Lincoln Street Center
Waterfall Arts is honored to serve as the steward of the historic Lincoln Street Center campus.
The building remains open, artist studios remain active, and over the coming year we will work with tenants, neighbors, and community members to thoughtfully plan its future.
This page contains the most current information about Waterfall Arts’ stewardship of Lincoln Street Center and will be updated as plans develop. We invite you to stay connected as we share updates about the building, opportunities to get involved, and the future of this remarkable place.
A Historic Place. A Creative Community.
Since 1868, this landmark building has been woven into the life of Rockland. First built as a public school, it educated generations of local students before evolving into one of Maine’s largest community arts facilities.
Today, Lincoln Street Center is home to more than 40 working artists, makers, and creative businesses. Its former classrooms now serve as studios where paintings are made, photographs are developed, sculptures take shape, businesses grow, and ideas are exchanged.
In late June of 2026, Waterfall Arts acquired the campus to preserve this extraordinary community resource and secure its future. Over the coming year, Waterfall Arts will work alongside tenants, neighbors, community members, and regional partners to assess the building and thoughtfully plan its next chapter.
A Landmark Worth Preserving
The Lincoln Street Center campus contains more than 150 years of Rockland history.
The original neoclassical brick school was constructed in 1868. Additions and renovations completed between 1923 and 1925 expanded the building with outer wings, a gymnasium, and a 300-seat auditorium—one of the region’s oldest surviving theaters.
For generations, the campus served local students, including those attending Rockland High School and Rockland District Middle School. Following the middle school’s closure, the City of Rockland acquired the property in 1996. The building later housed the Watershed School, the Rockland High School Alumni Association, artists, educators, small businesses, and other community organizations.
Its historic classrooms, hallways, gymnasium, and theater reflect the many ways this building has adapted to serve Rockland. Preserving the campus means protecting not only an important architectural landmark, but also a living connection to the people and institutions that have shaped the community.
Space to Create
Rockland is celebrated for its galleries, museums, cultural institutions, and remarkable concentration of creative talent. But the art presented in galleries and museums must first have a place to be made.
Affordable working space is increasingly difficult for artists and makers to find. Lincoln Street Center provides something essential within Rockland’s cultural ecosystem: accessible studios where artists can develop their practices, build their livelihoods, collaborate with one another, and contribute to the creative life of the region.
Located near the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the Strand Theatre, Lincoln Street Center complements Rockland’s public-facing cultural institutions by supporting the artists and creative businesses whose work helps make the city such a vibrant arts destination.
A Community of Working Artists
There is no other creative community quite like this in Midcoast Maine.
Lincoln Street Center brings more than 40 artists, makers, and creative businesses together beneath one roof. Its tenants include painters, sculptors, photographers, jewelers, fiber artists, designers, educators, and creative entrepreneurs working across a wide range of disciplines.
Some exhibit nationally and internationally. Others teach in local schools, mentor emerging artists, volunteer in the community, or are familiar neighbors whose work enriches the cultural life of Midcoast Maine.
Working in proximity fosters an invaluable exchange of energy, knowledge, and ideas. Through open studios and other public gatherings, community members have opportunities to explore the building, meet the artists, and experience the work being created inside its historic classrooms.
The Next Chapter
Waterfall Arts’ acquisition of Lincoln Street Center marks the beginning—not the end—of its story.
The building remains active, and its artist studios continue to support a thriving creative community. During the coming year, Waterfall Arts will undertake a comprehensive assessment of the campus while listening to tenants, neighbors, artists, and community partners.
This thoughtful planning period will help identify the building’s most urgent needs, explore the possibilities held within its historic theater and shared spaces, and establish a responsible long-term vision for the campus.
Our goal is to honor Lincoln Street Center’s history, preserve affordable creative space, and ensure that this remarkable place continues serving artists and the wider community for generations to come.
Stay Connected
Follow the next chapter of Lincoln Street Center.
Join our mailing list to receive updates about the building, its artists, community conversations, events, and opportunities to get involved.
Visit Lincoln Street Center
24 Lincoln Street
Rockland, Maine 04841
Please note that Lincoln Street Center is a working studio building and is not ordinarily open to the public outside scheduled events and open-studio opportunities.
Our Tenants
Lincoln Street Center is not open to the public. If you are interested in visiting studios of any of the artists listed below, please connect with them directly. We open our doors multiple times a year for Open Studios which is great way to visit multiple studios at once. Keep an eye out in our events listings for dates.
The tenant list here is only a partial list of the over 40 artists who have studios here.
