This week marked my fourth year of living in California. A cross-country journey brought my dog, Shep, and I from rural Maine to the West Coast in early 2020. I had been traveling from market to market, living and working out of my van. By the time the Pandemic took hold, I was all the way across the country without any markets or plans.
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In my family, I am the third generation to grow up in Maine. In fact, I was raised in the same small riverside town that my mother was raised in. Back home, I had grown up and graduated college. I had lived in the city, I had lived on an island, and I had lived deep in the woods — often without electricity or running water. I had traveled internationally, driven across the country, bopped all around, even opened a Maven storefront, but I had never really lived anywhere besides my home state. When I arrived on the Central Coast of California in early 2020, and there was a small, vacant storefront in the beach town of Cayucos, which I could use as a studio, I knew it was time for me to take a leap of faith and try something new in a new community, which was opening its arms to me at the time.
Four years later, I am so thankful to be living and working here today. My little storefront has undergone many transformations. Many of you remember when there was just a table in the center of the room with hardly anything for sale on it. My studio was towards the back of the room and I had no posted hours. You just caught me when you caught me. And people were very confused on what Maven actually was — was it a store? Was it someone’s home? Is she squatting there? What’s going on?
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Today, Maven is very clearly a gallery and it showcases not only my work, which I still make in the building, but also the work of 30+ other individual artisans just like me — from California, Maine and beyond. Many of these artisans are my peers who I have set up next to at markets or met along my artistic path.
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So: just a little slice of Maven history to celebrate my fourth year over here. Four years of eating burritos with French fries in them. Four years of saying ‘vibes’ completely naturally. Four years of surfing. And four years of working with bright colors and creating one of a kind, stitched, Maven pieces. THANK YOU for your support along the way and for maintaining interest in the ever-evolving experiment that is Maven. :)
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