WINTER 2022

A Fantastic Sunset, Alma Thomas, 1970

Winter 2022: What We Practice Matters

This winter, as the year ends and a new year begins, we reckon with what has occurred by breathing deeply into it and what is unfolding. We spent a lot of time this year being enraged, screaming, crying, and grieving. Simultaneously, we spent a lot of time checking in with and tending to each other and our communities as we (re)engaged or deepened practices—such as yoga, dancing, journaling, making, and meditating—that support our ongoing health and well-being. Our daily practices of community care are how we have been reckoning with harm and actively rupturing from it. What we practice consciously and intentionally matters.

Next year we will continue focusing on rupturing and repairing while also focusing on the parallel and ongoing process of reckoning and engaging in embodied practices. To end this year and welcome a new season and year, we invite you to move your body with us. For many of us, for myriad reasons, right now and the past few years have been very difficult. We know we need moments of release and joy to heal, resource, and sustain us. We hope this playlist brings some movement—whether that be in the form of dancing, screaming, stretching, rejoicing, or whatever feels good.

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We need your support!

Give now to support our 2023 Black feminist artists’ fellowship!

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Art making as community practice and organizational fortification

As an organization that supports artists and believes in the power of art as a method and practice of transformation, we find it crucial to make things together—not just this organization, but art, too. We were so happy to be invited to participate in The Studio in the Woods’ FORESTival in November to be able to use different mediums to share about Weavers’ vision and work. To bring the issues of gender, race, climate, domesticity, enslavement, and communication alive through an installation, allowed our team to troubleshoot our ideas, our artists statement, our materials. It gave us another opportunity to see our various gifts as a team, to find different ways to lead together and to experiment. This process helped us reconnect as a team through play and creativity, in ways that zoom work has made difficult. This experience strengthened our commitment to funding artists and to be in our own practice as artists.

Musings Beyond the Veil: Reading Plantation Interiorities Lazy Susan Goes on Strike
kai lumumba barrow, Willa Conway, and La Tonya Green

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Has making art or engaging with art ever helped you shift patterns?

Has art energized you or a team you work with? 

What are ways that you can infuse art into your organizational practices?

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This installation imagines the inner lives of the enslaved and the fugitives, especially Black and Indigenous women, who lived and passed through the land the Studio in the Woods currently occupies. How does this past materialize in our present and how does it inform our future?

Rupture and Repair
 

This month, we completed our first cohort of Rupture and Repair: A learning cohort for white people with wealth. It had been nearly 3 year since folks had been able to gather in person at Willa’s workshop space in New Orleans, and it was a gift to be able to watch the choreography of our learning, the movement from chair to white paper, to the tea and snack table, to feel the energy of principled debate, deep storytelling, and improvisational movement. All of these tools feel essential in building an anti-racist culture that is compelling, sustainable, and transformative for all people involved, and that moves us towards a ethics and practice of repair. Some central questions that emerged from this cohort were:

How do we tell the story under the story of the history and present of the harms of racial and gendered capitalism? 

How do we tell the truth of what has happened and what is happening in our lives that maintain white supremacy and wealth disparities? 

What is the place of guilt in white-antiracist work (or does it have a place at all)? 

What attention does real repair take? Is it like putting a bandaid on something or taking the time to mend something with care, to sit with the break and to bring care and attention to the process of repair?

Interested In learning more about Rupture and Repair or joining the next cohort, beginning in March 2023? Email willa@theweaversproject.org to be added to the waiting list. You will receive an email in the New Year with application info! 

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From the Lab: Journaling Practice

Winter Solstice Contemplations

Winter Solstice is a time of pause. We are deep in the heart of blackness… We learn to follow the rhythms of Nature. We lean toward a world that is hushed. We turn inward to listen to the stories of our deepest selves. This is the time to practice deep breathing, to give yourself the Time to wander into your  imagination and follow the paths illuminated by the gifts of the Winter Solstice.
  

