The Du Bois Forum 2023

W. E. B. Du Bois played a foundational role in shaping modern Black intellectual and artistic traditions. Throughout his life, he envisioned a constellation of scholars, writers, and artists of color supported by institutions committed to their creative and political work. The Du Bois Forum emerged from this vision as a space for collective study, collaboration, rest, and world-building, dedicated to empowering Black thought, catalyzing creative production, and advancing social transformation.

In July 2023, bryant participated in the Forum’s second retreat in the Berkshires as a fellow. As part of the gathering, the cohort convened at Jacob’s Pillow to honor the life and work of David Levering Lewis, the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Du Bois. For the occasion, terry designed a multi-course meal grounded in extensive archival research and treated as a form of culinary collage.

Drawing from Du Bois’s childhood fondness for strawberries, his enduring political and cultural commitment to Ethiopia, historic menus created in his honor, and his final resting place in Ghana, bryant assembled a sequence of ingredients, dishes, and flavor profiles that functioned as an edible homage to Du Bois’s global life and intellectual legacy. The menu was further shaped by a commitment to sourcing local, seasonal, and sustainably grown ingredients from Western Massachusetts, situating the work within a specific ecology and community.

Within bryant’s broader studio practice, the dinner operated as a site-specific activation, using food as a medium to translate archival research into sensory experience. The project honored Du Bois’s legacy while affirming food as a vessel for memory, political alignment, and care, and as a means of bringing history into the present through shared ritual.