Peter Bruun, of Damariscotta, stands along Main Street on Thursday, May 29. Bruun, an artist, former art teacher, and founder of the art and community nonprofit Studio B, has lived in the area since 2019 and seeks to destigmatize conversations around subjects like substance abuse through art. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Peter Bruun, an artist, art teacher, and director of the nonprofit Studio B, has spent much of his career using art to process and illuminate relevant community issues.
Whether it’s helping school children process the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or elevating dialogue surrounding the throes of addiction, Bruun’s utility of art has grown in scope and meaning throughout his life.
“The whole point about being an artist for me was not about being a famous artist, but about meaning, about learning about myself, about feeling connected to a large world. All those things were where the real value lay in being an artist,” he said.
Born in Copenhagen, the capital of the Nordic country Denmark, Bruun spent most of his early childhood split time between New York City and London in the United Kingdom after his parents had separated.
After attending high school in NYC, Bruun attended Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where he majored in art history, a decision he said was based on the school’s strong program and the realization that he “really enjoyed sitting in the dark looking at slides of art.”
“I just simply enjoyed that, so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll be an art history major,’” he said.
In school, Bruun had an art teacher point out his talent and suggested that he develop his skills further.
“When I was a child, I always made art. In school, you usually have an art elective, and some people do music and whatever. I always chose visual art,” he said. “But here’s the thing: I never saw it as anything but a hobby.”
After graduating college, Bruun continued his pursuit of art. In 1987, Bruun was admitted to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Md., where he completed a Master of Fine Arts.
While it wasn’t his plan, Bruun stayed in the city after graduating and found a job as the Maryland Institute College of Art’s exhibitions department gallery manager and teaching art as an adjunct faculty member at other colleges in the Baltimore area.
“I ended up staying in Baltimore, almost by accident,” Bruun said. “I had applied to jobs in the New England area teaching and found a job in Baltimore, and before I knew it, I had a wife and three kids.”
While a familial chapter had begun for Bruun, he said he had gone to graduate school with ambitions for artistic fame.
“I graduated with the ambition of being swept up by a New York gallery and rising to art fame with a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney (Museum of American Art) by the time I was 40,” he said. “Those were the ambitions of this 24-year-old at the time, and what happened was, luckily, nobody was interested in my artwork.”
Bruun said the lack of interest in his art ended up being fortunate, as it forced him to reflect on the reasons why his artistic practice mattered to him beyond recognition and prestige.
“(It) allowed me to affirm why art mattered to me and why I was an artist, which was the work,” he said. “There’s such a personal relationship between you and the art making and a sense of the world being a larger place through that practice … I think if folks had been interested in my work, I wouldn’t have internally mined so much.”
Between teaching, family, and his own art practice, Bruun said he was fitting in monthly trips from Baltimore to New York City to see galleries and shows that helped feed him artistically.
That experience of digesting so many art exhibitions over the years and his position as gallery manager at his alma mater led to an opportunity as the founding exhibition director at one of the schools he was teaching at, Villa Julie College, now known as Stevenson University.
“I had all kinds of ideas about gallery exhibitions, though I had never mounted an exhibition before, but I identified this need and said, ‘Can I run the gallery program?’ It took a little bit of convincing, but they let me do it,” he said.
While Bruun was only there for a year, his work with the gallery earned him recognitions such as curator of the year from the Baltimore Sun and a top 10 placement in Baltimore Magazine’s “Best of” list.
“It was crazy the kind of recognition it received,” Bruun said. “I knew how to honor the work, as an artist, too.”
During this time, Bruun said he discovered both an interest in and an ability at using art as a way to both advance the medium and the interest of the community.
“I went from being an artist in my ivory tower, making my work, to thinking about how can this art play a role in mattering outside of a wine and cheese event?” he said.
That philosophy and guiding thought about affecting the community with and through art may have been refined in his new position, but was an idea that began to take shape years prior in New York City.
While Bruun loved the galleries of the city, he said he was always struck by the stark contrast between the exhibition and the reality lying just outside the show’s doors.
“Once a month, it was like a pilgrimage,” he said. “Inevitably, when I was in the downtown galleries, I’d see all kinds of things that were spiritual epiphanies, all of these art experiences, but it was really speaking to my soul, this young, impressionable artist. Then I’d get on the subway, and I’d be like cognitive dissonance, what does this world I’m in right now on this subway have to do with that world (in the art gallery)? I couldn’t square it, and I think that idea sat there. And that’s what I’ve squared in the work I do now. Art making is central to my community work, whether or not the community work I’m doing involves my art objects.”
