Myron Beasley, Associate Professor of American Studies, Bates College, Lewiston
Daniel Minter (United States, born 1961), A Distant Holla, “The Mouth of the New Meadow River”, 2020, wood and paint. Courtesy of the artist.
“The Malaga series by Daniel Minter tells a vital and rarely heard narrative of Black life in the United States. In 1912, the interracial community of Casco Bay’s Malaga Island was evicted by the state of Maine. The houses were carried away. The schoolhouse was removed. The graves were exhumed. Those remains that were not lost were piled into three unmarked mass graves at the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. Minter situates the narrative of Malaga in the complex web of ongoing discourse of Black experiences in the United States and the Americas. His work performs a rupture in the master narrative surrounding Black life. Malaga is not unique in that it is a story of injustice, racism, and forced dislocation peculiar to African Americans. The particularities of the Malaga story, however, reveal a distinctive horror which Minter acknowledges and addresses.”
Myron M. Beasley, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies at Bates College. He is an art critic and curator. His writings explore the intersections of cultural politics, art, and social change. He has received awards and fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, The Davis Family Foundation, and Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.