“I want to tell my story,” heritage quilter Lisa Moore says. “And I think my story is other people’s story. We are all more alike than we are different.”
Nestled in the heart of downtown Orlando, the Orange County Regional History Center invited Moore and several other African American craft artists to display their work in February 2024. The exhibition, Honoring Black Heritage, Arts & Culture, fulfilled the goals of a new project: Cultural Sustainability and Legacy Planning for Craft Artists, begun in 2023. As part of a three-pronged approach, the project pursued sustainable methods of preservation through representation (exhibitions), education (workshops), and, perhaps most importantly, dialogue between the “living archives” of elder artisans and younger people.
The project is a partnership between the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s African American Craft Initiative, the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, and three Smithsonian Affiliate centers: the Orange County organization, Michigan State University Museum, and City Lore in New York City.
The history center noticeably strengthened the intergenerational relationships of artisans in their community by holding conversations around their work and displaying tangible representations of their family histories. Moore, who grew up on farmland in Florida, soaked up family stories and stitched them into the fabric of her work. In one of her quilts, five portraits in profile represent the five living generations of her family, from her ninety-seven-year-old grandmother down to her four-year-old granddaughter.
“I can remember sitting on my grandmother’s porch,” Moore recalled in our interview over the phone. “Everybody had a little crumpled up brown paper bag, and you were given your batch of peas, and you had to sit there and shell and be quiet while the adults were talking. They’re just enjoying themselves, saying what’s going on in that person’s life, and basically solving all the world’s issues.” Her exhibited work, a new series of quilts called Pass the Peas, represents communal life skills like farming and sewing which are now fading away. Moore hopes to help foster a resurgence in the next generation.
Katie Kelley, curator of exhibitions at the Orange County History Center, says young visitors received the artists enthusiastically. “One of the moments I really loved was a little girl who played with traditional African musical instruments on display and talked to the artist who handmade them. Maybe she hasn’t considered being an artist before, but to have that interaction with somebody who traveled extensively in Africa and is honoring that heritage and his own ancestry is invaluable.”
Many artisans brought dolls or doll fashions they made by hand. Dolls appeal to children and to the childhood memories of crafters, but they also symbolize cultural resistance and remembrance among the African diaspora. For children separated from their families and homeland, small dolls were something they could hold onto and carry with them.
One doll artist, Carmen Nibbs, displayed a selection of miniature clothing she designs by hand. The bulk of her commissions are from customers who feel excluded by the lack of African clothing representation in the U.S. doll market. There’s no Barbie doll line of the acclaimed Harlem singer Nina Simone, so Nibbs made her own, clad in miniature yellow-and-black chevrons from a traditional African dashiki print.
There were no big department stores on the U.S. Virgin Islands where she grew up, so Nibbs’s family made all their own clothing. “They called one of my aunts the Hot Water Seamstress, because before a pot of water could boil, she would have already made a dress and be wearing it. Going to church on Sunday became a fashion show!”
Nibbs entered a beauty contest as a young woman, and she designed a mermaid-tail dress that her grandmother, also a seamstress, sewed together. “She said, ‘It’s gotta flow, and it’s gotta fall just right.’ She first got some taffeta, and we tried it out with that, and she said, ‘No, we gotta go bigger.”
When Nibbs stepped out in her dress, her grandmother heard the buzz of the audience all the way through the broadcast channel airing the competition. “As soon as the competition was over, we went back to our house just so she could see me in my crown and the trophies I got, and that was one of her proudest moments.”
As part of the project, the history center recorded oral histories from the artisans with the intent to continue documentation through a future internship for college students. Kelley expressed how important multimedia forms of documentation are to preserving heritage crafts.
“All of these craft artists are history keepers,” she said. “They’re telling their own family’s history, and they’re preserving traditional ways of doing things.”
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At City Lore in New York City, high school students from the Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center’s Community Folk Program interviewed elder artists from City Lore’s exhibition The Calling: The Transformative Power of African American Doll and Puppet Making.
The Cultural Sustainability and Legacy Planning project at City Lore focused on dolls and puppets from twenty-six nationally acclaimed artists of the African diaspora who grew up during the Black Arts and civil rights movements. “Many of the doll artists involved in the exhibition are interested in legacy planning and developing ways to better articulate their practice and presence in the local community,” said Naomi Sturm-Wijesinghe, City Lore’s creative traditions program director.
In one workshop, the high school students led and recorded a conversation with two dollmaking artists, “Ms. Shimona” and “Ms. Laura.” The students’ thoughtful questions drew the artists back into their own childhoods.