Artists
Rachel Alexandrou
Interdisciplinary Artist
Rachel Alexandrou is an interdisciplinary artist who uses her education in plant science, and collaborative practice, to create experiential work about food, flora, and innovating human relationships to the natural landscape. College of Natural Sciences, Forestry and Agriculture.
Susan Beebe
Fine Art + Nature
Environmental activist, teacher and artist, Susan Beebe finds inspiration and beauty in the natural world. Through her art projects and studies, she strives to engage and empower others and share her love and knowledge of nature.
jonathanfrostgallery.com/susan-beebe/
Gary Briechle
Photography
Briechle, started photographing in 1996 with a Pentax 6×9 and Contax 645. He moved to Maine in 2000. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2015, and from 2008 until the summer of 2018. Briechle uses the wet-plate collodian technique, a photographic process invented in the mid nineteenth century. By embracing the artifacts and imperfections of this process, he creates a series of photographs that are equally as damaged as the individuals that sit in front of his camera.
Purchase one of his published books here.
Meghan Brady
Paintings | Prints
Meghan makes bold and emphatic art that nudges painting towards the realm of sculpture and installation. Her images freely reference ceramic vessels, the human form, her daughters’ drawings and American crafts. The scale of her pieces generates a direct conversation with the site in which they were created and also the one in which they are ultimately viewed. Meghan’s works are physical and bold, yet contain a spirit that sidesteps many of the trappings of monumental art.
Vincent Carducci
Oil Paintings
Lincoln Street tenant Vincent Carducci is a landscape painter.
Allison Cekala
Photography | Film/Video | Painting | Installation
Allison Cekala is an artist and educator whose work is deeply rooted in observation the experience of time. She co-founded and organizes The Rockland Observationalists, a collective of artists in midcoast Maine devoted to making and exhibiting observational work together. Cekala holds an MFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BA from Bard College in Photography and Environmental Studies and a teaching certificate through the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the LEF Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Cary Center for Ecosystem Studies, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.
Jared del Deo
Photography | Film/Video | Painting | Installation
Jarid del Deo is a painter whose oil paintings utilize the New England landscape as a tested vehicle for investigating color, shape and composition. Del Deo prefers a long contemplative study of his surroundings, plucking out details that best describe a place.
After completing his BFA in painting and printmaking at the University of New Hampshire, del Deo spent over a decade working in the performing arts in the Pacific Northwest and Europe. In 2022 he settled in Maine and turned his focus back to painting. Del Deo exhibits regularly on both coasts and has work in private collections throughout North American and Europe.
Katherine Ferrier
Poetry | Textiles
Katherine Ferrier is a poet, dancer, maker, teacher, entrepreneur, curator, director and community organizer. Her research grows out of a deep practice of paying poetic attention to the world, and lives in the intersecting communities of movers, makers, writers and activists. She regularly teaches and performs throughout the US and abroad, and believes in patchwork as a radical practice of being patient, saying yes, and making space for everyone at the table.
Amy Wilder Files
Mixed Media | Encaustic
Amy works as both a graphic designer and fine-artist. Her current works include encaustic paintings, jewelry design, fiber art, and large-scale sculptural pieces.
Kathleen Florance
Contemporary Paintings
Florance’s art is based on a multi-disciplinary approach and her “Eco-centric” vision engages a variety of materials and formats. Her drawings, paintings and printmaking techniques reflect the expression of a deep curiosity about the complex processes of our natural world and the contemplation of the challenging issues surrounding them today. She has exhibited her work internationally in events such as the “Women in Art” exhibition in Beijing, China and the “Global Focus” exhibition in Moscow, Russia. In addition, she has participated in numerous local and regional exhibitions. Her work has been featured in venues such as The Atrium Art Gallery, USM, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Arts, in Rockport. She is represented by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine.
Cig Harvey
Photography
Cig Harvey is a British-born photographer and writer whose practice explores sensory experiences in an attempt to acknowledge and accentuate the ordinary and everyday. Working in large-scale color photography and creative non-fiction, she roots her work in the natural world, focusing on time and what it is to feel. Cig is interested in the connection between life and death, the experience of living. She uses beauty and color as an access point to explore universal themes and the importance of existence.
Willoughby Lucas Hastings
Interdisciplinary
Willoughby Lucas Hastings is an interdisciplinary research-based artist working primarily in textiles, photography, video, and sculpture. Her work examines the aesthetics, traditions, and systems of whiteness, especially within the American South. She produces works of self and societal critique that often incorporate textiles and photography to document and subvert the material culture of whiteness.