“Once upon a time there was a door. And in the door was a window. The window was small and decorated with a tiny grid of metal bars. On the night of the Winter Solstice, the MOON would come to the door, put their eye to the window, and peer inside. The Moon’s brightness would fill the interior, lighting spaces usually hidden. The MOON reminds us to turn inward and go deep inside. This is the time to turn inward and let the noise of the outer world fall away. This is the time to get to know yourself and your community  without judgment or purpose.“ – Maia Toll

The Moon, 16x20 mixed-media collage, from the forthcoming Abolitionist Tarot series by kai barrow, 2022

JOURNALING PRACTICE #1 (excerpt from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned, “breathe”)


breathe:
 

Track your breath. A deep intimacy with the breath is crucial for all marine mammals. Use these passages as a measure. Read aloud and see how far you get with one breath. Try this at different times of the day and notice if there are any differences in your breathing based on the time of day, or based on the subject matter of the passage.

“And you? Maybe it's time to remember that there is more than one way to breathe in icy depths or summer heat. To thank your ancestors for how you have evolved in the presence of polar bears, harpoons, and other threats. To think on what you want to shift, how you want to grow, what you need to remember.

And me? It was always you I loved, not your elegant strategy. I will love you still, if you now outgrow it. I will love you more whether time moves forwards or backwards. Whether ice melts or water freezes back. Whether your next move is protection, breakthrough, shift, or any combination. There are at least three ways to love you: as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three.” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs

 

Variation: 

Set up your workspace to write, sketch, paint, or record your imaginings. Using automatic/stream-of-conscious writing, sketching, painting, composing and/or choreography, document your response to a selected text or passage.

 

Suggested Texts:

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Spotlight
Each issue of this year’s newsletters has put a spotlight on a Black radical feminist artist who has influenced the dismantling of racial and gendered capitalism through their art and effect on culture.


This issue we honor
Ms. Valerie Maynard
(1937-2022)

Rufus (1968) and Valerie Maynard. Photo: Mitro Hood/Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art

Maynard's work focused on "human-beingness." She believed that we each "are a composite of everyone who has come before you. That’s your voice, your soul, your person, your eyes, and everything you do.” -Valerie Maynard, sculptor, printmaker, painter, and teacher (from "Valerie Maynard’s Solo Exhibit Devotion at New Door Creative Explores the Human Condition through Printmaking" by Angela N Carroll, BmoreArt)

Get Me Another Heart This One’s Been Broken Too Many Times, Valerie Maynard, 1995

What Can I Do About All Of This Injustice?, Valerie Maynard, woodcut on rice paper

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Some of What We (Re)Read, Listened to (Again), and Watched (Again) in 2022

kai:

La Tonya:

 

Willa:
One of my favorite things about facilitating Rupture and Repair is picking out the assigned readings and podcasts that support the in-person curriculum. A few that really struck me this year were: 

Thank you very much for supporting and being in community with us. We love and appreciate you. We wish you health and abundance this season and for the new year. We look forward to engaging with you in person next year.

Peace and love,
-La Tonya, kai, and Willa

 

FALL 2022

Art as an Act of Liberation

We consider art as an act of liberation: facilitator of imagination and catalyst for change—a two-fold role that is both individual and collective. In the 1986 exhibition catalog, “Art as an Act of Liberation,” Elizam Escobar states:

From a bird’s eye view we can observe a new chaos in the art world; a great confusion in the artistic values and a sickening picture of the art market. Artists, dealers, gallery owners, museums, auctionhouses, collectors, etc. are all dancing to the tune of big capital, where art becomes ‘a piece of property to be enjoyed, not only for its esthetic or emotional value, but for its borrowing power.’ The artist becomes a servile factory that produces images no longer for the old illusion of art-for-art’s-sake, but in the spirit of art-for-money’s-sake…

It is naïve to think that art can be divorced from ideology, that art can be “apolitical” and somehow exist outside of its material and social conditions. What are the artists’ intentions? How are they positioned in the world? How do they articulate their own observations, contradictions, and complicated relationships with/in their societies?

The avant-garde is dead. The market made it harmless and useless. And we, who may still have something of the avant-gardist in us, would like to make our works something useless to that same market. We would like that our work would have something which they couldn’t use. Maybe that something could be US, because we know that the old fox has been able to convert everything into a commodity. Because perhaps there is still a great work of art to realize: the destruction of that market.

The Weavers Project is deeply committed to Black feminism, a school of thought whose initial theoreticians and practitioners were largely comprised of artists, mothers, workers, scholars and organizers. From Audre Lorde to Barbara Jones-Hogu, Black feminist artists created an aesthetic grounded in a politic of Sankofa. Their collective and individual works imagined and materialized worlds where the oppressed were at the center of the frame, conversation, gaze.

