In partnership with Indigo Arts Alliance

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens has partnered with Indigo Arts Alliance (IAA) to present a multi-year project that centers Black/Brown/Indigenous relationships with the land. This partnership, now in its second year, presented “Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back,” a symposium and public art commission. Together, we commissioned two indigenous artists/IAA July Artists in Residence, Anna Tsouhlarakis and Shane Perley-Dutcher, to create a permanent public art piece that amplifies Indigenous wisdom, artistry, and presence.

The programmatic series launched with an all day public symposia in 2023, Deconstructing the Boundaries: A Future of Land & Food Resilience. The symposium for 2024 expanded on the questions, points of connection, and learning provoked in the first symposium.

Deconstructing The Boundaries: The Land Fights Back

Our Northeastern United States indigenous citizens are the Maliseet, Micmac, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy, collectively make up the Wabanaki Confederacy. They are also known as “People of the Dawnland.” As members of a global community, we are people of the land. With the growing climate crisis and its reverberations in our societies, we bear witness to how the land fights back. Indigo Arts Alliance and Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens commissioned the work of Anna Tsouhlarakis, Shane Perley-Dutcher, Daniel Minter and Arisa White to envision and create a permanent public art piece that amplifies Indigenous wisdom, artistry, and presence.

This year’s 2024 symposium and public art commissions focus on environmental justice in urban and rural spaces and why it is critical that Black and Brown experiences and knowledge be centered. The work unpacks methods of reparative justice and challenge systems in place today. Witnessing through the lens of scholars, artists, historians and members of our community, we honor our collective wisdom and forge new ways to be in harmony with the land known as Maine and beyond. Participants had an opportunity to learn actionable steps that they can take to help create a better world.

For our team of artists, scholars and activists who are centered on inquiries of nourishment and of repair, examination of these normative cultural practices strive to address these key questions:

1. How do we evolve personal, community, and institutional relationships with land ownership – including specifically with botanical gardens, land trusts, and conservancies – in ways that forge generative relationships with landscape, land use, foodways, and agricultural practices, including very possibly relationships that result in the deconstruction of these same land-holding institutions?
2. How do we make visible and begin to heal the deep disease that roots itself in dominant narratives and dominant cultural spaces regarding how we embody?
3. How do we acknowledge heretofore ignored or rejected technologies generated by African and First Nations descendant people’s existence outside of settler colonial paradigms?