Nate Luce
Paintings & Sculpture
Nate Luce is a multimedia artist who studied art at Bennington College and religion at Harvard University. Beyond painting, embroidery, and sculpture, his practice extends to music, installation, Zen meditation, and experiments in distillation and rectification. In 2024, he was the first living artist to present a solo exhibition at the Langlais Art Preserve (Cushing, ME); other recent highlights include a solo exhibition at BUOY Gallery (Kittery, ME, 2022), as well as participation in the 2023 CMCA Biennial. Additionally, Nate has completed residencies at Hewnoaks (Lovell, ME, 2021) and the Zen Mountain Monastery (Mt. Tremper, NY, 2024).
Amelia MacDougall Fleming
Fiber Arts
Amelia MacDougall Fleming uses materials that carry stories of both people and animals, like wool and worn-to-shreds farming clothes. Her rugs are meant to be seen, touched, walked on, and passed down to grandchildren, working as some of ties that bind function, art, and domesticity.
Claire Perry
Sculpture
Maker of WHALES, “Fish” sculptures, and all things wild and wonderful from found wood along Maine’s Atlantic.
Sarah Szwajkos
Photography
Sarah Szwajkos is a fine art and commercial photographer. She has been photographing for more than twenty-five years, and began making images for clients in 2008.
Her recent personal projects use photography to explore and transform the everyday into something extraordinary – something that can put the photographer and viewers into contact with the transcendent.
Laura Waller
Contemporary Paintings
Since 2002, Waller has maintained a fulltime studio practice in Maine and Florida. Her award-winning paintings have been featured in six solo exhibitions since 2015 and 19 group exhibitions since 2006. In 2016, she received the Individual Artist Grant and the Carolyn Heller Visual Arts Award from the Arts Council of Hillsborough County.
Her work is included in numerous corporate and private collections nationwide and was most recently acquired by the Tampa Bay History Center and the American Victory Museum, both in Tampa, FL.
Nina Poole
Cyanotype & Mixed Media
Nina’s work explores layers and depth of field. she relates many of her photographs to people, in that we are all made up of so many layers – it’s impossible to see everything at once.
Lizzie Lombardo
Painting
Lizzie’s work combines her interest in historical icons and events of popular culture, social issues, as well as experiences of her own and the people she knows. Dedicating a portion of her time to collecting personal and impersonal artifacts as both references and art-making materials (i.e. newspapers, photographs, magazines, antiques, thrift store finds), she creates (and recreates) imagery in various mediums reflective of her mental and emotional state of mind while maintaining a dry sense of humor and sentimentality..
Businesses
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Jonathan Frost Framing
Fine Art Framing | Custom Framing
Please give us a call! We’re open Tuesday through Saturday 10:00 to 5:00, but please call first to make sure we’re here and that the outside door is unlocked. The frame shop is just a few feet inside the ground-floor entrance, next to the driveway at the south (left) end of the building. We look forward to seeing you and the art, photographs, and other treasures you would like to have framed.
Sarah Szwajkos photography | damn rabbit studios
Commercial Photography | Specializing in Architectural & Interior Photography
Sarah Szwajkos is a fine art and commercial photographer based in Midcoast Maine.
She has been photographing for more than twenty years, and began making images for clients since 2008. Her commercial work photographing architecture and interiors grew out of her fine art project Personal Space, photographs made alone in the homes of friends and acquaintances.
wilderbydesign
Brand Consulting | Graphic Design
Creating integrated design solutions for individuals, businesses, institutions & organizations, Amy Wilder Files has experience working in a wide variety of mediums and for a diverse clientele. Her specialty lies in concept development, consulting & designing integrated brand solutions for all mediums: print, logos, publications, book design & more; and specializing in signage & wayfinding.
Join Lincoln Street Center
Our studio spaces allow for multiple uses such as creating large scale art work, quiet workspaces, and many other creative endeavors. Flexibility is provided to allow tenants to build out space to suit their needs. Utilities and internet are included in rent.
Information
Please contact Luke Olson, Lincoln Street Facilities Manager, if interested in finding out about currently available or upcoming spaces.
Available Spaces
We are currently full and maintain a waitlist
If you are seeking space, please send an email with some information about yourself, the amount of space you need and your medium.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the building still open?
Yes. Artist studios remain active while planning continues.
Is Waterfall Arts leaving Belfast?
No. Lincoln Street Center expands Waterfall Arts’ regional impact while Waterfall Arts continues serving Belfast and Waldo County.
When will programming begin?
The coming year is dedicated to assessment, planning, and community engagement before new programming is introduced.