After leaving his position with Stevenson University in 1998, Bruun served briefly as exhibition manager for Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum before becoming the exhibitions educator at The Park School of Baltimore.
A memorable exhibit Bruun put together was in the wake of 9/11, where he found a challenge in trying to balance the need for the direct language the older students needed to process the terrorist attack and the abstract communication the younger students needed.
Seeking to fulfill artistic visions that fell outside of the school, Bruun left the position a few years later. In 2005, he started Art on Purpose, a nonprofit with the mission of bringing together people over ideas and issues.
“It’s a very vague mission, but that was when I really got my chops at using art to bring people together,” he said.
Bruun stepped down from his work as founding director in 2012 after feeling the frustrations of being unable to attend to his own art.
“I had not been in the studio, I had not been making any art for three years,” he said.
Around the same time, Bruun and his family found out their eldest daughter was struggling with addiction.
“Addiction was highly stigmatized,” he said. “Still is, but even more so then, and it was like this burden of secret that we carried.”
In 2014, Bruun’s eldest daughter died of an overdose and Bruun turned to what he always had to process and grieve: art.
“When my daughter died, I’d been doing this kind of work for more than a decade, very intensely,” he said. “That was all preparing me for what I needed to do next.
“If there wasn’t so much stigma, secrecy, isolation, if the community wasn’t so unreceptive to the people who are affected by substance use, she’d still be alive, 100%,” he said. “It was very clear that the common denominator obstacle or investment for changing the culture, the big stumbling block was stigma, so I wanted to knock down the walls of that.”
With this goal in mind, in 2015, Bruun started the New Day Campaign: a public engagement and arts programming initiative to knock down the walls of stigma and discrimination associated with substance use and mental illness. Over the program’s four years, Bruun and the campaign organized over 60 community art-centric events attended by thousands of people all over the Baltimore area.
“It was just extraordinary,” he said. “It was healing for the community, and it was healing for me, it was amazing and it was exhausting.”
On the tail end of that exhaustion, Bruun wanted to leave Maryland and return to New England, where he’d be closer to loved ones.
In 2019, Bruun moved to Southport and Lincoln County because the area checked a lot of those boxes for him, and the area was beautiful.
“I was in a place in my life where the Midcoast made sense,” Bruun said. “It’s peaceful and beautiful.”
In the spring of 2021, Bruun moved to Damariscotta, where he still resides today.
Bruun’s time in Lincoln County, while healing, hasn’t been idle. In 2023, Bruun founded Studio B, another art nonprofit with the mission to use art and humanities in support of community justice and well-being, according to his website.
Bruun worked with Healthy Lincoln County in August 2023 to put on 716 Candles, a series of events commemorating International Overdose Awareness Day.
A year later, Bruun organized 19 Towns, 19 Stories, a series of events throughout Lincoln County spotlighting and honoring residents who have been affected by substance use in collaboration with Lincoln County Recovery Community Center.
Bruun’s latest project, Beyond the Blue, is a project featuring art, stories, and music to commemorate substance and trauma healing in Lincoln County. The art exhibit is showing at The Waldo Theatre, at 916 Main St. in Waldoboro, through the end of June. On Thursday, June 19, there will be an artist talk at The Waldo at 4 p.m. and performances next door at the former Customs House, at 908 Main St.
In July and August, Bruun is helping put together The Puddle Dock Village Festival. Hosted primarily at the historic Puddle Dock Village School in Alna, the Puddle Dock Village Festival features three solo exhibitions by acclaimed local and national artists, each addressing themes of community significance.
Throughout the month, a series of programs will draw on the artwork and the artists’ narratives to explore topics such as addiction and trauma, incarceration and reentry, and pathways to wellness and healing.
Bruun said he’s appreciated the depth of the residents of Lincoln County and that the area has served as a needed healing ground.
“As I met person after person after person who was so … layered in their backgrounds and life experiences, that was eye opening to me,” he said. “You can’t throw a stone without finding somebody who has a really interesting life story and there’s just a really interesting formality and acceptance of who you are as you are without pretense. It’s been beautiful and a beautiful place to heal from all of the damage I’m coming out of.”
For more information about Bruun’s upcoming events, art, or previous work, go to bruunstudios.com.
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