Krystal C. Mack

A self-taught designer and artist, Krystal C. Mack uses her social practice to highlight food and the more-than-human world’s role in collective healing, empowerment, and decolonization. A critical element of Mack’s practice involves exploring food and nature beyond the limits of common consumption. She began her practice as a bodyworker and baker in the hospitality industry. She now approaches this work as a social designer and trained herbalist, maintaining regard for African diasporic foodways and following the intuitive ancestral wisdom of the Earth. Through comestible and social design, she seeks to unpack and heal personal traumas relevant to her life publicly. As a Black Autistic woman born and raised in Baltimore, her lived experiences speak through her practice. One of the traits of her Autism is impaired interoception, which poses a challenge when identifying physical pain, hunger, and thirst. While this neurological delay is an obstacle, it has also mediated her relationship with food and nature in a way that allows her to embrace the layers of her identity and use them as a conduit for conversational design. Mack does this by conceptualizing spaces and objects that invite the community to engage with food and the natural world in a multidimensional way. These spaces for dialogue and inquiry elicit a sensory call and response into the cultivation, or lack thereof, of sustainable and accessible practices that support or hinder reparative futures for marginalized communities.