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How Did They Do It? Indigo Arts Alliance’s Quest To Claim Permanent Artist Housing
ARTS ENGAGEMENT
Artists gather for the Indigo Arts Welcome Table to learn about cultural and culinary traditions that inspired and supported social justice movements.
Photo credit: Indigo Arts Alliance
When the team at Portland nonprofit Indigo Arts Alliance purchased condos in 2025 to house artists coming to Maine from around the world, they saw it as much more than a financial decision. It was a declaration of the vitality of Black-led arts and the importance of artists claiming space.
But taking ownership of two condos is a significant step in any nonprofit’s trajectory, one not without its challenges.
How did the Indigo Arts leadership team come to this decision? And what steps did it take to make it happen? According to Jordia Benjamin, Indigo’s executive director, the decision was all about taking steps toward the organization’s legacy goals and ensuring its work would last for generations.
An Alliance for Artists Around the Globe
Our existence is redefining what black leadership and black ownership look like. Our work centers the importance of equity and celebrates Portland’s rich history of Black contributions to the state.”
— Jordia Benjamin, Executive Director
While Indigo Arts Alliance resides on Portland’s peninsula, it fosters artistic connections among artists around the world. “We’re a Black-led arts incubator space dedicated to the amplification and professional development of Black and Brown artists locally, nationally, and globally,” says Benjamin.
With a 4,000-square-foot multidisciplinary art studio and a smaller working space for arts fellows, the organization offers robust opportunities for artists of color to learn, create, and connect. Through public events, residencies, and studio engagement, Indigo Arts reached more than 140,000 people across 377 cities in 2025 alone.
A Different Kind of Mentorship
Central to Indigo Arts’s work is its mentorship program, in which invited artists from the New England region are paired with nominated visiting artists from around the globe for one- or two-month intensive collaborations.
As Benjamin notes, the program functions differently from the typical mentoring initiative. “Our model isn’t hierarchical,” she explains. “It’s more about being in a community of exchange, storytelling, leadership, and networking.”
The goal is to establish a shared language of learning through which visiting and local artists can create something greater than the sum of their parts. That intentionality starts at the very beginning: “We take time to create the right pairings,” says Benjamin. “Artists have a lot of conversations beforehand, so when the residency begins, they’re starting from a place of commonality and not from a place of introduction.”
Artists collaborate during Indigo Arts Alliance's Art in the Wake symposium.
Photo credit: Indigo Arts Alliance
Making — and Claiming —Space for the Artists
It’s been a long ride for us! At the very beginning, we hosted our first residencies in our co-founder’s home. Now, we own two condos for artists.”
— Jordia Benjamin, Executive Director
Because the mentorship and residency program is such a core element of Indigo Arts’s work, the nonprofit has invested heavily in evolving it over time. The team took mentorship virtual during the pandemic, then secured an AirBnB on the Eastern Promenade to house artists for a time. When that building was sold and unavailable for use, they rented an apartment, fully recognizing the challenges of continuous change.
On top of the instability, Indigo Arts also needed to address housing for local artists as it expanded to include artists from all around New England. “Asking regional artists to figure out housing on their own just wasn’t in line with the spirit of our mission,” says Benjamin.
For those reasons, and to contribute more fully and permanently to the local economy, the organization decided to purchase two condos about a 15-minute walk away from the studio. “The area is quite diverse, and we wanted our community and our artists to work in harmony together,” explains Benjamin.”
What It Takes To Own Space
Like most housing ownership efforts, Indigo Arts’s came with a long task list and a need to overcome certain challenges related to:
- Finances: The executive team worked with the finance committee to map out the vision for their housing model, then launched a soft capital campaign with existing and new donors to raise the funds needed to reach that vision.
- Communication: The team needed to communicate more intensively with sellers to explain that the spaces would function differently than a typical home. They wouldn’t be occupied all year round, and different people would occupy them at different times as residencies shifted. Benjamin and her team made it a priority to work closely with sellers to ensure they understood and were aligned with the vision for the homes.
- Selecting the right place: It was important to Indigo Arts’s mission that its choice of home connected well with its mission of bringing people together, so the team purposefully chose nearby condos that would enable connection. “In the condos, community members speak to each other,” says Benjamin. “The artists bring a sense of culture to the space, which adds to the uniqueness of the environment.”
Navigating these decisions required the Indigo Arts team to have a solid plan in place, be intentional about aligning their priorities with their choices, and be confident in their right to claim space as Black and Brown artists.
Forging a Long-Lasting Legacy
Per capita, Maine has the most residency programs of any state in the U.S. But we’re the only one positioning ourselves to ensure that the legacy of Black and Brown brilliance is recorded and amplified.”
— Jordia Benjamin, Executive Director
From the outside, purchasing condos in the fourth and fifth years of the nonprofit’s existence was an ambitious undertaking. But for Benjamin and the rest of the executive team, doing so was a vital part of fulfilling their mission and building a lasting legacy. It also had the added effect of demonstrating that the Indigo Arts Alliance was here to stay.
“Speaking about our legacy at the time raised some eyebrows, but in a good way,” says Benjamin. “People saw that this was just one step in a very long trajectory of strategic plans we’ve laid out for the organization.”
That legacy underscores the vitality of Black and Brown art, while emphasizing the right to and importance of claiming space as artists. As Benjamin says, the permanent housing positions the organization “to not just open doors, but create windows, avenues, and bridgeways to ensure there’s constant opportunities for Black and Brown artists.”
Going forward, the Indigo Arts Alliance is working to solidify the nonprofit as a global organization by integrating global arts perspectives into its work as well as partnering with artists from African diasporic countries to bring Maine arts to the global stage.
For Benjamin, ambitious thinking is simply part of Black and Brown artistic brilliance: “We’ve always dreamed big, beyond what some think are our limitations,” she says. “That’s a direct result of what it means to live and work out of an artist’s mind.”