06/23/2026
From the Collection:
Billy Gérard Frank, born in Grenada, West Indies, is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator whose research and socially engaged art practice interrogate personal and collective historiography, memory, exile, global politics, post-colonialism, and q***r decoloniality. His work challenges and deconstructs normative narratives, using speculation and new imagery to suggest counter-histories.
This piece from the collection, Indigo: Entanglements No. 5, includes poignant imagery including The Royal African Company Logo, a West Indies sugar cane plantation family, a map of the ‘Triangular Trade,’ and many other details that look at Maine and Boston’s entangled relationship with slavery.
Indigo: Entanglements is Frank’s new and ongoing body of works (multimedia painting incorporating silkscreen, vintage African fabric, newsprint, acrylic, etc.) interrogating the unmitigated drama and tragedy of New World Slavery and Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was, in the words of the African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, “the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history…. The transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new found El Dorado of the West…. They descended into Hell.’’
Each painting in the series Indigo: Entanglements acts as a mirror of truth held up to the viewers; artifacts of shared cultural and social; personal and collective remembrances.
🖼️Billy Gérard Frank (born 1970), Indigo: Entanglements. No. 5, 2022, silkscreen, natural pigments, vintage African fabric, newsprint, acrylic, 62 x 70 inches. Museum purchase supported by an anonymous Maine donor, 2022.34. © Billy Gérard Frank / Photography by Craig Becker
