Earthseed Black Family

The Earthseed Black Family Archive Project is a collective archival project with the intention to facilitate healing through exploration, creativity and storytelling. This cohort included black change-makers, cultural workers and healers who are interested in ancestral veneration, storytelling and collective change. We read together, moved together and learned new modalities helping us to process and grow as beacons of trans-generational healing for our line. This two-day showcase is the culmination of our time together and an offering to the greater collective.

Gina Breedlove (Grace) - *special guest* Opening Ceremony

A sound healing practice can give us true freedom; dominion over our thoughts, body, sound, words, actions, place. With Vibration of Grace™, healing through sound, I share practices and rituals gifted by Grace that teach us how to use our voice in service to our personal liberation, and loving each other forward in community. Inquire about this and other offerings here.

Soraya Jean-Louis (she/they) - Matriologies : Cosmograms of Eternal Belonging

This project is a mixed media study and praxis centered in Black Feminist Futurisms called Matriologies: Cosmograms of Eternal Belonging. I intentionally utilize various ritual and ancestral veneration practices to create a visual language that is used to conjure specific cosmograms that represent my mitochondrial lineages and offer direct communication, healin', clarity and manifestation. I'm curious about what has been revealed and is continually unfurling in my creative healin' praxis.

Malorie Reid (she/her) - Witness (A Prayer After All)

The audience will view a video of various landscapes and images that are of personal importance/relation to me, while a prayer is being uttered. In the liminal space between reality and fantasy, I will pray to my ancestors and be answered back.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas (she/her) - My Mother Had Two Mothers

The presentation will focus on the histories of the two women who were mothers to my mother: One the biological mother and the other the aunt who raised her. The trauma around the beginning of my mother's story is also influenced by the trauma both sides of her family experienced as descendants of slaves, but the story also shows their resilience and love of family that kept them together. They were also entrepreneurial and believed in land ownership "you can always make things, but you cannot make the land" was a common statement passed down through the generations. "Secrets" will also influence this story. There will be a short-film presentation, ending with a collage of the pictures of the family going back to the early 1800s.

Yolande Clark-Jackson (she/her) - Seed and Story

For this project, I traced my matrilineal line, focused on the three generations of Mississippi sharecroppers. I then kinda became fixated on cotton. Mostly because of the juxtaposition of cotton’s softness with it being secured in this prickly boll that holds it. It reminds me of its complex past in my family but also in Black history.

Cara Rivera (she/her) - Healing the Warrior's Wound

An exploration of the healing journey of warrior women. The visual incorporates interviews with women who are on a journey to heal themselves and others through self love, connection to ancestral bonds, and the release of generational traumas. The video captures several healing experiences as women bring their burdens to the ocean and release.

Shalewa Mackall (she/her) - I am my Grandmothers' Daughter: An Atlas of Spells and Recipes

My project seeks to explore how my understanding of myself and the three grandmothers I grew up with has shifted for me recently. These grandmothers of my memory are my most present guides through midlife. I have found myself only lately beginning to understand and appreciate with some insight, who they were and who I am becoming. I lay plates with fat slices of the cake named for them out with white flowers, candles, glasses of water and rum on the floor of my own small Brooklyn kitchen in gratitude for all of the gifts which they planted deep in me, their most precious gift, that are only just coming into season.

Gina Breedlove (Grace) - *special guest* Opening Ceremony

Christen Smiley (she/her) - The Medicine Within...

The Medicine Within... is centered around connection, acknowledgement, affirmation, healing and restoration. I will be taking the audience on a journey through tea meditation, herbalism and conjuring. Inspired by a 7-generation mediation journey led by Alexis Pauline-Gumbs I will be showcasing a 7-generation guided tea meditation and healing ritual centered on my maternal lineage. Each generation will represent a theme and corresponding herb(s) used in a hand-made tea blend that will be personally prayed over using an original poem, prose, and/or incantation written and spoken by me. I will simultaneously play specific music related to each theme during the ritual tied to my belief that music is a deeply spiritual experience. From there, I will offer the prepared tea to my ancestors through placement on their altar and also partake in it with them allowing the healing and energy to permeate the invisible and present realms while sitting with them in meditation. I will record the downloads and personal emotions for each ritual and weave it into my ancestral healing work as a priestess and spiritual worker for my lineage.

Andrea Jenkins (she/her) - Searching for Daddy

All throughout this process my mind continues to circle back to my deceased Father. It really became clear during our time with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, during our guided journey when I encountered my grandfather, his brothers, aunts, all folks connected to my father, but I never saw him. I have been working on an essay by the same title above, that will incorporate interviews with my mother, my sister and my father's oldest living sister, and others for me to get a clearer image of who my father was. I download family images from my cell phone that have been captured throughout the years as backdrop for a video. I will read my essay, infused with poetry over images of my family (mostly my father's side). This project will produce a chapbook of poetry about family history, including the essay "Searching For Daddy" , think of this as a mini-memoir.

Katelyn Johnson (she/her) - 40 Acres

My ancestor bought a lot of land once he got his freedom. He built homes for his children who build homes for their children and now nearly a century and a half later, some of the land is still owned by family members. A video montage of photo archives, newspaper clippings, and audio interviews, this presentation is about how the value of land is more than the price of real estate.

Shoniqua Roach (she/her) - The Black Living Room

This visual presentation embraces Black feminist theoretical tools to paint a portrait of how Black mothers use interior design and material culture to curate and provoke Black freedom dreams. To do so, I dwell on two photographs of my own mother, Letisha West, and build a story around her erotic labors in Black home space.

Shay Collins (they/them) - Under the Shade I Flourish - English Translation here

“Under the Shade I Flourish” as an ode to my ancestral homeland Belize. It is the translation of the Latin motto on our flag Sub Umbra Floreo. It also pays homage to my grandmother, Marion Vernon, who is notoriously shady.

Jakalia Brown (she/they) - Earthseed: The things I went back to get, the things I can't leave behind

A visual representation of my journey in the Earthseed cohort and researching my family history. How I've changes, what I've appreciated and what I had to let go.

Je-Shawna Wholley (she/her) - Earthseed: Deeply Rooted

Looking to the past for inspiration, this project uses collage making as a ritual of manifestation. An act of dreaming up what is possible not just for our generation and our future, but also for the wellness of our ancestors.

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