Director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program Martha J. McNamara will discuss the 1856 autobiographical landscape drawn by Pedro Tovookan Parris currently on view in the exhibit, A Usable Past: American Folk Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. Parris’s drawing tells the story of a harrowing journey from East Africa, where he was enslaved as a child, to Rio de Janeiro, Boston and, ultimately, to the small western Maine town of Paris. By linking personal experience with political concerns in a single visual narrative, Tovookan’s imagery causes us to recognize the complex, traumatic legacy of slavery and to understand how it shaped his experiences as an African man living in a rural community in antebellum New England.
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