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 a plan to expand the resources offered by Build Your Archive as well as an how this would extend into working with new partners and collaborators.
What Do I Plan to Do?
Currently Build Your Archive is serving a community of Black Women Artist, Activists and Cultural Workers, as well as organizations and estates. At times this service line becomes blurred when provided community memory work labs, presentations and consulting on personal archiving to family entities. Since establishing in 2020, it is timely to return to the mission, vision and values of the organization to clearly define and expand who the work is being offered to, where it is being offered and how you can engage in the work of Build Your Archive from a Black Feminist Lens.
It is my hope that this can be accomplished through creating a micro-lab within the Build Your Archive Eco-System that builds a map of information by connecting and pattern seeking in biographies, text, literature and readings of Black Women Artist, Activists and Cultural Workers. This map of information would be built in Obsidian, a offline writing app that allows you to connect ideas, thoughts and concepts.(Obsidian, n.d.)
Once built, the system could also be replicated to help process archives of future Black Women Artists. As well as be integrated into the service life span that is provided to organizations and estates.
In addition to the newly created micro-lab, the website will be updated to reflect how Build Your Archive currently provides services to individual artists as well as working alongside Organizations and Estates.
Why Is It Important?
This is important because it will provide a visual of how I as an archivist and practitioner utilize Black Feminist Text to provide the services that are built and facilitated. It will return Build Your Archive to its original ethos of creating resources and templates that can be used within the practices of Black Women Artists and their communities.
Historically the archives of Black Women Artists, Activists and Cultural Workers have been fragmented, lost or undiscovered. Historian Ashley D. Farmer has coined the phrase, "disorderly distribution of archival material, or when the documentation of their ideas and lives are literally located everywhere and strewn across multiple archival spaces."
She continues, "This absence of a traditional archival collection has had important implications for the histories that scholars produce. Such Black women theorists are often left out of the historical record all together due to claims about the “lack” of the “right kind” of sources to write them into histories. Or, if they are included, scholars frame them as incongruous, incomplete, or enigmatic figures because their lives and thoughts are not neatly collected and processed in manuscript collections. If their archive is discordant, then their activism and theorizing must be too." (Farmer 2022).
This project aims to highlight where their work is being held but also connect convergence points, similar meeting points and third spaces where they completed their works. I also believe that the practice of citation , annotation and visually connecting relationships will reveal patterns, strategies and touchpoints in the community-at-large of Black Women Artists and how they either cemented the trajectory of their legacies.
Currently, Build Your Archive has digital repository of interviews, talks and videos this project would also take those transcripts, if available, and connect them to.
Screenshot of Research Page / Digital Repository on the Build Your Archive Website
In Alice Walker's, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens she states, " in my own work I write not only want I want read -- understanding fully and indelibly that if I do do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction -- I write all of the things I should have been able to read. Consulting, as belatedly discovered models, those writers -- most of whom, not surprisingly, are women -- who understood that their experience as ordinary human beings was also valuable and in danger of being misrepresented, distorted or lost." (Walker, 2004)
I believe that the excavation of these text and providing a foundation of research that connects them all, digitally and visually, can become a powerful tool for artists to discover their models within the canon of Black Feminist Text. Specifically those who are working with literature, archives and Black Feminist text in their artistic and creative practices.
How Do I Plan to Do It?
As the Founder and Principal Archivist, I plan to lead the project and manually transfer for the information from the text to offline server/vault. All text will be referenced from my personal library/archive as well as literature that I have access to online. In addition to manually transferring information I will be utilizing plugins like Smart Connections which would allow me to discover the hidden connections between the notes within Obsidian, to aid in finding similarities at a faster rate.
Initially, I will be working with the Text and/or Materials of Mildred Thompson, Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde.
Within the server there will be separated "wiki pages" of the person's life account either sourced from Black Women Writers Project, Black Women Radicals, or directly from Wikipedia.
Potential Collaborators and Partners
It is my aim to highlight the existence of communal third spaces as well as how institutions can collaborate with community archives and organizations. I would like to present, have a discussion or activate the information artistically at either For Keeps Rare Books or yes please bookhouse and carespace.
I am also interested in collaborating with institutional spaces where the text of Black Women Artists, Activists and Cultural Workers are held. Specifically at Spelman College Archives, Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, and The Mildred Thompson Legacy Project.
What Results & Outcomes Do I Plan to Achieve?
To consider growth as success, I would like to have a "proof of concept" for at least 5 Black Women Artists, Activist or Cultural Workers. I would like to ultimately publish this as a micro-site and allow it to be of reference for other artists who looking for models to design their pathways afterwards.
Sources:
Farmer, Ashley D. Disorderly Distribution.The Black Scholar 52, no. 4 (October 2, 2022): 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2022.2111648.
About | Obsidian. (n.d.). Obsidian.me Retrieved December 17, 2023, from https://obsidian.md
Walker, A. (2004). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.