Portland, Maine 04102 United States
Tate House Museum is pleased to announce our participation in Re-Site 2024 in partnership with SPACE. This Mellon Foundation-funded program is the second edition of a site-specific temporary public art and Portland history-telling initiative first launched in 2020 as part of Maine’s bicentennial. Re-Site 2024 offers five new artistic projects in partnership with diverse public organizations and spaces that will help expand community knowledge of local histories and their impacts today as well as generate dialogue about what we carry with us into the future. Re-Site 2024 projects come with site histories, artist statements, bibliographies for further reading, and recorded conversations with the artists and other key participants.
FMI about Re-Site 2024, visit space538.org.
Tate House Museum will host an Opening Night Reception with Re-Site 2024 Artist Ashley Page on Friday May 10 from 5:30-7:30 pm. This event is free and open to the public, and will include viewing of Ashley’s art installation titled, Imagining Freedom, in the context of the historic 1755 Tate House. Her artwork will be on display through June 30 and can be viewed as part of Tate House Museum’s regular house tours, which will open for the season on June 5.
Ashley Page (ashleypagestudio.com), interdisciplinary artist and Studio and Programs Manager at Indigo Arts Alliance, describes her project as follows: Reconciling Portland, Maine’s history of industrialization and colonization while contending with the global reverberations of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Imagining Freedom, asks the viewer to step into the shoes of an enslaved Black individual, Bet. Her age, appearance, homelands, and quality of life are all unknown, lost to the unraveling nature of time. Only appearing in court records, we know nothing about Bet other than that she was a servant living and working in the Tate House in the 1770s for an indeterminate amount of time.
Researching the social, political, and economic landscape of Maine during this period and reviewing archival documents, Page makes an intentional departure from the archive as she asks the guiding question: What did freedom look like for Bet? What did her daydreams look like, sound like, taste like? This historical recovery project grapples with the ways enslaved peoples were excluded from historical records and navigates new ways we tell our stories.
Stay tuned for more information about an upcoming workshop by Ashley Page on Juneteenth (June 19th ) that will highlight her artistic process.
Join us for this unique and provocative viewing and more inclusive telling of Tate House and colonial Portland history.
FMI: contact Director Holly K. Hurd hkhurd@tatehouse.org