Indigo Arts Alliance builds global connections by bringing together Black and Brown artists from diverse backgrounds to engage in their creative process, while building lasting relationships rooted in co-mentorship. An integral aspect of the Indigo vision is providing Maine-based artists of African descent access to a broader range of practicing artists of color worldwide. Indigo Arts Alliance embodies a multiracial approach to the rich intersections of citizenship, community-building, and creativity. Our work is in service to shifting historical injustices as a vital component of achieving equity for Black and Brown artists. We believe that artists are instrumental to doing the work of social justice in ways that are deeply grounded in lived experience and community.

Saturday, July 20, 2024

The next event in our WHERE2024 series takes place this Saturday when Indigo Arts Alliance will host Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back, a daylong symposium at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens centered on environmental justice in urban and rural spaces.

For this second edition of a three-year collaboration between IAA and CMBG, artists, scholars, and community activators will share their perspectives on why justice requires that Black and Brown experiences and knowledge be centered.

Unsurprisingly, this event has sold out!

are other ways we invite you to take part in this experience.

1. Visit Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens to view the commissioned installations of artists Anna Tsouhlarakis and Shane Perley-Dutcher to be unveiled this Friday, July 19. These public art pieces amplify Indigenous wisdom, artistry, and presence and will be on permanent display in the gardens going forward.

2. Join Atlantic Black Box’s corps of citizen historians and engage in participatory local research in the Boothbay area. To understand what happened here and what these historical and ecological truths require of us today, we all need to get curious and learn to reconnect with place. We’re inviting you to do just that.

Drawing on ABB’s model of community-engaged local research, you can play an active role in surfacing invisibilized histories on Maine's wider landscape. The first step in this process involves getting better acquainted with what is currently visible by taking active notice of the commemorative landscape that we’ve largely come to take for granted. 

We invite you to make your way to the Boothbay area to scan the “memoryscape,” which is made up of monuments, historical plaques, museums, place names, cemeteries, and other narrative and visual elements that activate and shape public memory.

Now ask yourselves:

• What local stories are being told?

• What evidence exists that there are other stories to tell?

• Whose memory is favored and forwarded?

• Whose worldview is reflected on the built environment?

• How are slavery, land theft, colonialism, and oppression represented (or not) in public spaces? 

Let us know if you’re up for participating in this collective survey of Boothbay’s memoryscape; we have resources to help you get started. With enough interest, we'll hold a follow up zoom call in early August allowing participants to connect, share their findings, and process them collectively. 

3. Keep an eye on this webpage. In the coming days we will be populating that page with imagined historical signage, presenting just a few of the many stories that are not currently inscribed on Boothbay's commemorative landscape but that should be integrated into our understanding of this place.