In partnership with Indigo Arts Alliance
Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens has partnered with Indigo Arts Alliance to present a multi-year project that centers Black/Brown/Indigenous relationships with the land. The programmatic series launched in 2023 with an all-day public symposia, Deconstructing the Boundaries: A Future of Land & Food Resilience, and continued in 2024 with Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back. This partnership, now in its third year, presents Deconstructing the Boundaries: Tending to Communities, a symposium and public art commission.
Intertwining difficult conversations and hard truths with compassion and togetherness are the pillar upon which Deconstructing the Boundaries: Tending to Communities stands. As people of the global majority, Black, Brown and Indigenous communities have been historically disenfranchised, culturally erased and forced to be resilient. As concerned citizens of the world, we bear witness to social shifts and remain steady through political opposition, economic strife and social unrest. We create frameworks, models, and guides that demonstrate ways to be together and share resources and organize for the betterment of all peoples. Looking through the lens of ecological justice and rematriation, Deconstructing the Boundaries: Tending to Communities focuses on the ancestral, cultural, and historical severance of knowledge and power as a result of colonization.
Considered through the lens of artists, scholars, historians and cultural practitioners, we invite participants to engage in meaningful dialogue, inspire sustainable futures, and create a platform for innovative, community-driven environmental justice. Indigo Arts Alliance and Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens commissioned the work of writer Arisa White and artist Daniel Minter to envision and create public art works that reflect the responsibility of life, love and identity amongst communities. We will honor our collective wisdom and forge new ways to be in harmony with the land known as Maine and beyond. We will share perspectives on how Black, Brown and Indigenous communities have created spiritual, traditional and cultural relationships to the land since millennia and and continue to do so.
In Partnership With
Founded in 2018, Indigo Arts Alliance (IAA) is a Portland, ME-based, Black-led organization dedicated to professional development and amplification of Black and Brown thought-leadership, vision, and creative practice. As an organization of social practice artists, scholars, and activists, it seeks to strengthen multiracial democracy by cultivating and celebrating art as a key resource for healthy communities, connecting global and local Black and Brown artists, providing an affirming environment for the creation of artwork across disciplines, and promoting engagement through participatory events that bring artists’ and activists’ work into public conversation on social justice, culture, and community. IAA is the only Black-led, established arts incubator in northern New England. That being the case, they fill a critically important gap in representation lacking in other regional arts and cultural institutions.
