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.
Commissioned Artwork
In the Voice of Trees
Created by Daniel Minter, this freestanding sculpture builds upon the existing themes introduced in The Healing Language of Trees (a project installed at the Lynden Sculpture Garden), which continues the exploration of trees as symbols of resilience, healing, and interconnectedness.
While the first work transformed ash trees devastated by the emerald ash borer into sculptural totems, this second project extends the conversation, featuring sixteen red pine trunks stripped of their branches, bound together as a single entity.
The trunks symbolize the African proverb, “Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable,” and are a meditation on unity and endurance. Draped over the trunks are strands of clay beads, hand-formed through multiple community activations to echo seeds, stones, and relics, representing prayers for the next seven generations. The trunks, standing together, are both guardians of memory and pillars for the future.
Daniel Minter
Daniel Minter, IAA co-founder and Artist Director, is a painter, illustrator, and educator whose body of work deals with themes of displacement and diaspora, spirituality, and the (re)creation of meanings of home. In his richly textured bas-relief and mixed media assemblages, Minter employs such diverse materials as metal, wood, twine, and clay to construct an iconography of the Afro-Atlantic experience rooted in resilience, resistance, and healing.
Of the motivating force that sustains his practice, Minter’s work has been featured and acquired in permanent collection by numerous institutions including the Portland Museum of Art, The Hood Museum of Art, The Charles H. Wright Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Bates College Art Museum, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Bowdoin College Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, Bates College Museum of Art, The David C. Driskell Center and the Northwest African American Art Museum.
look after your heart
Writer Arisa White encourages guests to engage with the multisensory nature of her writing. Inlaid into the ground is a mirror poem titled “revolution is ritual” that speaks to belonging, safety, rootedness, compassion, and love. Symbolically referencing the plants located in the woodland beds, the poem also serves as a spell for opening, encouraging, and healing the heart.
Accompanying the mirror poem is the song “grand revolve.” This song was created to inspire a vast sense of love and belonging. Press the button and let the music tend to the light in your chest! The lyrics, written by Arisa White, are set to music composed by cellist Robin Lane with vocals by Jazmin DeRice. Words for the song are sourced from the Latin and common names of the botanicals found in the Woodland Garden.
Arisa White
Arisa White (she/her) is an IAA Mentorship AiR ‘22 and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. In collaboration with composer Jessica Jones, Post Pardon: The Opera is Arisa’s librettist debut. Her poetry is widely published, and her collections have been nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Per Diem Poetry Prize, the Maine Literary Award, the Nautilus Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and the Golden Crown Literary Award. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations that are rooted in Black queer women’s ways of knowing. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Community Advisory Board. arisawhite.com
grand revolve
you are here
you are safe
you are loved
you belong
here, holding a broken heart
in a woodland garden of names
blue magic beauty
raspberry rhapsody
grand revolve
steward orange shores
gust rhododendron
freckle sandy crisp
phylla red
lady whale
venus effect
be a young ripple
a great golden curve
a wide-striped honeymoon
fawn no Queen,
Jack or Victor
be a candid dry if
a stable vein pulpit
holding your heart whole
and tending to the light
inside your chest
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.
