The First Coast is a mobile studio / exhibition space that will travel to year-round coastal communities in Maine during the off-season. Through collaborations and workshops residents engage in conversation about their community’s working maritime identity and personal perspective of place. 

The First Coast will be a collection of sounds, stories, images, and ideas that seek to reconstruct the narratives and mythologies of both Maine and Mainers.

The First Coast is an effort to reclaim the Maine coastline by creating a body of multimedia work that expresses the needs, desires, and identities of year-round coastal Mainers. 

In the Winter of 2017, Galen Koch and woodworker Seth Brayton began renovating a 1976 Airstream trailer. The 30’ trailer is outfitted with a pop-up recording studio, digital archiving services, and a space for communities to gather and engage. The trailer is powered by solar energy and is entirely off-grid, allowing The First Coast to travel and work in any rural community in Maine, without compromising access to quality technical gear and equipment. 

Between September 2017 - November 2018 the mobile studio / exhibition space, The First Coast, will travel to five different towns in coastal Maine. Spending three - four weeks in Lubec, Jonesport and Beals, Stonington, Friendship, and Chebeague Island audio producer Galen Koch and collaborating writers and photographers will work with local residents to reconstruct and repossess a fading maritime identity. 

Through town-hall style meetings and workshops The First Coast team will work with communities to identify stories and histories that are meaningful to the town and its residents. Participants in The First Coast workshops will learn methods of digital and analog recording and will be encouraged to record memories in the mobile sound studio, recordings will be shared with local historical societies as “living histories.” The artists and documentarians will collaborate with residents to produce intimate portraits of the town, its people, and their evolving maritime identity. 

This is a crucial time to preserve, celebrate, and critique the changes happening along Maine’s coast. 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.” The First Coast will draw attention to those communities who still have access to and rely on the sea through community driven storytelling and material collection. Artists leave the five sites with a vast amount of media and information to be made into cohesive site-specific exhibitions in the spring of 2017 and 2018. 

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 along Maine’s coast. 

The First Coast is seeking funds to launch the Pilot Program in Stonington and Lubec in the Fall of 2017. $10,000 of contributed funds will go to Airstream renovations (including the solar energy system, media lab, and equipment). $7,000 of contributed funds will be used for TFC Artists-In-Residence. $3,000 of contributed funds will go directly to TFC's contractors and builders. 

The First Coast's founder Galen Koch is an audio and multimedia producer based in Portland, Maine. Her work has appeared on MPBN, NPR's Weekend Edition. BBC World Service, and Radiotopia's The Heart. To see examples of her work about Portland Maine's working waterfront please visit Wharfside. The First Coast is also Justin Levesque, Jenny Rebecca Nelson, and Seth Brayton. TFC's video was produced by Timber & Frame Media.

The First Coast is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Fractured Atlas will receive grants for the purposes of The First Coast, provide oversight to ensure that grant funds are used in accordance with grant agreements, and provide reports as required by the grantor. Contributions for the purposes of The First Coast must be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Support for The First Coast is provided by SPACE Gallery through the Kindling Fund. The Kindling Fund is administered by SPACE Gallery as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts' Regional Regranting Program. Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.