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About AUCOCISCO:
The Gallery
Aucocisco
Galleries is a contemporary fine art gallery originally
established in 2000 in Portland’s Arts District in both the Congress Square
Building and in the Eastland Park Hotel.
The primary focus was then
and is now on presenting mid career artists
along emerging newer artists and, on occasion, art works from
the secondary market is sold from artist estates and private collections.
All of our gallery artists
shown and represented
have a significant and direct connection to the state of Maine or,
quite simply, the state has played a significant part of their identity as
visual artists.
In 2005,
Aucocisco closed its two original gallery locations at 615
Congress Street and 157 High Street at the Eastland Park Hotel, and then
relocated into another larger space comprised of three inter-connected
storefronts in the Congress Square Building otherwise known as the State Theatre
Building.
In 2009, Aucocisco left the Arts
District altogether and moved to Portland's premiere retail block on Upper
Exchange Street in the city's historic Old Port District. Here, we continue to
feature a program of monthly installations of art by our regularly committed
artists and invited guests.
The Name
The name Aucocisco
comes to us from the Abenaki by way of the English explorer Capt. John Smith
(1580-1631).
On an expedition to this coast in the spring of 1614, Smith wrote; "westward of Kennebeke, is the country of Aucocisco, in the bottom of a large deep bay, full of many great Iles, which divides it into many great harbors."
In The History of Portland (1865) William Wills believed; "This refers to Casco bay and Aucocisco, may be supposed to express the English sound of the aboriginal name of that extensive and beautiful bay." Like most authorities of the time he believed that it meant heron or crane, since those birds were here in abundance.
In Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (1941), Fannie Hardy Eckstorm explores the origins more gingerly. She believes that Casco derived from the Abenaki Kasqu¢ (Great Blue Heron), and may have been a clipped form of Aucosicso. However she notes that the latter was at the bottom of the bay, or what we now call Back Cove. She sites various authorities noting Auco or wakw might be Maliseet or Micmac for "the head of the bay" and cisco or seskoo for "mud". "No name", writes Eckstrom, "could better fit the place (Back Cove) than this when the ebb-tide had drained it."
Like the word Machegonne (Machegony), another Native American name for the early Portland, the exact meaning of Aucocisco will continue to be argued. In recent years it has taken on new life as Portlanders have begun to re-examine their early heritage. During the 1990s Aucocisco became the name of the annual family celebration centered on the waterfront and now, most recently became the name of this gallery which showcases some of Maine's leading visual artists.
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