Daniel Minter leads a block printing workshop last year at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle. He’ll be leading another one this month as part of a symposium on art and slavery at Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, which he co-founded with his wife, Marcia. Photo courtesy of Indigo Arts Alliance

Quilting. Block printing. Movement.

Those activities are on the agenda for an upcoming symposium in Portland alongside panel discussions with historians, museum curators and professional artists. The event, called “Art in the Wake: Reckoning and Re-membering,” will explore the role of art in grappling with the legacy of slavery, uncovering buried histories and creating new understandings of Blackness.

So, organizers said, making art had to be part of the program.

“You can learn things by hearing them, by seeing them, but our bodies remember things by doing them,” said Portland artist Daniel Minter, who will participate in one of the talks and then lead the workshop on block printing.

Indigo Arts Alliance will present the symposium May 19 and 20 in partnership with the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture and Atlantic Black Box, a public history project that empowers New England communities to research and reckon with the region’s involvement in enslavement. It will also include a preview display of new work by Minter, which will be part of an exhibit that will debut next year at the museum in Washington, D.C., and then travel to three continents.

The central question posed by the organizers is: How can the power of creativity move us toward reconciliation, justice and grace?

Kate McMahon Photo by Megan Brodie

“What we mean by that really is, not only are we having these thematic panels where scholars like (Kate McMahon, a historian and curatorial specialist at the Center for the Study of Global Slavery) and others will be in conversation with artists who are working with these stories within their personal artistic practices, but we will also have multiple ways community members can work hands-on with what they are learning throughout the days,” said Marcia Minter, co-founder of Indigo Arts Alliance with Daniel, her husband and its executive director.

Marcia Minter emphasized that the event is open to the public, not just to professional artists. The invited speakers from Maine and around the world are what she calls “social practice artists, which means that they are really looking for ways to not only connect and be inspired by the everyday world and everyday people around them, but also to engage those individuals in making too.”

“Think about how just as an ordinary individual, you’ve used your hands and your heart and your mind and your body and your spirit to process,” said Marcia Minter. “These professional artists are just going to help lead people, are just going to help guide people in ways to do that work.”

Daniel and Marica Minter, co-founders of Indigo Arts Alliance, in front of a colorful mural outside their Deering home in 2018. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Marcia and Daniel Minter have long relationships with many of their collaborators on the symposium, including Paul Gardullo, director of the Center for the Study of Global Slavery. Gardullo has been an advisor to Indigo Arts Alliance since the nonprofit formed in 2019. Next year, the museum will debut a major global exhibit called “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World” that will eventually move to locations in South America, Africa and Europe.

Paul Gardullo Photo courtesy of National Geographic

Gardullo said the symposium could be a model for future events as the exhibit travels the world.

“We’re trying to experiment with that to see what we can learn from that and what we can learn from not just having these conversations in academic spaces, which are always really rich, but I would say are limited,” said Gardullo. “And what happens when you bring them not just outside of the academic environment, but what happens when you break the model and start thinking about combining smart conversations with doing things with your hands and your heart and your imagination?”

Daniel Minter, artistic director at Indigo Arts Alliance, is working on an art installation called “The Universe of Freedom-Making” that will be central to that exhibit. One artifact that has stayed in his mind as he developed the work is a ballast used as a counterweight for the human beings in slave ships. He said the center’s research and the materials in the exhibit have given him “a wider sense of freedom” in his work on this piece.

“I don’t have to explain,” he said. “I don’t have to give reason for the imagery that I create or the things I create, because there are scholars and academics who have this information in a readable, digestible form that can be passed on so that I don’t have to worry about that. I can work on it on a more artistic level.”

Johanna Obenda Photo by Junie Lee

Minter will discuss the upcoming exhibit and his work on a panel with Gardullo and curatorial specialist Johanna Obenda during the weekend. Obenda said the exhibition will weave together art and history, and Daniel Minter’s work will provide an opportunity to explore the concept of Black freedom.

“We could try to describe that with words and text, but it feels like it’s better expressed through art,” said Obenda. “There are a lot of things in this history that are easily processed through art, and we were looking for areas where we could cede some space from the curatorial perspective.”

The center’s staff includes Kate McMahon, who is from Maine and now researches New England’s connections to and complicity in the illegal slave trade and colonialism. McMahon said one challenge in developing the museum exhibit is the lack of material artifacts from enslaved and colonized people around the world because of racism that has shaped archival collections, and art can help fill the gaps where those items are missing.

“Art and artists have an important way of making the memory and the histories tangible, something that people today can really hold onto and see in its physicality,” she said. “In many instances, manuscript evidence doesn’t have the same broad pull evocative emotion that a piece of art can have. Artists have this way of keeping those memories alive and helping us bring them forward.”

The symposium will open that Friday evening with a screening of the Oscar-nominated film “Descendant,” about the only known slave ship discovered on North American soil, its survivors and their descendants. Following the screening will be a discussion with McMahon; Gabrielle Miller, an archaeologist and program specialist at the Center for the Study of Global Slavery; filmmaker Margaret Brown; and descendants of The Clotilda.

Gabrielle Miller, an archaeologist and program specialist at the Center for the Study of Global Slavery, will be part of a post-screening discussion of “Descendants.” Photo by Mig Johnson

“Art is an essential tool and practice for many communities that are impacted by enslavement. … I think broadening our idea of who is impacted by the history of enslavement and realizing that’s more than those who are descendants of those who are enslaved, we all need these tools, and these tools are built in community,” said Miller.

The event will continue all day Saturday with an excerpt from another film, the panel discussion about the upcoming exhibit and another about quilting, and meals by Jordan Benissan, the chef and owner of Me Lon Togo, a West African restaurant in the Midcoast. Participants will be able to join the hands-on workshops on Saturday afternoon.

Atlantic Black Box is also supporting the event, and founder Meadow Dibble said their contribution will be an interactive map of more than 70 slaving voyages with connections to Maine. Dibble said art can help people grapple with the kind of research that Atlantic Black Box is trying to uncover in communities across New England.

“Art is and always has been about truth,” she said. “Coming into this knowledge that an entire region has managed to suppress its knowledge of involvement in slavery for a couple hundred years, that’s a head trip. How can you convey the reality of such an inconceivable thing? The official narrative, what we were supposed to believe, was deeply incomplete, deeply skewed, misrepresented our role in the world economy. It left us alienated as a people from our true history. How else but art really can you bridge the gap between the truth and the narrative?”