The artist reception for Wabanaki artist Maya Tihtiyas Attean is scheduled for Friday, September 12, 2025, from 4-6 pm.
Maya Tihtiyas Attean
Maya Tihtiyas Attean (b. 1994) is a Wabanaki artist living in Portland, Maine, and Machigonne, raised on the Penobscot Reservation. Her work reflects her ancestry, resilience, and connection to the natural world. Through exploring the duality she embodies within the colonized world in which she exists, she marries mediums and techniques from multiple cultures to create new realities and possibilities in her work. Maya earned her BFA in Photography from Maine College of Art & Design in 2023. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Portland Museum of Art and the Abbe Museum.
For more information, please visit: https://www.mayatihtiyas.com
Follow Maya: https://www.instagram.com/mayatihtiyasart
Photography Exhibit – “What the Land Carries“
(Aug. 29 – Sept. 28, 2025)
An exhibition by Maya Tihtiyas Attean
This exhibition builds upon Maya Tihtiyas Attean’s ongoing project, Does the land remember?, a visual and emotional inquiry into how memory, identity, and land are bound together across Wabanaki territory. Through photographs created across the region, including the Katahdin area, a place of deep spiritual and ancestral significance, Attean explores the land as more than a setting. It is a living witness, a keeper of generational memory, and a participant in stories of resilience, loss, and return.
Drawing from her own Wabanaki ancestry and lived experience, Attean engages the landscape as both archive and relative. Her images reveal a layered terrain, one that bears the scars of colonization but also pulses with presence and continuity. In these works, the land is not neutral; it holds the weight of what has been done to it and what it still offers in return.
Attean’s practice reflects the tension of existing within both colonized and decolonized realities. Her photographs carry this complexity, blurring the boundary between the physical and the spiritual, the remembered and the forgotten. Through this lens, the landscape becomes a mirror and a memory, offering viewers an invitation to consider: What does the land remember? And how do we begin to listen?
