This sculpture is included in Open Inquiry: UC Arts, a group exhibition bringing together a new generation of artists emerging from the renowned art practice programs at University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Los Angeles. Long recognized as hubs of artistic experimentation and critical thought, the art departments at these universities have incubated artists whose practices merge rigorous academic research with ambitious studio experimentation. The exhibition highlights artists whose work extends the legacy of UC arts as a site of inquiry, experimentation, and social engagement.

Grounded in the idea that research is not confined to laboratories or archives, Open Inquiry frames artistic practice as a vital mode of investigation. Across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and digital media, the artists in the exhibition use their studio practices to question, test, analyze, and interpret the world around them. In this context, the studio becomes a site of creative problem-solving where artistic processes function as tools of critical inquiry. At a moment when public funding for both the arts and academic research faces increasing challenges, the exhibition underscores the importance of public arts education as a space where material experimentation, social justice commitments, and intellectual freedom continue to shape new forms of knowledge.

The origins of this sculpture trace back to 2022, when bryant was a Democracy Abolition Fellow at UC Berkeley. Inspired by the hand-drawn statistical charts and diagrams created by W. E. B. Du Bois and a team of students from Atlanta University for the Exposition Universelle (1900), bryant initially envisioned a series of mixed-media collages visualizing data related to African American health, food, and farming.

His first mock-up examined the dramatic decline in the number of Black farmers over the course of the twentieth century. As he researched these issues, he began to notice a troubling parallel: the disappearance of Black farm operators coincided with the rise of preventable, diet-related chronic illnesses in African American communities. While this relationship is only one factor among many, the correlation suggested a deeper question about the structural disconnection from land, food production, and traditional foodways.

Recognizing that pharmaceuticals rarely address the root causes of these illnesses, bryant began asking a different question: What is our medicine? One answer, he believes, lies in the traditional foods of the African diaspora.

This inquiry led him to begin working with preservation techniques practiced by his ancestors—dehydrating, salting, fermenting, and curing—to preserve staple ingredients. For this project, he sourced produce exclusively from three Black farmers in Northern California, transforming these ingredients into preserved foods that function simultaneously as nourishment and cultural memory.

From the outset, bryant imagined presenting these preserved foods within a homemade pantry inspired by the long history of Black families in both rural and urban communities using such spaces to store not only food but memory. The structure recalls the pantry in his maternal grandmother’s kitchen and is darkened through the use of ebonizing and yakisugi techniques. Its surfaces are layered with cultural signifiers that gesture toward the preservation and transmission of Black culture across generations.

Jars filled with pickled collard greens, beet-hibiscus water, and soil gathered from the farms of the Black growers who contributed produce to the project sit in careful rows on the shelves of the pantry like soldiers at the ready. Their chromatic array of red, black, and green references the colors of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African flag.

The pantry structure later became a central element of The Table and the Larder: Feeding the People, Remembering the Future (2025), bryant’s mixed-media installation presented at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Within the context of Open Inquiry, the sculpture continues to reflect bryant’s ongoing exploration of foodways as research—investigating the relationships between land, health, cultural memory, and collective liberation.