With their carefully rendered coastlines and borders, maps are good at conveying a sense of place. But a visiting artist at the University of Southern Maine is showing how maps can also help convey a sense of self.
Billy Gérard Frank visited Hannaford Hall in Portland on February 7 to discuss his creative process and the art that results from it. He was the featured speaker of the annual DiMatteo Lecture, hosted by the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education.
Frank was born in Grenada. As with many Caribbean islands, slavery looms large in its past. Historians estimate more than 129,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Grenada between the 17th and 19th centuries. French and British colonial rulers forced them to farm cocoa, sugar, and indigo.
Frank explored that history and its cultural legacy in a series of artistic expressions called “Indigo: Entanglements.” Over the course of his lecture, he discussed numerous entries in the series while their images lit up the screen behind him. Each piece is made of multiple elements including paintings, newsprint, photographs, fabrics, and maps.
“Maps are not just records of place,” Frank said. “They are artifacts of struggle, survival, and resistance.”
The descendants of enslaved people continue to reckon with their cultural inheritance centuries later. Art helps Frank reconcile that part of his identity with the Irish heritage he got from his mother. The history that Frank explores also has echoes in current headlines about human trafficking, labor relations, and mass migration.
Film is another outlet for Frank’s curiosity. He paused his lecture more than 20 minutes for a screening of “Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories.” It’s a biographical study of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, a former slave who became an anti-slavery activist.
Frank eschewed traditional narrative structure and instead layered scenes from Cugoano’s life out of linear order. The technique is meant to mirror the way Cugoano had to reconcile the different identities that he was forced to embody over the course of his tumultuous life.
The movie went public at the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition. The screening at USM was its New England premiere. Among the audience was Emma Hargreaves, a social studies teacher at Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham. She was interested in the educational applications of Frank’s work.
Hargreaves challenges her students to build their critical and visual thinking skills by sharing ideas in small group conversations. She is always looking for new ways to get them to open up. In Frank’s work, she sees how the integration of primary sources into contemporary art can help to bring history alive.
“Frankly, I’m just trying to get them curious,” Hargreaves said. “And sometimes, pulling out the really cool old stuff is what gets them curious to ask questions.”
Students at the college level will also benefit from a conversational approach to learning. Frank will return to USM in the fall semester to interact directly with students as a Peggy L. Osher Visiting Artist Fellow. He’s the first person to hold that role, but teaching isn’t new to him. Frank is also a lecturer in Directing and Drama at Yale.
The Osher Map Library further cemented the relationship between USM and Frank by acquiring one of his pieces. “Indigo: Entanglements, No. 6” features several of the series’ trademark elements including portraiture, historical documents, and a map of Africa.
In the weeks leading up to Frank’s lecture, the piece was on display among other new acquisitions at the Osher Map Library’s gallery. It came down at the end of February to make way for a new exhibition but won’t be out of sight for long. Mountings are being prepared in the library’s seminar room for its permanent home.
Frank’s work is in high demand. He’s been featured at the Brooklyn Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, and the National Academy of Design, among many other public and private spaces. But he takes special pride in his involvement with the Osher Map Library.
“Because there are students and people who are looking at this work, it becomes a living artifact versus just a dead artifact that is in a museum,” Frank said. “In spaces where it’s constantly interrogated and contested, my work does speak to a different kind of audience, specifically students who could learn from the visual elements.”