Creative Community Care

De’Amon Harges’s canvas is city blocks strewn together, to which he applies his ‘genius for community.’ He listens for and then paints the stories he hears from and sees in his neighbors. He shares the words of wise elders in the neighborhood, printed in extra-large print and on the side of abandoned buildings, reminding people of the wisdom held in that place. Doors on the front of people’s homes tell the stories they have chosen to tell, reminding people of the absolute abundance of life in each household.

“Black Wall Street Door,” featured in this exhibition, is one of those doors, painted by neighbor Jamahl Crouch. Chimes formed into the shapes of the gifts of people who live in that house decorate the yard. The next house has a front yard full of flowers, and the next house has a backyard growing over a hundred pounds of peanuts. A bicycle shop, begun at his encouragement, asks young people riding by if they want to fix the bicycles themselves (and even sell some). In the next yard, a neighbor hosts a party with homemade wine. Every avenue offers a festival with plates of food from neighborhood cooks. Photos of parents teaching their children art, math, music, and history adorn the outdoor walls of the building facing the school building in their neighborhood. De’Amon’s art is not that he did these things. All he did was make the invisible, visible.

As a theologian and mystic, DIA’s area of focus is theopoetics, the examination of the intersectionality of creativity and spiritual formation. DIA’s poetry and photography is the hybrid of exegetical analysis and sociological studies, which come together in the soul-piercing video installations Dichotomy. This installation examines an essential question or truth about the human condition in relation to radical tenderness and self awareness. How do we examine and embody these concepts in a hurting world? Dichotomy is part-memoir, part-sermon, part-liturgy, and part-lament as a summons to contemplation. DIA’s work is an attempt to holistically examine ourselves, the world we’ve inherited, and our behaviors by creating and documenting poetic and universal narratives of affirmation and discomfort.

History is an imperfect archive, a jagged and fractured window to the past. Despite the importance of Black contributions to Corsicana, Texas’s economic, cultural, and spiritual legacy, only shards of Black presence can be found in the town’s public history: a broken plaque, a faded tombstone, the frame of a house.

In this installation, poet and Meetinghouse Revival founder Alysia Nicole Harris frames the group’s work to restore the abandoned Wesley Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. This CME congregation was one of several Black churches in Corsicana dating back to the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era. Using a mixture of oral interviews, archival material, and personal poetic reflections on the restoration process, Harris platforms the stories of Wesley Chapel, past and present. She hopes this installation sheds light on the many Black place-keeping efforts happening across Texas.

During her research, Harris scoured the online records of local newspapers such as the Corsicana Daily Sun, Oil City Afro-American, and Dallas Express for any mention of the church. From these mentions, she creates blackout poems to enact on the public archive the same intentional erasures and omissions enacted on Black Corsicanans. However, this time, the blackout poems work in service of Black residents to reveal layered truths about life in rural Texas. These texts are arranged into identical 12 x 16 frames and then positioned among contemporary and archival photos of the building to create a grid of historical fragments that mirrors the church’s broken stained glass. While the picture remains incomplete, glimpses of the past come into view.

“Eco-Crafts for Friends,” encompassing the collection of works “Busy Hands Open Heart” (featured), “Gifts Received Gifts Given,” and “Something from Nothing”, explores the intersection of environmental and relational sustainability through gift giving. Over six months in 2021, Kuo made crafts out of the plastic wrappers, old fabrics and other recycled materials that accumulated in her home over the height of the pandemic and gave them as gifts to friends and family: this process is recorded in the artist book Gifts Received Gifts Given. In that challenging time of loss, uncertainty, and isolation, the project served to keep the artist grounded with hands-on creative practices while tending to fragmented relationships. The gifts included scrap paper thank you cards (Something from Nothing), patchwork coasters and pot holders, scrunchies, plastic crochet planters (Busy Hands Open Heart), and propagated house plants. More broadly, Kuo seeks to encourage community care as a mode of self-care, to highlight the importance of nurturing that which nurtures you, and to show the generative possibilities of simple acts of generosity, that abundance can be found in unlikely places.

