A partnership between Belfast’s Waterfall Arts and the Rockland-based Ellis Beauregard Foundation will permanently safeguard Rockland’s Lincoln Street Center as an affordable studio and cultural space for working artists.
Waterfall Arts acquired the historic building for $1 million on Tuesday, after a coalition of organizations and community members spent the past year raising funds. The Ellis Beauregard Foundation was the largest donor, giving $700,000 to the project. The Lesher Family Foundation gave $100,000, and two anonymous donors gave $100,000 and $200,000, respectively. In total, the campaign raised $1.3 million, with $300,000 earmarked for repairs.
“This is about protecting space for artists to work and thrive,” Kim Fleming, Waterfall Arts executive director, said in a statement. “Sustaining artists means more than funding projects; it means defending the environments that allow their ideas to take root and flourish.”
Waterfall Arts is a nonprofit arts organization based in Belfast that offers classes, workshops, exhibition and studio space for people of all ages. With the addition of the Lincoln Street Center, Waterfall Arts will have campuses in two of Midcoast Maine’s largest communities.
The Lincoln Street Center building was built in 1868 and was the site of Rockland High School until 1963, when the high school moved to a new building and Lincoln Street Center became a junior high. In the 1990s, the middle school closed because of air quality concerns; the building has been used as a studio space for artists on and off in the intervening years.
Though upgrades to the aging building are needed, the high-ceilinged, light-filled classrooms make ideal artist studios. The site currently houses more than 40 working studios.
“If you don’t have artists living and working in your city, you’re not going to have the arts capital of Maine,” said Donna McNeil, executive director of the Ellis Beauregard Foundation, which is devoted to supporting art in the community. Ellis Beauregard recently opened two new buildings to support its artist residency program, but it previously housed artists at the Lincoln Street Center.
“If your creatives move out of town, you’re not a creative place. I think that Rockland is building toward a small city with so many cultural assets that this just adds another layer onto that,” McNeil said.
A grassroots campaign to purchase the building and secure its future as studio space for artists was launched in 2025, led by artist-tenant Amy Files. That group, Lincoln Street Center for the Arts, raised about $100,000, according to Fleming, and will now dissolve and transfer its remaining funds to Waterfall Arts. A seven-member advisory council, made up mostly of Rockland residents, will guide future planning at Lincoln Street Center, and McNeil and a Lincoln Street Center tenant have joined the Waterfall Arts board.
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.