Conspiring creatives, flamboyant hunks in rapture, making art and building community
Mission:
We operate from a belief that creative practice builds community care through socially conscious art; centering pleasure, celebration of revolution, and trans-cendance of our current world.
Values:
creativity, vulnerability, community care
What we do:
Across different media, Boots Shertzer (they/he), Sampson Spadafore (they/he), and Hale Linnet (they/them) are carving out authenticity; pursuing transformation despite cultural norms, mounting intolerance, and extremism. The trans body exemplifies revolution and liberation, and we believe art acts as a tool for both individual and collective excavation. Our work challenges and invites viewers to become co-conspirators, to climb down into the ache with us, and seek connection across difference. Through the lens of the trans experience, this artist collective uses creative practices to seek the truest versions of ourselves in hopes of using that knowledge as a foundation for a different world.
Our Work:
The Brazen Bandits are all members of the transgender and queer community, which makes us uniquely qualified to offer programs that benefit the community we’re a part of. After attending the MaineTransNet Artist Retreat in early spring of 2023, we maintained connections with other artists that attended the event and created a way to continue building community with one another through a paper mache puppet making project. This allowed for us to deepen our connections with one another outside of the three day retreat, which we still maintain today. The puppet was created over the course of four art build events with various attendees at each. Two of them were hosted outside on the Eastern Prom with onlookers engaging and asking questions. We titled the final piece Doula of Liberation, and it was further used in community at the Portland Pride parade, where it was universally enjoyed. During the parade, we invited community members to join us in taking turns to help to carry the puppet and march alongside it.
Over the past year, Brazen Bandits have hosted 20 events with nearly 60 participants and over 2,600 audience members and attendees.
Brazen Bandits organized a public event for grief and healing after the sudden passing of Nex Benedict, a nonbinary and Choctaw Nation student in Oklahoma. This event was in conjunction with the vigil held in Oklahoma by the Trans Advocacy Coalition of Oklahoma. We reached out to our network to find people willing to be peacekeepers to ensure safety of the attendees. During the event, we invited folks to speak into the microphone and dictate what was shared and what was the focus of the event. We heard powerful messages from our trans youth and other folks we previously hadn’t met before as a result of giving over that power. We connected with the Wabanaki Two Spirit Alliance who sent a speech to share in their stead. Given that this event was put together within 48 hours and over 50 people attended, that shows the necessity of creating a space to facilitate the grief, rage, and healing felt by the transgender community.
The Bandits held a visual arts show titled “Self-Portraits for Survival” featuring portraiture by RBoots Schertzer and Hale Linnet on themes of identity, transition, and self-excavation. Queer and trans people in particular were drawn to the event and expressed feeling represented by the art, and wished they could encounter more art in the world that includes queer and trans experiences. The show included a circle of reflection with viewers, and an opportunity to complete written reflections based on questions related to the art. One viewer expressed that after seeing the show, they felt held in community enough to move forward with gender affirming surgery.
Connect with us:
Artist Founders Info:
Sampson Spadafore
About:
Sampson Spadafore (they/he) is a white, neurodivergent, queer, gay, nonbinary trans man currently living on unceded Wabanaki tribal land known as Westbrook, Maine. Sampson works as a poet, writer, and theatre artist around themes of trans identity, queer and trans joy, relationship to family, romantic partners, and community, grief, spirituality, and self expression. They hold a BFA in Musical Theatre from Nazareth University of Rochester. He was the recipient of the 2022 Bodwell Fellowship through the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Hewnoaks Artist Residency.
Artist statement:
I work and play in the realm of liberatory movement. My writing and performance is based in my own personal experience and identity, and while not representative of the whole of the trans experience, is a piece of the larger consciousness raising movement that has spanned hundreds of years through trans cultural icons, trans innovators and advocates, and the average every-day, working-class trans person. I create for my community, and for everyone else. For those who love me and hate me, because I believe in their liberation too.
Theatre is a spiritual space for me and it is where I find myself the most comfortable and energized. Just as ancient humans once used the stage to tell the stories of and honor the gods, we humans today play as a way to see the divine in one another. My humanity is on full display when I’m on stage. I use song, dance, poetry and speech to engage, confront, and challenge audiences. I like to hold a mirror to society and ask them questions that may scare them but lead to their freedom.
Hale Linnet
About:
Hale Linnet (b. 1990 Worcester, MA) is a Maine-based figurative painter and sculptor who creates socially conscious work around themes of bodily autonomy, gender, pleasure, and self-excavation. Hale holds a degree in Public Health, and uses their experiences in community organizing and abortion access to inform their art-making practice. They create collaborative art and have received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts for community sculpture projects centering the diverse lived experiences of menstruating bodies. Hale currently lives in Old Orchard Beach, and works out of their studio in Space538 of downtown Portland, ME. In addition to their studio practice, Hale teaches trauma-informed yoga to queer youth and works with unhoused teens.
Artist Statement:
I look to my art practice as an exploration of the question “How can I contribute to the world I want to live in through what I do with others in my community every day?” I view art as a world-building tool, particularly creative collaboration as generating pathways to freedom of expression and connection to ourselves and each other.
As a painter and sculptor dedicated to visual story-telling through the figure, I choose the materials, three dimensional or two dimensional, that best serve the narrative I’m expressing. The stories I’m most interested in communicating serve to elevate life’s mundane moments to the realm of the sacred through earnest visual representation.
RBoots Schertzer
About:
RBoots Shertzer is a 60 year old queer/ transmasc. artist deeply committed to community and the arts. Their Life has been truly dedicated to creating a voice and vision of change through art, and political action. Boots is an old queer punk rocker they have passionately created, curated, painted, sculpted and screamed in studios, galleries and the streets from Boston, NYC, Washington D.C., Oakland Providence, RI and now Portland, ME. They have struggled for many years, with and through issues around addiction, madness, gender and sexuality. Like so many women, queers, and artists Boots was institutionalized at 14, and on their own at 15. They have both suffered the depths of anxiety, depression, demonic paranoia, mania and illness and too believes that this wild, terrifyingly beautiful, unruly voice is the source of their art. Boots is moved, challenged, perhaps even possessed in their attempts to understand and articulate the world around them. Their work is about relationships and the tension between internal and external worlds, the sacred and the profane, evolution, decomposition, transformation, metamorphosis, release, redemption, loss, trauma, anguish, recovery, healing, sex, power, passion and pain. They have been Clean and Sober for 35 years. they have come to believe (out of necessity and survival) in the power of art, passion, love and rage, reaching deeply into their experiences, creating these powerful images that draw you in and leave you changed somehow. Boots is inspired by a long history of fighters and creatives and the tenacity and dedication of the fierce love art warriors in their life. Boots has come to believe it is in this… powerful honoring, creation and community, that all of our survival depends.
Artist Statement:
I have lived on the edges. Struggled and fought, pushing boundaries from both within and without. I have watched my queer-trans-community, brothers, sisters, lovers, in all our joy, beauty and passion, and I have seen suffering and anguish. I am compelled to give voice to all I have experienced and witnessed. My work attempts to embody my struggle and rage, our beauty and fierceness.
I work with combinations of texture, materials, and raw emotion. These images are both beautiful and harsh, holding the sacred and the profane, at once fragile and violent. They are caught in flight, somewhere between heaven and earth, release and transformation. Embattled in pain, raw, exposed, pushed to the edge of the canvas. Their gaze dares the audience to explore their wounds, struggle, and healing; a reflection, an invitation, a challenge to climb inside the ache. My work questions the bounds of connection, beauty, gender, sexuality, love, and passion.