“The Constellation Project” began as a conversation on grief, loss, and hope with five friends. This personal experience informed an artwork that attempted to trace these exchanges in memory. The project eventually broadened by inviting a wider community into the exchange to share their own stories of loss on a virtual platform. The widening of the conversation in turn shaped the artwork into a piece that uplifts a greater collective history.

In its visual form “The Constellation Project” is a wall piece (5’x8’) constructed from aluminum mesh with mixed media applied to the surface. Names of those who have passed on in death or otherwise are written onto areas of the work. These include names shared by the original five participants that started this project. And also present names submitted online by the public. These names and accompanying stories are posted on www.olgalah.com/the-constellation-project.

“The Constellation Project” is a work that holds the gathered memories of a community. It makes meaning of the life remembered as well as the life of the one sharing the remembrance. In recalling and reflecting on the past it supports a movement forward into healing. The hope is that it points to the inter-connectedness of our lives and the brief wonder that we experience together in a lifetime.

“Chinatown Yarn Circle: Stand Speak Shape” was led by community activist Tina Lin and artist Naomi Lawrence, in partnership with local organizations and the support of a 2021 Catalyst Commission award, to STAND together; SPEAK up for justice; and SHAPE society through civic action and crochet. The flowers are in tribute to AAPI community builders, embodying collaboration, triumph over struggle, and inspiring future generations. Throughout the summer of 2021, Lawrence and Lin organized crochet workshops in Columbus Park inviting all levels to come and participate in this community mural. Think Chinatown, The Creative Sanctum, Oversea Chinese Mission Church, Knitty City, Asian Americans for Equality, Center for All Abilities, and City Seminary of New York, as well as other groups meeting in homes and small organizations across the city, organized yarn circles and brought Chinatown locals, experienced and novice stitchers alike. The final work, measuring 28 feet wide, consisted of over 1500 flowers, more than 800 green and yellow 2” squares mostly made by beginners, Chinese characters and bamboo made by mother’s and daughters. The floral section is made in special honor of the late Pearl Chin, owner of the store Knitty City, who so many of the textile art community loved and were inspired by.

Julian Davis Reid incubated “Notes of Rest” within the Creative Community Care Residency program of City Seminary of New York. The residency helped Reid see how much all of his communities needed rest during the pandemic, and that he needed to approach rest theologically and musically. Out of this gathering with his fellow artists, Notes of Rest emerged as a spiritual formation ministry grounded in Scripture and Black music that invites the Body of Christ to receive God’s gift of rest.

Reid writes:

I pray that this video helps you attend to your own need for rest, as well as to the needs of those around you (fellow humans as well as the rest of creation). God promises us an eternity of rest in Jesus, so for now, in the here and not yet, let us practice receiving and sharing the notes.

Of “Father and Son,” Sophia Victor writes:

When I went before the Lord concerning my marriage, I prayed from many different angles. When I began to grow weary, finally I reminded the Lord of the covenant that I have with him concerning my son Pharaoh. I stood on that covenant and interceded. My prayer was, “Lord, this child needs a kingdom father so that he can grow in your ways. I have given you full custody of him, now provide someone that will stand for him and guide him in this thing called life.” That prayer was answered and continues to be answered through the life of my husband.

During the year when the world shut down, so many changes occurred. I watched my son grow from a child into an adolescent before my eyes. He began to navigate art materials as an outlet to maintain his peace. My biological family grew closer than ever as we attempted to be a village raising four boys, my mother’s grandsons. My son’s biological father was also incarcerated during this time. I reflect in this piece on the community needed to raise a child and the new personal community of a new family that the Lord has given me. It is a reminder of the seeds sown at different stages in early childhood development and stands on the biblical instruction to train up a child in the way he should go.