research, process, and form

This project emerged through an ongoing dialogue between research and making. The sections that follow trace the questions, source materials, artistic influences, and material decisions that shaped the work, showing how research gradually became sculptural form

the central question

Before there was an object, there was a question:

How do Black communities transform landscapes shaped by extraction into infrastructures for survival, memory, ecological knowledge, and collective care?

Although What the Black Belt Carries is rooted in the Alabama Black Belt, the project began with a broader inquiry into how landscapes carry history, not only materially but also ecologically, culturally, and politically, and how sculpture might make those histories physically present without reducing them to illustration.

As I pursued that question, my focus shifted from asking what history meant to asking how it might generate form. That shift shaped every material decision in the work, from its use of historical maps and photographic chemistry to its excavated surface and layered black field.

an earlier inquiry

What the Black Belt Carries has its roots in my earlier installation, The Table and the Larder: Feeding the People, Remembering the Future, presented at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA in 2025). Beginning with the table and the larder as sites of Black memory, ecological knowledge, nourishment, and collective care, the installation asked how everyday acts of cooking, gathering, and preservation carry history across generations.

As I developed the installation, I found myself asking what sustained those domestic spaces. Following that question meant looking beyond the home to the systems that made it possible. Every pantry has an agricultural history. Every table rests upon a landscape. Looking beneath those everyday acts of nourishment expanded my inquiry beyond the domestic interior to the land, labor, and ecological systems that sustain it.

That shift led me to the global cotton economy and to the ways Black communities transformed landscapes shaped by extraction into places of survival, cultural production, and political possibility. The organizing traditions represented by figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer first drew me to the Black Belt as a broader regional geography. From there, Robin D. G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe and the history of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization focused my attention on Alabama as a particularly generative place through which to explore these intertwined histories.

The Black Belt became more than the setting for the work. It became the framework through which its questions could take material form

“Every pantry has an agricultural history.

Every table rests upon a landscape.”

finding the black belt

As my research expanded beyond the domestic interior, I became increasingly interested in the Black Belt—not simply as a geography, but as a landscape shaped by the intertwined histories of agriculture, ecology, labor, and Black political life.

A nineteenth-century map charting cotton production revealed the immense scale of the global cotton economy and the ways the region's fertile soils became central to systems of extraction and wealth. Yet the Black Belt could not be understood through cotton alone. I became equally interested in what Black communities created within and against those conditions.

Robin D. G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe profoundly reshaped my understanding of Alabama by documenting the radical organizing of Black sharecroppers and members of the Communist Party during the Great Depression. The history of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization further demonstrated how, decades later, Black communities transformed the same landscape into a site of grassroots political power, self-determination, and collective action.

I came to understand Alabama not simply as a place marked by extraction, but as an entry point into the broader Black Belt—a landscape that has continually generated ecological knowledge, cultural production, political organizing, mutual aid, and practices of collective care.

What the Black Belt Carries emerged from that shift in perspective.

translating research into form

As my research deepened, I became less interested in representing history than in asking how it might generate form. I began treating archival materials not as images to reproduce, but as sets of instructions for making. My challenge became developing a sculptural language that could emerge from research without simply illustrating it.

A nineteenth-century map of county-level cotton production in Alabama became one of the project's primary points of departure. Rather than reproducing the map, I translated its underlying data into the physical structure of the work. Counties associated with greater cotton production received additional layers of acrylic, creating a subtle topography of accumulation that speaks to the scale of the plantation economy without reproducing its visual logic.

This approach grew out of a broader interest in translation as an artistic methodology. While developing What the Black Belt Carries, I was simultaneously creating Laughin' & Talkin': A Study in Translating Line into Space during an artist residency at the Eames Ranch. That project explored how the underlying structure of an image might move from one medium to another without becoming a literal copy. That inquiry carried directly into this work, where maps, photographs, and historical sources became material processes rather than subjects to depict.

The excavated surface, layered black field, and photographic process are therefore not expressive gestures added after the fact, but the material consequence of the research itself. Together, they invite viewers to encounter history through texture, weight, accumulation, light, and absence rather than illustration.

material continuities

Although the subject shifted from domestic space to landscape, I found myself returning to materials and processes I had developed during graduate school at UC Berkeley. In Razed Bed #2, techniques such as ebonization and yakisugi became more than methods of construction. They established a way of thinking through material process, where burning, carbonization, and hand finishing became ways of exploring transformation, cultivation, memory, and repair. I carried those same processes into The Table and the Larder and, ultimately, What the Black Belt Carries.

The materials remained consistent, but the questions they were asked to answer changed. In The Table and the Larder, these processes grounded the work in food, nourishment, cultivation, and collective care. In What the Black Belt Carries, they became a way of thinking through landscape, history, and memory. Blackness emerged not simply as a color, but as a material presence shaped through layering, burning, sanding, and excavation.

