Smithsonian Institution

October 6-8, 2020 / I served as a moderator for The African American Craft Summit, a national community conversation by and for African American makers ages 20s-80s, sponsored by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

The arc of our conversation moved from participants defining themselves and their art in relation to ‘Craft’ and looking at the foundations of African American craft in the 21st century — how our work reflects heritage and background, cultural memory and trauma. We then mapped the present — with makers sharing their responses to current social issues, challenges to access and to growing their business/brand/practice and we closed with scaffolding our own institutions and economies of support built on centuries of cooperative work and envisioning change - what each maker understands as necessary to ensure the continuity, recognition and of African American Craft.

This series of conversations builds on my decades-long collaboration with Senior Curator, Diana Baird N’Diaye her Will to Adorn and Crafts of African Fashion programs.

(Title image, “Textile artist Sehar Peerzada applies block prints to textiles that she then makes into her distinctive apparel. Photograph by Diana N’Diaye.)

Milliner Vanilla Powell Beane (with her granddaughter Jenni Hansen) best known for the hats she crafted for civil rights activist Dorothy Height, though she crafted thousands of hats for people marking every right of passage in life. Raised in Wilson, North Carolina, Mrs. Beane was a skilled farmer’s daughter (forced to “sharecrop”) and the second youngest of seven children.