Artist Statement: I am a supernaturalist, cultural activist, storyteller, preservationist, crocheter, photographer, researcher, and animator of the inanimate. A descendant of creative agricultural people, who exercised their freedom of imagination to follow The Farmer’s Almanac that sustained them through the trauma of the North American Atlantic slave trade and Jim Crow. 

This epic crochet project, titled Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk: Living a Dream in a Nightmare, is an evolving realization ceremony, layered with vanishing stories of redemption. This is an autobiographical study of my mother, a homemaker, domestic worker, and caregiver in the Jim Crow segregated Southwest. She is my first teacher of the fundamentals of the “Funktional” possibilities of fiber from a mystical-domestic, magical-realist visionary. 

I am researching to develop and preserve a fading design philosophy and discipline of visual narratives from communal memories and an undervalued material culture. This work is a continuum of remixing found objects, discarded textiles, and organic and synthetic materials for enhancing the interior and exterior living quarters and garments of an emancipated sharecropping community in Oklahoma at the end of the 1800s. It serves as a humble, decorative needle arts of adornment and identity from an agricultural people in cosmic custodianship, co-creating and servicing the planet and the inhabitants.

My expanded practice is merging the Radical Free Black Community of Philadelphia of the 1700s, which chronicles African Americans’ contribution to a shared humanities, while creating tools to formulate cosmic utopias that complement the traditional and modern cultural heritage of mother and daughter.