E. Maude Haak-Frendscho
About
E. Maude Haak-Frendscho (she/her) is a curator, publisher, arts writer, and community arts organizer based in Easthampton, MA (ancestral and unceded Pocumtuc and Nipmuc). Maude’s work takes shape in exhibitions, public programs ranging from artist-led walks and in situ workshops to talks and performances, publications, and hybrid projects that cross disciplines and media. A throughline of her work is supporting living artists in their practices, and creating spaces to support dialogue and interplay between artists and audiences. The framework of exhibitions, publications, and events as spaces of gathering, co-authoring a moment, learning and forming new practices, ideas, and relationships—of becoming—is central to her methodology as a curator. She programs experimental works that foreground process and experience, that strive to forge relationships of mutuality, and that are informed by social and spatial practices, as well as the embodied experiences of those phenomena. She has independently organized exhibitions for A.P.E. Gallery Northampton, ECA Gallery Easthampton, Vox Populi Gallery Philadelphia, and Pro Arts Gallery Oakland. Maude has led community projects and public artwork at Mural Arts Philadelphia, including project management for the citywide exhibition Monument Lab in 2017, and designed public programming and site-responsive projects at Headlands Center for the Arts, where she also oversaw artist programs and project granting. As well, she has served several rural communities in Western Massachusetts as a cultural strategist, programmer, and open studio tour organizer.
Maude is co-organizer of the publications and events platform Neighboring Systems, under the banner of which she has edited and designed several publications, organized readings and performance talks, and initiated and curated Press On: Indie Publishing Festival since 2022. She has also developed publications and writing for San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education Gallery in Philadelphia, and Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland. Maude was formerly a collective member of the artist-run Vox Populi Gallery, founder of DRIFT Magazine, and a collaborator in several grassroots, DIY projects that continue to inform her commitments as a cultural producer.
Haak-Frendscho is also dedicated to strengthening the artist-centered field, and currently is on the board of Easthampton City Arts, Western Mass Arts Advocacy Coalition (WMAAC), and was the Convening Program Director at Common Field, a national network of artist-centered organizations and independent organizers, where she led partnerships and collaboration for co-learning, and also developed artist commissions, fellowships, and convening-related special projects and events with a focus on equity and accessibility.
“A poem can't do much but
it gives off sparks from its wheels,
the bristle and the clicks, mostly
at moments of resistance.”
– Brenda Hillman,“To a desert poet,” Practical Water
“We need to understand the body not as bound to the private or to the self – the western idea of the autonomous individual – but as being linked integrally to material expressions of community and public space. In this sense there is no neat divide between the corporeal and the social; there is instead what has been called ‘social flesh’ (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000). The body itself is a political site or place that mediates the lived experiences of social and cultural relationships.”
– Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar, Women and the Politics of Place