Bio

Daniel Minter is a painter, illustrator, and educator whose body of work deals with themes of displacement and diaspora, spirituality, and the (re)creation of meanings of home. In his richly textured bas relief and mixed media assemblages, Minter employs such diverse materials as metal, wood, twine and clay to construct an iconography of the Afro-Atlantic experience rooted in resilience, resistance, and healing. Of the motivating force that sustains his practice, he explains, “I want to channel my ancestors, I want them to know that they have projected out into the future.” Minter’s work has been featured and acquired in permanent collection by numerous institutions including the Portland Museum of Art, The Hood Museum of Art, The Charles H. Wright Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Bates College Art Museum, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Bowdoin College Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, Bates College Museum of Art, The David C. Driskell Center and the Northwest African American Art Museum.

Minters visual artwork is informed by his extensive travel across the African Diaspora. A travel grant from the National Endowment for the Arts enabled him to live and work in Salvador, Bahia Brazil where he established relationships that have continued to nurture his life and work in important ways. Minter is co-founder of Indigo Arts Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to cultivating the artistic development of people of African descent. The organization has hosted a growing number of Black and Brown artists from across the globe. Indigo Arts Alliance has received several national grants, including awards from the VIA / Wagner Fund, Terra Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Minter has illustrated over fifteen children’s books, many of them award winning, including the distinguished Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustration Honor. He was also commissioned twice 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. Minter is a graduate of the Art Institute of Atlanta. He was conferred the Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Colby College in 2023 and from Maine College of Art & Design in 2019.