This building has been part of Edgecomb for a long time.
Chris and Richard Hilton started Edgecomb Potters here in the 1970s — pottery made and sold from the same space on the Boothbay Road. For fifty years, people turned off Route 27 and found something worth taking home. A lot of them came back.
That chapter ended. The studio closed. But the building is still here, at 727 Boothbay Rd, and the thing that made it worth stopping for hasn’t gone anywhere — handmade work, people who know how to make it, a place where the two can find each other.
The Artist Collective is what we’re building from that.
We’re a co-op of makers from around Maine. Potters, jewelers, silk artists, painters, woodworkers, weavers. Each artist keeps their own work, sets their own prices, and shows up on the floor as themselves. What we share is the space, the overhead, and the audience that has been finding its way to this address for decades. A building with that kind of history isn’t something you rebuild from scratch. You work with it.
Edgecomb Potters ran for five decades. That’s a real track record — it means generations of people who grew up stopping here, who brought their kids, who still have pieces from forty years ago in their kitchen cabinets. We’re not trying to replicate that. You can’t replicate fifty years. But we’re trying to honor what made it worth coming to in the first place.
“The chain between the person who shaped the thing and the person who brings it home is short. That’s the whole point.”
The practical case for the co-op model is simple: no one has to run their own retail operation from zero. Our artists make things. We handle the gallery — the building, the foot traffic, the online shop at mainepottery.com. A lot of what we’re trying to do is stay out of the way and let the work speak.
When someone buys something here, we want them to know who made it. If we’re lucky, they meet them. Our artists come by. There are events where you can sit with the makers and hear them talk about the work. The chain between the person who shaped the thing and the person who brings it home is short. That’s the whole point.
A lot of galleries in Maine are either hushed and hands-off or retail shops where the artist is invisible. We wanted something in between: gallery experience, but you can actually buy what you’re looking at. Not a velvet rope. Not a gift shop. Something that takes the work seriously and lets the people who made it be part of the conversation.
We’re not pottery-only, despite what the address might suggest. The building came from pottery, and there’s still clay on our floor. But we have jewelers, silk artists, painters, weavers, woodworkers. What we look for isn’t a medium — it’s a certain quality of attention. The kind of work where you can tell someone spent real time on it, that decisions were made and remade before the thing was finished.
Midcoast Maine pulls makers here for reasons that are specific and concrete: the light off the Sheepscot on a clear morning, a community small enough that people know each other, winters that strip things down and make the work season mean something. The summers are short. The work isn’t.
Our artists are here because they chose to be.
If you’ve driven Route 27 toward Boothbay Harbor, you’ve been on our road — that stretch where the trees open up and you get a flash of the Sheepscot before the road bends. We’re on that road. Same building it’s always been. Open again.