In conjunction with Re|Sounding, now on view, join Maine Maritime Museum this spring and summer for an artist workshop and lecture series. Each month from May through August, we are hosting a different contributing artist for a unique learning experience, each examining art as a tool for exploring histories, and uncovering how historical and cultural contexts can influence art. The four art mediums explored throughout this workshop series are sculpting, poetry, performance art, and painting.
Carried by Water: Memory, Migration, and Afro-Diasporic World-Building
Water is both a material reality and a conceptual framework within Nyugen E. Smith's interdisciplinary practice. It functions as a site of migration, exchange, loss, survival, and renewal, serving as a connective force that links people, places, and histories across the African Diaspora. In this lecture, Smith explores water as the connective element across his interdisciplinary practice, revealing how it links his sculptures, mixed-media drawings, conceptual mapping projects, assemblages, and performances into an evolving investigation of memory, migration, and Afro-diasporic world-building.
Smith's use of found materials, speculative architectures, ritual forms, and an evolving symbolic language considers how communities navigate displacement while preserving cultural knowledge and creating new possibilities for belonging. Water functions as both a witness to histories of the transatlantic slave trade, migration, and climate change, and an active participant in Afro-diasporic traditions of freedom-making, resilience, and world-building.
Drawing on more than two decades of research, travel, and collaborations across the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and North America, Smith reflects on how these experiences have shaped his practice, informing what he describes as an ecology of memory, a framework in which histories, materials, and cultural knowledge remain in motion. Rather than understanding water as a boundary, Carried by Water proposes it as a living archive and connective medium through which past and present converge. By following these currents, the lecture offers a perspective on world-building rooted in relation, care, and the continual remaking of home.
This in-person event is free, but preregistration is required.
Photo: Erica MacLean
Nyugen E. Smith is an artist living and working in Jersey City, NJ. His work addresses Black cultural identity. Guided by the metaphorical roots of this colonial legacy, Nyugen is interested in the dynamic interplay between various thematic nodes, including architecture, language, performance, ritual, trauma, DNA memory, climate change, and migration.Central to his practice is an emphasis on the utilization of pre-existing materials, the body, and play, within the art-making process.
Nyugen holds a BA, Fine Art from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, Peréz Art Museum, Museum of Cultural History, Norway, Frist Art Museum, Blanton Museum, Newark Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Nyugen is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace Fund, Dr. Doris Derby Award, New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant, and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
Exhibit Contributions
Bundlehouse: FS Mini No. 12 (Garvey Aight)
Spirit Carriers
Working in the museum's historic blacksmith shop to forge a custom stand for the Bundlehouse sculpture