Marty Pottenger (born March 30, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American playwright, performance artist and theatre director. Pottenger is a pioneer in the community arts and arts-based civic dialogue movement. Joan Shigekawa, former Acting Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts, named Pottenger as one of her favorite artists "...for her deep engagement with the lives of working people."
Pottenger was a founding member of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. She was the writer, artistic director, and solo performer of City Water Tunnel #3 a multi-media, Obie-winning play and community art project about the building of the largest (non-defense) public works project in the Western Hemisphere.
Pottenger is also the founder and Art At Work (originally Terra Moto Inc.), a national initiative piloted with the City of Portland Maine's departments, unions and elected officials to improve municipal government through strategic arts projects in collaboration with artists and community members. Pottenger served as a consultant with the city of Boston, MA on an Art At Work inspired project called Boston AIR.
She is currently the Executive & Artistic Director of Art At Work (originally Terra Moto Inc.), a multidisciplinary arts organization.
Notable work
Art At Work
Pottenger is the Founder/Director of Art At Work (2007-2015), a national initiative piloted with the City of Portland Maine's departments, unions and elected officials to improve municipal government through strategic arts projects. In response to the success of her community performance project "home land security," the City of Portland, Maine asked Pottenger to develop a citywide initiative that would use the tools of stories, art and performance to address long-standing issues of discrimination and perceived prejudice within the city government and the school system, with the objective of increasing equity. Art At Work (AAW) was created as the first US city/school/community partnership to develop ways for creativity and the arts to effectively address discrimination, inequity and a growing sense of disenfranchisement between multiple sectors of the city.
Over the next eight years, Art At Work's ideas were re-created in seven cities and two countries, training hundreds of artists for residencies in city departments, unions, and neighborhoods putting people at the center of creative placemaking. In 2013, Pottenger launched Art At Work Holyoke in Holyoke MA.
Most notable of Art At Work's fifteen projects: Meeting Place, an NEA Our Town project, to increase diversity, with strategic arts-based programs partnering professional artists and city residents in four neighborhood associations in Portland Maine; Radio Calls, an original performance written & directed by Pottenger for police officers in Portland Maine; Police Poetry & Photography Calendars, a project involving ten Portland Maine police officers and detectives working to creating a police calendar by partnering with ten local poets & photographers.
Productions and performances
#PHILADELPHIASAVESEARTH (2015 - 2016) A theatrical piece (currently in production) written and directed by Pottenger and commissioned by The Painted Bride Arts Center as one of three artist residencies in the project "Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia". #PhiladelphiaSavesEarth is a community arts project that explores the impacts of climate change and the city's responses. It premieres on Earth Day 2016 April 22 to the 24th at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philly. Funding in part from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Hearts, Minds & Homes (2015 – 2016)
Pottenger is writer, director for this series of public dialogues and theatrical performances focused on creating civic dialogue about gentrification and homelessness in Maine's largest city, Portland, Maine. Pottenger has said she created Hearts, Minds & Homes in response to Portland's housing crisis with a 0% vacancy rate and the second-highest increase in rents in the nation. "When you use art as the basis of a civic dialogue like this, people are able to talk more directly with each other and think more flexibly, without the understandable need to be defensive. Art introduces a sense of collaborative exploration," Pottenger said. Performances were followed by the launching of a city-led task force aimed at addressing and coming up with solutions to the housing crisis.