Donna McNeil is the founding executive director of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, which is dedicated to supporting artists and strengthening the Rockland community.
In America, we tend to talk about the arts as enrichment — something ornamental, secondary, even optional. A luxury for prosperous places. A pleasant amenity once the “real” work of a community is done.
Rockland, Maine, suggests the opposite.
This small Midcoast city of just over 7,000 residents has quietly become one of the most culturally vital places in New England, not despite its working-class identity, but because of it.
Long defined by fishing, farming, boatbuilding and manual labor, Rockland understands something many larger cities have forgotten: making things matters. Whether one builds a boat, paints a canvas, composes music or crafts furniture by hand, the impulse is fundamentally the same. Art is not separate from civic life, but evidence of it.
Purchase this image
That philosophy has transformed Rockland into what many now call the Art Capital of Maine. The scale of its cultural ecosystem is astonishing for a city this small: two major museums, galleries, a restored Art Deco theater, internationally respected film programming, furniture craftsmanship, wooden boatbuilding, artist residencies, performance spaces and independent creative organizations.
These institutions do more than attract tourists: they create identity, generate conversation and foster curiosity, tolerance, experimentation and pride of place. At a moment when so many American downtowns are hollowed out by vacancy, homogeneity and cultural fatigue, Rockland feels alive.
The arts are often discussed in terms of economic impact, and certainly they matter economically. Artists and cultural institutions support local businesses, activate streets, fill restaurants and attract visitors and investment. But their deeper value is harder to quantify.
Over decades in the arts, I’ve seen firsthand how art transforms the way people experience their daily lives. It elevates expectations. It creates a sense that beauty, thoughtfulness and imagination belong not only to elite coastal capitals, but to ordinary communities.
This is particularly important in rural and post-industrial America, where narratives of decline have become so dominant that many places struggle to imagine futures for themselves beyond survival. Rockland offers another possibility.
Part of that story can be traced to painters Joan Beauregard and David Ellis, who arrived in Maine in 1979 after escaping a fire in their Brooklyn studio. They came seeking a quieter life centered around painting, sailing, learning and community. They were not interested in art world celebrity or market validation. Instead, they invested deeply — and quietly — in the cultural fabric of Midcoast Maine, supporting arts education, music, language studies and civic life.
Before his death in 2015, David Ellis established what later became the Ellis-Beauregard
Foundation, dedicated to supporting artists and strengthening the Rockland community. In the years since, the foundation has emerged as an outsized cultural force, awarding grants, residencies and major artist prizes while helping position Rockland as a national destination for creative practice.
Importantly, our work rejects the increasingly corporate model of contemporary arts philanthropy. Our mission is intimate, local and human-centered. We treat artists not as content producers or economic engines, but as essential contributors to civic life. That distinction matters.
American culture often celebrates artists symbolically while making it materially impossible for them to live and work. Affordable housing disappears. Studio space vanishes. Creative people are displaced from the very communities they help revitalize. Cities eagerly market “arts districts” while neglecting the conditions artists actually need to survive.
Rockland, to its credit, appears to understand the contradiction.
Throughout my career in arts advocacy, I have been guided by a belief that artists and communities thrive when they are deeply connected to one another. At the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, I have had the opportunity to put that philosophy into practice, and to cultivate an ecosystem where artists are not merely visitors, but active participants in the life of the city.
The foundation’s newly completed residency campus embodies this precept physically, as well as culturally. Designed by Baird Architects and completed in 2026, the net-zero campus was developed with direct input from former resident artists across disciplines. The result is not an architectural monument chasing spectacle, but something rarer: a thoughtful environment genuinely designed around the realities of artistic practice.
The project also demonstrates another lesson America urgently needs to relearn: that good development does not have to erase local identity. Built by Maine craftspeople using skills rooted in boatbuilding and furniture-making traditions, the campus reflects the intelligence and care of regional labor. It belongs to its place. Its sustainability measures are expressions of this sense of stewardship.
In this way, the project becomes larger than a residency building; it is a civic argument that says that small cities deserve ambitious cultural infrastructure. That environmental responsibility and artistic experimentation can coexist. That beauty and utility are not opposing forces. That communities thrive when they invest not only in commerce and housing, but in imagination.
Most importantly, Rockland demonstrates that the arts are not peripheral to civic health, but central to it. At a time of profound loneliness, political fragmentation and cultural exhaustion, the arts remain one of the few forces capable of creating shared emotional experience across differences.
For generations, Americans understood that public life required cultural life. We built libraries, theaters, museums, concert halls, schools, parks and civic monuments because we believed democracy required citizens capable of thought, empathy and aspiration.
Somewhere along the way, many places stopped believing this. Rockland did not. And that may be why this small city on the coast of Maine increasingly feels less like an exception and more like a blueprint.