed, competition, wealth, and accumulation. Over time, the meaning of service has also expanded, and provided an opportunity for healing individuals to carry on in daily life with a sense of purpose, restoring meaning, and unifying goals.
In performing public services, I work to exercise my privileges and lived experience, as someone who can choose to be in service of my community and the common goal of holding space with assisting action, for each other and in times of personal need. I do this work in acknowledgement and gratitude for the lives, cultures, and efforts these privileges cost.
Worker
In the words of Sister Mary Corita Kent, “RULE 7 The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.”
_TRAINING
Licensed Massage Therapist (LMT), 2025 (anticipated)
Downeast School of Massage, Waldoboro, ME.
Master of Fine Arts (MFA), 2021
Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME.
Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT), 2018
Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME.
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, 2013
State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY.
_CERTIFICATIONS
Maine State Board of Education, October 13, 2021
Educator ID 170740 / 217765
Code 34 (620), Visual Arts K-12
Red Cross Lifeguarding with CPR/AED, August 13, 2023
for Professional Rescuers and First Aid
_WORK
Asst. Aquatics Director, Penobscot Bay YMCA, 2023-2024.
Private Art Tutor, 2020-2022.
Paralegal, Neal K. Stillman Attorney At Law, 2020-2022.
Teaching Assistant, Maine College of Art and Design, 2019-2020.
Visitor Member Experience Ambassador, Portland Museum of Art, 2019-2020.
Art Essentialist, Breakwater School K-8 Day School and Aftercare Program, 2018-2019.
Pastry Chef, Various restaurants and bakeries throughout the Hudson Valley of New York, 2011 - 2017.
Co Founder, Director, and Artist at 158 Salon Productions, New Paltz, NY, 2011-2013.
_PRESS
“I HEAR YOU”, in the Portland Press Herald, February 25, 2024.
_EXHIBITIONS
Lights Out Gallery x Fort Hall Gallery, the House support itself, January/February, 2024
Dacha Space, Rockland, ME, HAUNTED SUMMER, July, 2023
The Steelhouse, Rockland, ME, OF MUD AND FOG, April, 2023
Gallery 263, Boston, MA, Shapeshifting, October 2022
Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Artist Resident Program, January 2022
Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL, Word of Mouth, January 2022
ICA at MECA, Portland, ME, 2021 MFA Thesis Exhibition (My construction is my purpose and this is what gives me freedom.), May 2021
Target Gallery, Alexandria, VA, Those Spaces Between Us, 2020-2021
New Systems Exhibitions, Portland, ME, Our Bodies Know Where They Are Meant To Be, 2020
Museum of Mississippi Delta, Greenwood, MS, 4 Artists, 2020
Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN, Color Schemes, 2019
Erin Hutton Productions, Portland, ME, Experimentation Station (Feature Artist), 2019
MECA, Portland, ME, Ritual / Power, 2019
Creative Portland, Portland, ME, Immersion, 2019
PortFringe, Portland, ME, Quapico, 2018
Kingston, NY, HOMOWreckers Presents, 2015 - 2017
Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY, BFA Thesis Exhibition (Things I Need), 2013
Apostrophe NYC, New York, NY, Failure to Communicate, 2013
New Paltz, NY, 158 Salon Productions, 2011 - 2013
