Re-Site 2024 | Ashley Page – Imagining Freedom opening reception

Join us at the Tate House Museum for an opening reception for Ashley Page’s Imagining Freedom, one of five artist projects in SPACE’s site-specific public art program Re-Site 2024.

Ashley Page’s installation asks, “What does freedom and liberation look like?” Inspired by the history of Bet/Bett (some current references stylize this as “Bette”), an enslaved African who worked for the Tate Family’s home built in 1755, and the only colonial house in Portland, that overlooks the Fore and Stroudwater rivers. 

Interdisciplinary artist Ashley Page has partnered with the Tate House Museum for the 2024 iteration of SPACE’s Re-Site project. Reconciling Portland, Maine’s history of industrialization and colonization while contending with the global reverberations of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Imagining Freedom asks the viewer to step into the shoes of an enslaved Black individual, Bet. Her age, appearance, homelands, and quality of life are all unknown, lost to the unraveling nature of time. Only appearing as a called witness in a court record, we know nothing about Bet other than she was an enslaved servant living and working in the Tate House in the 1700s for an unknown amount of time. Researching the social, political and economic landscape of Maine in the early-late 1700’s and reviewing archival documents, Page makes an intentional departure from the archive as she asks the guiding question: What did freedom look like for Bet? What did her daydreams look like, sound like, taste like? This historial recovery project grapples with the ways enslaved peoples were excluded from historical records and navigates new ways in which we tell our stories. 

Ashley Page is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, Maine. Originally hailing from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Page considers her studio practice and curatorial projects to be a vessel for representation, intergenerational exchange, and creative expression. Having obtained her BFA in Sculpture and a minor in Public Engagement from Maine College of Art & Design, her work is an expansion of textile based techniques, bringing craft sensibilities into a sculptural domain. In 2022, she was awarded the Amelia Peabody Award for Sculpture by St. Botolph Club Foundation, and has taught various workshops at Waterfall Arts, Peters Valley, the University of Maine Orono and more. Her curatorial and studio practice has been seen in the Portland Museum of Art, Hunterdon Art Museum, Congress Square Park, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, The Abyssinian Meeting House, Cove Street Arts, and others. Page is presently the Studio and Programs Manager at Indigo Arts Alliance, where she works within the intersection of art and activism. 

SPACE is pleased to present Re-Site 2024, the second iteration of the site-specific, temporary public art and Portland history-telling initiative we first launched in 2020. This year’s series features artwork by James Allister Sprang, Maya Tihtiyas Attean, Ashley Page, Rachel Alexandrou, and Ling-Wen Tsai, in collaboration with historians Seth Goldstein and Libby Bischof.