The Interco(a)stal Initiative
Interco(a)stal: Reading Between the Ribs of Maine's Maritime History is a yearlong, place-based project that uses monument reinterpretation as a framework for historical recovery, artistic exploration, and civic dialogue.
Led by Atlantic Black Box in collaboration with The Third Place, Maine Maritime Museum, Bomazeen Land Trust and a network of artists, researchers, culture bearers, archivists, and community partners, Interco(a)stal centers on the Wyoming Evocation—a monumental skeletal ship sculpture in Bath that commemorates the longest wooden vessel ever built.
Through archival research, artistic intervention, community engagement, and a process of narrative return—bringing stories, histories, and knowledge back into the communities, landscapes, and public spaces from which they emerged—participants are working together to uncover overlooked dimensions of Maine's maritime past and explore how they might change the way we understand this monument and the histories it represents.
Interco(a)stal will culminate in a public WHERE walk and site activation on October 17, 2026 in Bath, Maine. This daylong, multisensory, embodied encounter with the City of Ships will invite participants to engage Maine's maritime history through multiple lenses and ways of knowing while exploring what it means to "read between the ribs" of official narratives.
The Interco(a)stal Walk
Saturday, October 17, 2026
What stories surface when we look at Maine’s maritime history from the waterline,
and when we peer between the ribs of the ships that built its reputation?
On October 17, join us for a daylong, multisensory journey through Bath, Maine, the City of Ships. Together, we’ll walk just under three miles from the North End Boat Launch to Maine Maritime Museum, encountering place-based histories, performances, installations, and other artistic interventions along the way.
The Interco(a)stal Walk invites us to see this familiar maritime landscape through a new lens. We’ll encounter the Kennebec River as Wabanaki homeland and a living ecosystem, recenter Black and Wabanaki maritime histories that have too often been left outside the frame, and trace Bath’s connections to colonization, slavery and Atlantic commerce, migration, labor, industrialization, ecological change, resistance, and community.
Along the way, we’ll consider how these histories change what we understand Maine’s maritime story to be.
What realities should a monument to shipbuilding and seafaring actually reflect?
The walk draws on research contributed by six Maine museums and historical societies and 14 independent researchers, historians, and community knowledge keepers.
Along the route and at Maine Maritime Museum, 19 extraordinary artists will bring these histories into public space through sculpture, painting, poetry, music, performance, sound, augmented reality, digital art, canoe-based work, and participatory installations.
At Maine Maritime Museum, we’ll gather over a shared lunch featuring foods that speak to the histories and communities encountered throughout the day. The afternoon will culminate in the public unveiling and activation of a collective reimagining of the museum’s monumental Wyoming Evocation sculpture, opening new ways of seeing the monument and the maritime histories it represents.
Come walk with us as we recover stories, return them to place, and make room for a fuller understanding of Maine’s maritime past.
Rather than replace one version of Bath’s history with another, we’ll ask what becomes visible when we read between the ribs of familiar narratives and make room for histories that have been overlooked, obscured, or forgotten.
This an invitation to collectively engage in historical recovery and narrative return, reconnecting stories and knowledge with the communities, landscapes, and public spaces to which they belong.
Why WHERE here?
The deeply collaborative Interco(a)stal project unfolds in Bath, Maine—a place long known as the City of Ships. For over two centuries, the Kennebec River has been a site of extraordinary shipbuilding activity, from the construction of massive wooden schooners like the Wyoming to the ongoing work of Bath Iron Works, one of the nation’s most significant naval shipyards. Shipbuilding here is not only a historical legacy; it is a living tradition, deeply embedded in the economic, cultural, and emotional life of the community.
At the same time, this history does not begin with European settlement or the rise of the shipbuilding industry. For millennia, Wabanaki people have lived in relationship with this place—moving along the Kennebec and its tributaries as vital waterways, or “roads,” and building vessels shaped by deep knowledge of land, water, and seasonal rhythms. These practices reflect reciprocal relationships with the natural world that stand in contrast to later extractive maritime economies.
To speak of Bath as the City of Ships is to invoke a more recent chapter layered onto much longer histories of presence, movement, and making. Recognizing this deeper context invites us to reconsider what counts as maritime knowledge, whose traditions are visible, and how relationships to water have changed over time.
This legacy is visible across Bath’s commemorative landscape. Monuments, museum exhibits, and public narratives tend to emphasize ingenuity, craftsmanship, scale, and maritime achievement. They tell a story of innovation and pride—one that has shaped local identity and continues to be carried forward by generations of shipbuilders and their families.
And yet, as with many places shaped by extractive industries and global trade, these narratives are partial.
What often remains outside the frame are the broader systems in which these ships were embedded: the Atlantic networks of commerce and coercion, the entanglements with slavery and colonization, the ecological transformations of coastal and oceanic worlds, and the human lives—particularly Black and Indigenous lives—whose labor, displacement, and resistance made these histories possible yet have gone largely unacknowledged in dominant narratives.
In a place where maritime heritage is so central to collective identity, these omissions can be especially difficult to see or to question. The stories that have been told are not necessarily false, but they are harmfully incomplete. Over time, this partial telling becomes normalized, shaping not only what is remembered, but what feels rememberable.
WHERE offers a way to engage this complexity with care.
By gathering people in place and moving together through the landscape, WHERE creates space to encounter both what is visible and what has been obscured. It allows participants to remain in relationship with the pride and skill embedded in Bath’s shipbuilding traditions, while also asking more expansive questions about the histories those traditions are connected to.
In the context of Interco(a)stal, WHERE becomes the means by which the Wyoming Evocation is activated—not as a monument to be passively observed, but as a point of departure. Through walking, research, artistic intervention, and collective reflection, the site is opened into a field of inquiry: one that holds pride and critique, presence and absence, memory and possibility together.