Presented by Atlantic Black Box & Indigo Arts Alliance

Thursday, January 28 at 7:00 pm on zoom

 Register here

Join Indigo Arts Alliance and Atlantic Black Box for the first in a series of conversations that will showcase projects from around New England that aim to make Black history and heritage visible in the built environment.

Dr. Kate McMahon of the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will moderate a conversation about public memory and representation featuring the following panelists:

• Representative Rachel Talbot Ross, Portland Freedom Trail (Maine)

• Charles Roberts, Rhode Island Slave History Medallions (Rhode Island)

• JerriAnne Boggis, Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire (New Hampshire)

• Dennis Culliton, Witness Stones Project (Connecticut)

Register here

New England has long repressed the memory of its complicity in Atlantic world slavery, just as it has suppressed the stories of the region’s free and enslaved Black and Indigenous populations. These glaring omissions perpetuate historical harms. In plotting a course toward a more equitable future, we are going to need a better map.

ReMAPping New England (Memory + Art + Place) is a historical recovery project aimed at inscribing these effaced narratives both in the built environment and on a dynamic digital landscape in an effort to re-member our communities in all their diversity and radically shift public consciousness toward truth.

Indigo Arts Alliance connects Black and Brown artists from around the world with Maine’s artists of African descent through a multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program that embodies a Black-led approach to creativity, community-building, and mentoring.

Atlantic Black Box is a public history project that supports individuals and institutions in researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the Atlantic world slave economy.

This program is made possible in part by a grant from the Maine Humanities Council.

#AtlanticBlackBox #IndigoArtsAlliance

Published by Meadow Dibble

Meadow Dibble is Director of Community-Engaged Research at the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations and founding Director of Atlantic Black Box, a nonprofit devoted to researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the slave trade and the economy of enslavement. She is currently in her third year as a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Meadow received her Doctorate from Brown’s Department of French with a focus on Postcolonial studies and taught Francophone African literature at Colby College from 2005–08. Originally from Cape Cod, she lived for six years on Senegal’s Cape Verde peninsula, where she published a cultural magazine and coordinated foreign study programs. In 2016, Meadow experienced a brutal awakening to the reality of her hometown’s deep investment in the global slave economy. Ever since, she has been researching complicity among Cape Cod’s sea captains while developing The Atlantic Black Box Project.

Leave a Reply