![]() ![]() “It starts in one place, and then this repeats. “The melody ascends,” he said, playing the notes. Roumain plays his violin inside the Abyssinian Meeting House in Portland. “Echoes” originated from his long connection with the organization and its executive director, Aimée Petrin. ![]() He also has a long history of performing in Maine, including at “flatbed truck concerts” organized by Portland Ovations during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Roumain has performed with artists from opera singer J’Nai Bridges to pop star Lady Gaga to pianist and composer Philip Glass. “Their ideas were freedom, and these ideas were art,” Cummings said. She saw local Black artists including Daniel Minter and Titi de Baccarat talking together about their work and thought, “This is what it must have been like in 1830 when Black people were getting together, trying to figure out the Anti-Slavery Society and the Underground Railroad and how they could help the slaves get from the South to the North.” This project with Roumain is an example of how the Abyssinian could inspire and host artists in the future.Ĭummings recalled an art exhibition hosted in the meetinghouse in 2017. Related The Abyssinian and the struggle to save Black history in Maine In 2022, the Committee to Restore the Abyssinian received a $1.7 million appropriation in the federal budget, a major boost after many years of fundraising. In 2013, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the Abyssinian as one of the most endangered historic places in the United States. The Abyssinian is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and recognized as a northern hub of the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement. It was sold and converted into a tenement. The congregation never recovered, and the church eventually closed. But in 1898, 19 crew members who attended the Abyssinian died when the SS Portland sunk on a return trip from Boston. The Abyssinian became the religious, educational and cultural heart of Portland’s Black community. “What I’m doing is cultural documentation,” he said.īuilt in 1828, the meetinghouse is the third-oldest in the nation built by an African American congregation, after churches in Boston and Nantucket.
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