So either we cooperate with the system, or we struggle against it. Either we become what we say we are, or simply accept the role of mercenary peddlers and useful fools.

Black feminist artists influence the ways we understand and imagine our pasts, present and futures. With intersectionality, self-determination, institution-building and revolution as guiding principles, these artists created archives, collectives, galleries, museums, and classes within their communities, serving as living models of possibility and removing another brick from the wall.

It’s true, our pretensions may seem fantastic and unreal, but our century has proved that reality is much more fantastic than our imagination. That the imagination is also a political weapon. And that the struggle is also between one fiction and another fiction. Let’s then be daring, as our poems, as our images. Let’s walk too besides the gravediggers for the wellbeing of art and humanity. 

In our current moment of multi-crises, what does it mean to practice art as an act of liberation? And how do our relationships with each other, and our environments benefit from these practices? These are a few of the questions we are currently exploring in our work of building the Weavers Project. We invite you to dream, study, and dialogue with us.

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Give now to support our 2023 Black feminist artists’ fellowship!

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“I get to learn from and appreciate art, literature, painting, film, music... Art guides us. I have said many times that art helps us to feel what we do not yet understand, what we cannot yet say. So I’m a beneficiary of all the wonderful artists that helped pave the way to change and to reimagine the way we live and to imagine new worlds. All of us are beneficiaries of art, whether we produce art or not… cultural workers and artists have paved the way.” -Angela Davis from "For Angela Davis and Gina Dent, Abolition Is the Only Way"

From the Lab: The Magic of Journaling

Can’t say enough about the importance of journaling. For artists and those who aim to facilitate imagination, journaling is crucial for sparking creative breakthroughs and building muscle memory. Journaling can provide you the space to experiment with techniques, genre, form, and ideas. Your journal is a place to problem-solve and make mistakes. Give yourself the gift of journaling. Aim for a timeframe, approach, and practice that is comfortable, challenging, realistic, wild, calm, erratic. Find your footing. There are many different tools to help guide your journaling. Like meditation, it is sometimes difficult to focus and it can be challenging to decide on subject matter. What will you journal about? An observation? A place? Your emotions? Big ideas?  Some folks use cards to help guide their thoughts; some record dreams or draw from stream-of-consciousness. Some work with a journaling buddy to come up with topics and stay accountable. There are numerous ways to keep a journal–from vlogs, blogs, and playlists, to sketches, collage, or scrapbooking.  Check out the following and get inspired!

Journaling Exercise #1:  Create a Symbol Dictionary

Creating a personal dictionary of symbols is a fun way to start journaling, or another technique to add to your journaling practice. Pay attention to the subtle and quiet voices around you as you go about everyday activities. Notice a feather on the ground? A crow call? A police car? These are the symbols that surround you. What stands out in your memory as you gather your thoughts for journaling? Your dictionary can look like a collage of images or objects, drawings, word maps, or sounds. Be sure to capture what is going on in your life when you see/hear the symbol. Over time, your journal will help you understand your own metaphoric language.

Spotlight

Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times

In the spirit of legacy, we take a look at groundbreaking artist/activist, Faith Ringgold. Ringgold’s radical activism helped foster a movement of Black feminist artists, including the 1970s collective, Where We At: Black Women Artists. She and her contemporaries insisted that room be made in the mainstream art world for marginalized artists while continuing to critique its structures and practices. Strategically moving between reform and revolution, they organized actions, mentored emerging artists, and created work directly within communities outside of the standard art world venues.

Faith Ringgold Dancing on the George Washington Bridge, 1988

Faith Ringgold, #19 US Postage Stamp, 1967

From the Archives

 

In 1971, artists Kay Brown, Dindga McCannon and Faith Ringgold founded “Where We At” Black Women Artists (WWA) to provide a platform for Black women artists. Although the Black Arts Movement, like its predecessor, the Harlem Renaissance, brought increased attention to Black artists, the predominantly male movement continued to exclude women from dialogues and opportunities in and about the art world. Similarly, the burgeoning feminist art movement, largely organized by white women, did not address the interests and concerns of Black women. Caught between misogyny and racism, WWA provided its membership with crucial moral and tangible support and professional development. The collective held workshops in community spaces, jails and schools; organized public talks and exhibitions, and contributed to feminist art publications. Their example continues to inspire.

Three Seasons, by Mark Wagner Inc.