Carrying these materials forward allowed each project to build upon the last, treating making itself as an evolving form of research. The sections that follow explore how this material vocabulary found new expression through photography, the black field, and the excavation of Alabama.

photography as material

While historical maps shaped the work's overall structure, I began searching for a photographic process that could carry a comparable sense of material and historical depth. Rather than producing a conventional digital photograph, I wanted the image itself to emerge through a process that was physical, time-based, and historically situated.

Rashid Johnson's use of nineteenth-century Van Dyke brown printing demonstrated how historical photographic processes could remain active within contemporary practice. His work encouraged me to think of photography not simply as a means of representation, but as a material language capable of carrying memory, labor, and time.

That realization led me to learn the Van Dyke process through a series of experiments, beginning with abstract photograms of cotton that allowed me to understand how light and chemistry could be translated into image. I ultimately photographed a cotton plant grown by fifth-generation Black farmer Julius Tillery in North Carolina. Rather than presenting cotton as a harvested commodity, I wanted to encounter it as a living organism—one whose form carries intertwined histories of agriculture, labor, ecological knowledge, and Black land stewardship.

The final print intentionally moves across multiple technologies and temporalities. I began by creating a contemporary digital photograph, refined the image digitally, and produced a digital contact negative. That negative was then placed on hand-coated cotton rag paper and exposed under ultraviolet light using the nineteenth-century Van Dyke brown process. Rather than treating historical and digital technologies as opposites, I approached them as complementary stages within a single act of translation.

Hand-coating the paper, exposing each print under ultraviolet light, and developing the image by hand transformed photography into a process of sustained attention, requiring more than twenty hours in the darkroom. The resulting print functions less as documentary evidence than as a material presence within the sculpture, connecting the histories embedded in the landscape to the living plant itself.

As with the historical maps, the photographic process became more than a means of representation. It became another form of translation.

“Rather than treating historical and digital technologies as opposites, I approached them as complementary stages within a single act of translation.”

fire and excavation

f the black field records historical accumulation, Alabama emerged through excavation.

The panel already carried the material history of The Table and the Larder, where it had been ebonized and burned by hand. Rather than beginning with a new surface, I chose to work with one that already bore the traces of an earlier project. Excavating Alabama became an act of both continuity and renewal, allowing one work's material history to become the foundation for the next.

The resulting form reveals itself through removal rather than addition. By sanding back layers of carbonized wood, Alabama emerges not as an object placed upon the surface, but as something uncovered from within it.

building the black field

Although Alabama serves as the work's geographic anchor, the black field surrounding it became the painting's primary material site of inquiry. Rather than functioning as a background, it operates as a material record of accumulation: labor, extraction, memory, and time.

Its structure is informed by a nineteenth-century map of county-level cotton production in Alabama. Rather than reproducing the map visually, I translated its data into layers of acrylic, allowing counties that produced more cotton to accumulate additional paint. The resulting surface forms a subtle topography whose variations emerge gradually through shifts in light rather than explicit representation.

As the painting developed, I became increasingly interested in the expressive possibilities of black itself. Thinking with Theaster Gates' sustained engagement with blackness as both material and cultural presence encouraged me to move beyond black as a neutral ground. Mark Bradford's transformation of cartographic information into layered abstraction likewise demonstrated how historical systems could shape a painting's structure without becoming its image.

I chose to leave evidence of revision, buildup, and reworking visible within the field. These interruptions acknowledge the painting as something continually worked and reworked, allowing its own history of making to remain present. The surface records not only the histories that informed the work, but also the labor of its construction, becoming an archive of accumulated decisions.

Early in the process, I considered making the county boundaries visible. Ultimately, I realized that doing so would return the work to illustration. Allowing the map to remain embedded rather than visible asks viewers to encounter history materially rather than diagrammatically.

The black field ultimately operates on multiple registers at once. It recalls the fertile prairie soils that give the Black Belt its name while recording the historical accumulation of cotton production across the landscape. Read alongside the excavated Alabama, it completes a dialogue between subtraction and accumulation, revealing two distinct yet interconnected ways history becomes material.

in the gallery

What the Black Belt Carries was first presented in Welcome In This Continuous Loop of Transformation, the 2025–26 Graduate Fellows Exhibition at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Installed with an immersive soundscape, the work invited viewers to move between sculpture, photography, and listening, encouraging close attention to the relationships between landscape, memory, labor, and Black life.

opening

Every artwork changes once it leaves the studio. The opening reception marked the first opportunity to experience What the Black Belt Carries in conversation with others, as visitors brought their own histories, questions, and interpretations to the work. Those conversations became an extension of the project's ongoing inquiry into memory, landscape, and collective care.