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About the exhibit
Africa to Maine opens a window on immigrants’ perspective of their homelands. The pictures in this exhibition are highly personal family photographs taken by Mainers of African descent. Maine’s Africans arrived here as refugees from violence with few possessions – but one thing portable enough to travel across continents and oceans, and holding deep personal meaning, was a handful of cherished family photographs. Posed group portraits or candid snapshots, they depict relatives and friends, social occasions and everyday scenes in Angola, Burundi, D.R. Congo, Egypt, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia, between the 1960’s and 2022. The exhibit was displayed at the Portland Public Library March 24 – June 18, 2023 and is currently housed in our 3rd floor café community space. Stop by Chai Hour and see the exhibit!
This exhibition was assembled by Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center as a community response to the exhibit Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa, which ran at the Portland Museum of Art March 24-June 19, 2023. Webb was an American photographer who travelled across Africa in the 1950’s on assignment from the United Nations. The wars and social upheavals that constitute the history of the next sixty years are absent from Webb’s images, but they hover in the background of the photos shared by Maine’s African community. Their images all have a story to tell, and individuals who contributed their family photos to this exhibition shared some of them with us in a series of public conversations in the spring of 2023. Thank you to all the participants, and to those who joined us for these events to hear about their journeys from Africa to Maine.
Africa to Maine is a production of the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center: Reza Jalali, Executive Director; Bau Graves, Project Supervisor; Elizabeth Donato, Project Coordinator, Mouhamedoul Niang, PhD, Project Scholar. It is produced in partnership with the Portland Public Library, the Portland Museum of Art, and Amjambo Africa. Photographs courtesy of Ekhlas Ahmed, Bishara Alkher, Antoni Bazia, Magnifique Butoto, Fernanda Caliki, Maxwell Chikuta, Elizabeth Donato, Sahra Hassan, Jean de la Passion Ilunga, Benoit Ikuba, Joselynne Kamikaze, En’kul Kanakan, Josephine Katandula, Daniyah Kazadi, Safiye Khalid, Lydianna Lubwini, Teresa Vanessa Mateus, Mouhamedoul Niang and Grace Vanusa. Thank you!