Upcoming

In-person class:

Rupture and Repair

Beginning November 1st, we are excited to offer Rupture and Repair: A learning cohort for white people with wealth. This cohort will be in-person and meetings will take place in New Orleans. New Orleans and Louisiana have deep histories of extraction and violence that have benefited white wealthy families across the country for generations. We begin this work as Weavers within our local context, to acknowledge the ruptures in this geography, historically and presently, and ask together, what can we do to create sustainable repair?

Rupture and Repair will blend feminist political education, family history research, healing and embodiment work, 1:1 coaching and leadership development. Participants will learn about how racial and gendered capitalism has shaped our world, our families, ourselves, our relationships and our relationships to giving and money, exploring the ways that we have both benefited from and been harmed by systemic injustice. The program is oriented toward increasing participants' capacity to hold these truths and act more powerfully, consistently, and joyfully in alignment with our longing for racial, economic and gender justice. Find out more information about this cohort on our website here or you can apply directly here by Friday, Oct. 21st. If you are unable to participate in this cohort and are interested in participating in a future one, please email us to be added to the mailing list.

In-person event:

FORESTival

We are excited to be collaborating with A Studio in the Woods as part of their FORESTival: A celebration of Art and Nature on Saturday, November 12th. Please join us at this beautiful event in the woods, as we create an interactive installation that considers legacy and regeneration. Buy your tickets here! 

What We Are:

Reading:

 

Listening to:

Watching:

Supporting:

Thank you very much for your time and attention, and for being a part of our community. We love and appreciate you.

-kai, Willa, and La Tonya

 

SPRING 2022

 Rage, Mothering, and Collective Care

From Kara Walker’s installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Photo: Creative Time

“[The revolutionary struggle is] not only for a social universe that is meaningful and just, but lives that are inherently precious. It is the struggle against our elimination, our disappearance from one another. Mothering is a primary front in this struggle, not as a biological function, but as a social practice…The ethos of mothering involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies. It presents a fundamental contradiction to the logic of capitalism, which unmoors us from each other.” 

–Cynthia Dewi Oka, “Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis” in  Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines


Spring 2022: Rage, Mothering, and Collective Care

Last month was filled with pain and terror, in a month and season, where both mothering and mental health are meant to be honored. We believe that now is never the time to be passive. The most recent mass shooting of Black people in Buffalo, the mass shooting of children and teachers in Uvalde, the meticulous piece-by-piece dismantling of transgender and abortion rights at the state level, and the impending overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court enrages us! The right to choose what happens to our whole being in a world that restricts choices based on gender, race, and class is a political framework and a practice. We are living with ongoing explicitly anti-Black and anti-women acts of control, violence, and terror. This is a moment when the ideology, functions, and consequences of white supremacy, patriarchy, and racial capitalism are once again being televised, affirming the truth of what these systems are designed to do: control, repress, silence, and extract. In addition, as many have written, acting on the Great Replacement theory and the overturning of Roe v. Wade are not the beginnings or closing acts of a crusade to restrict rights and body autonomy, but a harkening back to skulduggery of “the way things were.”

In order to not only resist anti-Blackness and misogyny/misogynoir but to also build a world without them, we all must be explicitly pro-Black (and disassociate it from being anti-white) and be explicitly feminist.  As we celebrated our birth and chosen mothers this month, we were drawn to the text Revolutionary Mothering and the quote from Cynthia Dewi Oka, above specifically mothering is a social practice. Mothering comes in many different forms. We do not have to have children to live into the politics and practices of mothering–of care, negotiating needs, listening, rage, commitment and dedication, awe, or fighting for a future where all beings can thrive. We need these qualities and practices to support us to learn, heal, and shift culture. What qualities and practices are currently supporting you?


Collective Care is the Future by Angela Faz

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“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one's work. And part of the rage is this: It isn't only what is happening to you. But it's what's happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance. Now, since this is so, it's a great temptation to simplify the issues under the illusion that if you simplify them enough, people will recognize them. I think this illusion is very dangerous because, in fact, it isn't the way it works. A complex thing can't be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across.”

-James Baldwin, "The Negro in American Culture,” a group discussion with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Emile Capouya, Alfred Kazin talk together in 1961.

