In my Social Justice ePortfolio (SJ-eP) I analyze existing diversity and inclusion responses to Black Women Artists, Cultural Workers, Organizers and their communities at Build Your Archive located in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Greater Metro Atlanta as part of CIS 668 (Social Justice and Inclusion Advocacy) course during fall 2023. On this page, I provide context why Build Your Archive is located in Atlanta, Georgia, current improvements to the mission and vision statement and next steps to ensure that Build Your Archive continues to grow in service an information organization.
Environment & Setting
Atlanta, Georgia as a Site of Resistance
The work of Build Your Archive has its foundation and lineage in Atlanta,GA. I have reclaimed that the first archive and gallery that I entered was my Great-Grandmother Annette Battle's living room.
In 2017, I sat with Kathleen Neal Cleaver, former communications secretary of the Black Panther Party, as she spoke about her life in the United States and traveling across the waters to Algiers, France with her children, her husband and her life in documents, photographs and manuscripts. As one of the most recognized women of the 1960's under the constant surveillance of the state, she was determined to protect her narrative in ways that provided the world with a storyline that prioritized her humanity.
Atlanta,Georgia is also the native home to Black Women Artist and Cultural Workers whose archives are currently being documented, preserved and archived in real time. Those artists include: Sierra King, Jasmine Nicole Williams, Ebony Blanding. We are also working with the estates of Mildred Thompson and Ethelyn Stephens to better understand how to posthumously build an archive. The record of their intentions, their photographs, books and documents of why their narratives and lives are rooted in this particular place can be found in their archives (Campt, 2012).
Since 2022, the US Census Bureau reported that over 499,127 call the city of Atlanta, home and 48.2% of those people are either Black or African Descent. I relay to these numbers because the artist that are currently being served based their practices, lives and cultural work out of the city rather than the Greater Metro Atlanta Area (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Atlanta, Georgia, n.d.). Although Black women have the highest labor force participation followed closely by Latina women, they earn just [64 cents and 54 cents respectively] which greatly impacts their livelihood in areas such as being able to rent, own and make a home in the state of Georgia that they have familial or historical ties. (Georgia Budget and Policy Institute)
Campt, Tina. Image Matters : Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. Duke Univ. Press, 2012.
Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. www.gppi.org. Retrieved October 5, 2023, from https://gbpi.org/surviving-not-thriving-post-pandemic-economic-security-for-black-women-and-latinas-in-georgia/
U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Atlanta, Georgia. (n.d.). www.census.gov. Retrieved October 9,2023, from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/atlantacitygeorgia
Organization Profile I : Who & What
Poet and Practitioner, Dominique Matti with Blessing The Boats by Lucille Clifton at yes please: bookhouse and carespace, photographed by Sierra King, 2022
In working with these artists, organizations and estates, Build Your Archive has followed a significant through line of the city of Atlanta being a site of resistance where the work, lives and legacies of Black Women Artists and Cultural Workers converge. It has become a place where either find their roots, pass through while they are making or a meeting ground to connect with other artists.
In 2022, I expanded into the community and third spaces like yes please: bookhouse and carespace and for keeps books. It was significant to partner with these spaces to create art as well as a place to gather from either presentation or workshops, because the Black Women Artists and Cultural Workers that I work with do the same. While I presented the work of Build Your Archive in library and academic spaces, the communal spaces provided the feeling of "home". Which led to signature offerings of Portrait Sessions and Worklabs, both of which I came to understand could be documentation projects that build archives for the communities that they are made in.
In collaborating with other organizations such Free Black Women's Library, Save Your Spaces and Project STAND I am able to to interact with niche communities that have similar interest in preservation, activism and resource sharing.
Organization Profile II: Existing How?
Mission and Vision - Build Your Archive is a nomadic memory work lab where Black Women Artists, Cultural Workers and their communities build their archives in real time. Inspired by the embodiment and care practices of bell hooks, tina campt, toni morrison and octavia butler, we believe that archiving is a self-defined praxis of intentional choices and ritual led record-keeping. Existing between a continuum of all of the grandmothers living rooms and grandfathers basements, we learn and study archival practices within an ethos of radical care, liberation and world building. We further imagine a world where their narratives, whole or fragmented, are accessible to those who prioritize protection.
I updated the mission to include Cultural Workers and their communities to be more specific who Build Your Archive for. While still understanding that Black Women Artists will be centered and that is the foundation of where the research and praxis begins. I believe that it is important to name "their communities" here to be deliberate that they come with their own ecosystem, families, friends.
I then extended the mission to position the work that I want to do as a future repository or new iteration of what is means to be a community archive into the future by prioritizing the protection of the narrative rather than accessibility to all.
Goals and Objectives - Similar to the familiar memory of home that bell hooks shared in her 1990 essay 'Homeplace' she states, "In our young minds houses belonged to women, were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly mattered in life took place - the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of ours souls, There we learned dignity, integrity of being; there we learned to have faith. The folds who made this life possible, who were our primary guides and teachers, were Black women." (hooks, 1990)
It is my aim for Build Your Archive to embody that feeling that bell hooks spoke of. For it to be a resource and provide tools that guide the artists in a direction where they are able to follow a pathway or trajectory of Black Woman that came before them but also make their journey their own. I want the structure of how the information is distributed encourage them to be able to lean on primary resources, text and documents and make strategic decisions about how they choose show up in the world as people. I hope that in tandem to grow a collective of Black Women Artists, Cultural Workers and their communities who understand deeply how their history is connected to the global narrative and how this understanding is necessary for the liberation of us all.
hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Chicago, 1990
Next Steps
Most immediately, I am looking to overhaul the website to reflect the philosophical changes of what Build Your Archive and its deepest intention. Which is to create models for collectives, organizations and estates, document their practices and help them maintain their archives to a standard created by them.
As well as provide case studies of how artists like myself, Jasmine Nicole Williams and Ebony Blanding have implemented these practices that led to the evolution of their practices, political shifts and safekeeping of their legacies.
This will lead to being able to identify future funding and partnerships that align with how we are looking to operate and working to "imagine and enact [our] own liberatory practices" (Caswell, 2021).
I will also be taking recommendations from Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community-Based Archives to be used as the foundation for the strategic plan and Impact Deck.
Caswell, Michelle. Urgent Archives. Routledge, 2021.
Jules, Bergis. Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community-Based Archives. 2019, shiftdesign.org/content/uploads/2019/02/ArchitectingSustainableFutures-2019-report.pdf.