For Ms. Shimona, dolls spark creativity and resourcefulness. “I had an older sister, and she had a Black doll, and she grew up, and it was my Black doll. When my mother was teaching me art and crocheting, I crocheted a top and a skirt [for the doll], and then I went to a Catholic school, and so we had rosaries. And I took apart my rosary beads, and I made earrings! And I still have that doll to this day.”
Ms. Laura’s childhood was filled with dolls from Malibu Barbie to Raggedy Ann. “I’m a collector of things, which is why I still have the Afghan my mother made me. I was in the sixth grade. The dolls—I think they’re part of my first collection of things. I did not stop playing with Barbie until I was fourteen. I wasn’t ready to release everything that kept you young.”
A final public storytelling event brought the artists and youth together again to continue interviews and documentation efforts, as well as discuss future goals. One of these goals is to have students from the Folk Culture Program continue to work with artists to build legacy plans or film short videos that artists can use in their personal archives to advance their work.
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“Within a Black quilt tradition, storytelling is central,” says Liv Furman, a scholar at Michigan State University and the leader of the legacy planning workshops at the MSU Museum. When Furman’s grandmother taught quilting, it wasn’t just imparting practical techniques. “It was her talking to me as we sat.”
The project at MSUM prioritized this conversational style of hands-on learning, with Furman leading workshops to train artists in documentation and archival practices. Several of the invited artists from Detroit were heritage quilters excited by MSU’s online Quilt Index collection.
At the workshops, most of the artisans were also teachers, providing an atmosphere of what doctoral student Samuela Mouzaoir called “bidirectional sharing.” Furman brought MSU students into the workshops to learn with—and from—the artists. Attendees built each other up in these workshops, Mouzaoir says, exploring the “deeper emotional and communal significance of archiving.”
For Mouzaoir, who immigrated from Burkina Faso, West Africa, at age eleven, the archives at the MSU Museum were both a new and familiar world. “[The workshop] inspired me to start thinking about how I can archive my own work. I work with words, I write poetry, I sometimes write prose, I write music, and I’m also a photographer. So it got me thinking, how do I archive this? How do I start to convince myself that it’s worth archiving?”
The workshops were affirming for the artists who use at-home methods of preservation. As Furman said, “These artists are already developing their own archival practices. They have their own rich methodologies for memory keeping and self-archiving.” These methods, whether storing physical copies of obituaries or passing down family histories orally, are uniquely powerful because they are personally authentic.
Furman gestured during our conversation, drawing my eye to one of their quilts, a vibrantly polychromatic artwork hanging on the wall. “Fabric is a way of archiving what is happening in my day to day because of what I put into it. This is an archival tool in and of itself.”
“I think we’re all living archives in a way,” Mouzaoir ruminated.
Personal archives shift oppressive narratives—something Dasmen Richards, a doctoral student in K-12 education, noticed during the workshops. “I was in awe hearing all their stories again,” she said. “I felt that was the way they’re remembering not only themselves but also their families through their art endeavors. They aren’t just being placed in a box in the basement.” The workshops inspired Richards to recreate personal archives in her dissertation research.
“My dissertation is focusing on Black girl literacies, particularly thinking about shifting the ideas of what literacies are,” she explained. Richards documents her research with K-12 girls by providing each a journal. She hopes they will use these materials in the future to retrieve their memories, just as artisans did in the collaborative workshops. “I’m thinking about creating a Black girl capsule to hold these stories. I’ll be videotaping different parts of our study, so not only will it be documented on paper but also video and photo and voice recordings. That way we can do active recollection.”
Richards is worried by how much we rely on technology to hold our memories for us. “We can’t forget those stories we were told and we’re sharing with others across the communities of diaspora. It’s important to reach back to things that worked for our elders and ancestors.” For Richards, archiving serves to heal and recover memories, but it is also part of survival.
In the future, the African American craft artists involved in the legacy planning workshops are hoping to establish a new kind of archive in Detroit: one which is open to the community and made to serve the surrounding artisans. In this new scope, artisans can retain their own voice and story while also having the space to store larger objects like quilts.
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The work of the African American Craft Initiative, the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, and Smithsonian Affiliates across the United States on this project is just one facet of a continuous journey, but it reflects the belief so many African American craft artisans hold: that their work is part of who they are and where they come from.
“Maybe this poem I wrote when I was twelve matters,” Mouzaoir mused. “When you’re able to sit down and collect the pieces of your life and the lives of the people who came before you, it makes history tangible because it’s no longer just an idea. It’s a story. It starts to tell you that it all mattered.”
Eowyn Stewart is a former writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her interests are creative writing, anthropology, and women in their environments.
