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Photo Gallery |
| Daniel Minter, Visual Artist Dept. of Public Works City of Portland Maine |
In the language of trees
I speak to Ogun
My father is old
He is old and don't
mind waiting
I think so slowly so
in the language of trees
I speak my mind.
My art work is a study of memory, exploring the many ways in which memory is embedded into our past, present and future. It is the interconnection of time that contains the essence of what memory has left behind. We all have histories - those of our families, as well as our own - that are filled with trials and triumphs. Histories that remain silent, their lessons unexplored, their moments of grace unrevealed. Those histories hold the potential to let us to know who we are, to share ourselves with each other, to make meaningful lasting relationships, to reclaim our connections across society’s perceived divisions and separations. Using archetypal symbols, icons and folklore steeped in the context of African-American and African-Diasporic culture, I create a visual vocabulary. Metaphors take shape out of chairs, houses, snakes and trees infusing the energy of emotion, action and place to everyday life, everyday being.
Born in Ellaville, a small rural community in southern Georgia, in 1963, I loved art at an early age. After high school, I moved to Atlanta and graduated from The Art Institute of Atlanta. Since then I have worked professionally as an illustrator, arts educator, painter and sculptor. My work has taken me from Atlanta, Seattle, Salvador, Brazil, Brooklyn, Chicago to Portland, Maine.
The Arts & Equity Initiative: The opportunity to work as an artist with a city, to accomplish something as concrete as a new energy and perspective on diversity, to use my gifts, to share them, to have it acknowledged that art has the power to transform things, is a profound gift. The Department of Public Works and I have a relationship that was built over the last two years of working on Portland Freedom Trail. As they installed the granite markers along Portland’s Freedom Trail, I watched them become excited and engaged in the project. Public Works employees would be digging up parts of the city for other projects and save the bottles, cobblestones, buttons that they found to show me. Then we’d think together about what era they belonged to, whether enslaved men and women might have played a role in their existence, and so on. Public Works has very few people of color employed. One of the many things I am looking forward to is that it is primarily a working class culture so there is a plain spoken-ness that can be tapped into in art-making and conversations about race, class, gender and religions. People are themselves in a real way and that is a good place to begin to make art from.
We will be using discussions in the workshops and in personal conversations while I am there every week, to build our relationships, learn about each other, ask questions, and listen to the answers. In the workshops, we will be creating prints by carving linoleum blocks that reflect these experiences. Prints will include objects connected to their jobs, to their family’s history, to their own experiences growing up re: diversity and ‘otherness’. Each participant will make several ‘rubber stamps’ used to create larger prints, adding text and exhibiting their work for their co-workers and the public. The work created will create countless opportunities for discussions among Public Works employees and in their families about history, diversity, heritage and pride as their relationships deepen and multicultural literacy expands. I am particularly excited re: AEI’s goal to impact the policies and practice re: diversity in the Dept. of Public Works. This is where I think art needs to be.