Windgate-Lamar Fellowship
2021
This summer, when I visited my grandmother in Gary, Indiana, I asked if she had anything left from the sharecropping plantation she was born on in Minter City, Mississippi. She told me that the only things left were an old quilt that belonged to her mother and a small woven basket that her grandmother used to carry, both of which she left in the South. My grandmother is the oldest of two surviving members of the Williams Plantation, bought in 1892 by her grandparents, Muh and Papa (Molly and Bill Williams). This land was taken from them in 1939 by white authorities. My grandmother’s story is part of a larger history of Black agricultural land theft in the Mississippi Delta, where over 12 million acres have been lost in the last century. My textiles are meditations around Black indigeneity and our historical, physical, and spiritual relationships to land. Informed by my grandmother’s memories of the land and lack thereof, they have manifested themselves as flowers and butterflies, knots and roots; watered by stories my grandmother tells me; and nurtured by photographs of our ancestors who hold ancient wisdom in their eyes. I have painted Mississippi plantation fields that somehow morph into self-portraits embodied as wild flowers, existing in an afterlife of fragrant scars. The land is the grandmother of grandmothers - the griot of griots - and it is for this reason why I must go and hear her stories, learn the tools, write through thread, and archive through fabric.
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In order to increase the value and relevance of craft to society, the Center works to advance the understanding of craft in higher education, museums and cultural institutions, and across disciplines. Field building strategies include convening thought leaders, creating, documenting and disseminating research, and launching innovative leadership initiatives. We provide grants and fellowships to emerging and established craft artists, curators, and scholars in order to build a future for the field of craft.
Recognizing that Asheville and the surrounding area has been a bastion for craft in the United States dating back to the Cherokee, the Center is actively working to preserve and advance the craft legacy of Western North Carolina through the development of our property in downtown Asheville, North Carolina and through a series of exhibitions and community-focused initiatives.
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