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Our Mission, History & Commitments

Our Mission

The mission of Meetinghouse Arts is to make Greater Freeport a vibrant center for arts and culture by fostering creative collaborations, expanding access to arts and cultural resources, and amplifying arts and culture as tools to economically strengthen, educate, and connect community.

Our Vision

Meetinghouse Arts envisions a vibrant, creative Freeport where the arts are woven into everyday life, sparking connection, inspiring imagination, strengthening community, and making downtown a desired destination.

Our Values

At Meetinghouse Arts, we strive to be a space where art connects community. We believe this environment must be safe, welcoming, and respectful of every individual regardless of age, ability, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, spirituality, or any other aspect of identity. We recognize our responsibility as a venue and community organizer. Everyone who passes through our doors, whether staff, volunteer, artist, or audience member, should feel safe, respected, and inspired. For our full values statement, please see below.

Our History

The Arts & Cultural Alliance of Freeport (ACAF) was incorporated in June 2015. The board of directors includes representatives from arts groups and the business community, individual artists in various disciplines, and advocates for the arts and culture from the community at large.

2015

Following a year of interviews, research, and public meetings about Freeport’s needs and interests in the promotion, enhancement of, and access to arts and culture, the Freeport Arts & Cultural Alliance was officially incorporated as a non-profit organization. This would soon become Arts & Cultural Alliance of Freeport (ACAF) and, seven years later, Meetinghouse Arts.

2016

A website, newsletter and Facebook page dedicated to supporting the arts and promoting arts activities in Freeport were launched. Locations for a black box theater and possible gallery space were considered

2018

With the guidance of a consultant, hired with funding from both private donations and the Town, we created the Freeport Cultural Plan. Consistent with the findings in the Plan we continued to consider the possibility of creating an arts and cultural center with a stage and gallery.

2019

We began negotiations to lease the historic First Parish Church on Main St. and, enabled by an extensive capital campaign and major financial support from the Town, undertook an extensive project to update and preserve the 1895 Freeport meetinghouse structure. The remodeled space, called Meetinghouse Arts Gallery & Stage, now houses an art gallery and performance hall.

2021

On June 25, Meetinghouse Arts Gallery opened to the public with the debut show titled “A Community of Artists.” The show featured local visual artists working in a variety of media, a fitting start for this community-driven venue. Meetinghouse Arts Stage, a 182-seat performance hall, officially opened four months later with a gala opening weekend of events to showcase the new facility and thank all who had made it possible.

2022

In July 2022, ACAF officially changed its name to Meetinghouse Arts, adopted new branding and, thanks to a generous sponsorship from Bath Savings Institution, began work on a new website. The Gallery and Stage hosted local and touring visual and performing artists and cultural organizations to present, exhibit, learn, educate, and engage with residents and visitors to Freeport. A full season on the Stage, in the Gallery, and throughout town is scheduled for 2023.

Our Values Statement

Meetinghouse Arts is a community arts organization in Freeport, Maine. We exist to make room for artists and audiences to meet, for work to be made and shared and for the public life of our community to be enriched by the arts.


We believe in artistic freedom. We believe in work that is difficult, ambitious, even unsettling. We believe a community arts space should be a place where the unexpected can happen.


However, difficult work and harmful work are not the same. The freedom to make demanding art is not the freedom to wound people through the way they are named or shown.


We believe that the people whose history, identity, and experience are named, depicted, or invoked in art have a particular claim to how that naming happens. A slur belongs to the community it was used to wound. A representation belongs to the community it represents. When art touches these things, the people the art touches are part of how it travels.


Our work is built on that belief. We will not present language or imagery that targets people on the basis of who they are. We will not platform stereotyped or demeaning representations of any community. When our programming engages a community whose voice has historically been spoken for by others, we will ask that community to be part of the work.


We hold these commitments because we believe Meetinghouse Arts owes something to the people who come to join us in our work, and to the people who make our work possible: performers, volunteers, staff, audiences and our community. We owe them a space where they do not have to brace, perform, or absorb harm in order to gather with us.

Shared with care and commitment,

The Board of Directors & Staff of Meetinghouse Arts