The Jesup is establishing this annual lecture celebrating the life and ideals of Ashley Bryan. Bryan, who is from Isleford, is a noted printmaker, author, puppet maker, painter, story teller, illustrator and maker of profound art from sea glass and other found materials. He has devoted his life to bringing people together through art. Each year for a mid-summer presentation, the Jesup will invite a distinguished artist or critic of color whose work reflects similarly deep interest in racial equity to discuss that work with the Downeast Maine community.

Minter, an adjunct professor at Maine College of Art, is known for his work in the mediums of painting and assemblage. His overall body of work often deals with themes of displacement and diaspora, ordinary/extraordinary blackness; spirituality in the Afro-Atlantic world; and the (re)creation of meanings of home. Many of the figures in Minter’s art are those of ordinary Black life, especially of the mid-20th century rural south: hot combs and axes; straw brooms and jack-knives; snakes, jars and crows; round women, big men and long-limbed trees. Through his skilled gaze and carefully honed instinct, Minter elicits deeper meanings from the mundane. In some of Minter’s newest works, he has created canvases and metal plates stamped with small individual images. He calls these Keys. Burned into metal, scraped into wood, stamped on canvas or paper, these are representations of Minter’s family memories and childhood experience. They are also easily recognizable images of a collective Black southern ethos. And they are remnants of journeys in Brazil and the Caribbean.

Minter’s work has been featured in numerous institutions and galleries including the Portland Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, The Charles H. Wright Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Bates College, University of Southern Maine, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The David C. Driskell Center and the Northwest African American Art Museum. Minter has illustrated over a dozen children’s books, including “Going Down Home with Daddy” which was 2020 Caldecott Honor Book. He was also commissioned in both 2004 and 2011 to create Kwanzaa stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. As founding director of Maine Freedom Trails, he has helped highlight the history of the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement in New England. For the past 15 years Minter has raised awareness of the forced removal in 1912 of an interracial community on Maine’s Malaga Island. In 2019, Minter co-founded Indigo Arts Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to cultivating the artistic development of people of African descent. Minter is a graduate of the Art Institute of Atlanta and holds an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from The Maine College of Art.