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Message

A Reflection on an Intentional Practice in Intergenerational Learning and Healing

Three Generations/We Gonna Heal! Photo: La Tonya Green

Growing up in the desert of southwest Texas in the 70s and 80s I was reared by a community built on the collective care of primarily Black, Chicana, indigenous, and Mexican women. I grew up in El Paso where a mass shooting in 2019 of mostly Chicanos also took place in a grocery store (like the recent mass shooting of Black people referenced above), a domestic space conventionally associated with “women’s work.” Thinking about the spaces and places associated with women’s work reminds me of sitting at my maternal grandmother’s dining room table listening to her and my paternal great-grandmother, who were best friends, talking, laughing, mourning, loving, celebrating, and strategizing. Past memories have been viscerally vivid the past few years as I have been living with an unprocessable range and amount of emotions. The COVID global pandemic, which has now taken over one million individuals in the United States and over six million worldwide, has only intensified those feelings.

One way I have attempted to process my emotions over the past two years, in particular, is by engaging in intentional intergenerational conversation with my extended family about what I have been feeling and my goal of both the breaking of harmful intergenerational patterns and practicing intergenerational learning and healing.  Because of the effect of mothering in my rearing, recent conversations between my mother and me have been one of the most powerful sites for intergenerational healing and transformation. While conversation between mother and daughter as a critical site for healing and transformation is not an epiphany, for me, being intentional about the practice of mutual learning, healing, and cycle-breaking from conversations with my mother, however, is revolutionary.

One of the entry points to the conversation practice between my mother and me has been reading together. We are reading My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies and The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, simultaneously. We started with pages ix-26 in My Grandmother’s Hands and then read and discussed pages 1-21 in The Body Keeps Score. The interweaving of the texts grounds our experience as Black people in the United States as we understand its physiological consequences. As we read, we journal whatever comes up for us. When we meet, we discuss the passages and what moved us; we pay particular attention to what moved us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Through our conversations, I am learning to listen to my mother differently. I not only listen to her how her life experiences have shaped her but I also listen to learn more about and for deeper understanding of how the experiences of our ancestors shape her…and, therefore, me,...and my daughter,... My understanding of her and my maternal grandmother and paternal great-grandmother deeply influence how I think about myself as a daughter, a mother, a wife, and a Black woman trying to not only survive a racialized and gendered world but to live in a world without them. 

I believe that the most powerful and sustainable sites for change are in the interior and the mundane. As my mother and I share and process our stories, reflections, and analysis of achievement, struggle, collective care, woman's work, abuse, and intergenerational pain and silence, we are simultaneously healing ourselves and future generations. Please join me in trying to bring to fruition a world beyond racial and gendered capitalism by initiating intergenerational conversation with your family. 

-La Tonya  




Spotlight

This year The Weavers Project will put a spotlight on a Black radical feminist artist who has influenced the dismantling of racial and gendered capitalism through their art and effect on culture.


Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)

“I have always wanted my art to service my people - to reflect us, to relate to us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create art for liberation and for life.”

Elizabeth Catlett’s Sharecropper, from 1952; Fern Logan’s photograph of Catlett in 1986

Elizabeth Catlett wanted her work to resonate with working people. An influential artist over many generations included focusing particular attention on the stories of Black women.

These Two Generations by Elizabeth Catlett

Tsedaye Makonnen, The Crowning Series: Nsukka Market I, 2018. © Tsedaye Makonnen from “Tsedaye Makonnen’s Art Addresses Reproductive Healthcare Inequalities Affecting Black Women.” (Ayanna Dozier, May 6, 2022 Artsy.net)

What We Are:

Reading:

Listening to:

Watching:

Supporting:


Thank you very much for your time and attention, and for being a part of our community. We love and appreciate you. More soon.

-La Tonya, kai, and Willa


About The Weavers Project

With feminisms at the center, the Weavers Project experiments with building and sharing ideas and practices that dismantle racial and gendered capitalism and materialize the world we imagine. Our programming creates spaces of sharing across sector, race, gender, and class boundaries. We value and support work and ways of working that have been feminized and devalued, honoring art-making, spiritual and embodied practice, and environmental and personal sustainability as key strategies for social change. Our artist fellowships, resource mobilization and donor education programming, community events, workshops, and partnerships emphasize embodied learning, vulnerability, peer learning, and mutual aid. Through mentorship, cohort learning, and mutual aid practices we create opportunities for collaboration between artists, resource mobilizers, scholars, and social movement practitioners. Please donate.

 

WINTER SOLSTICE 2021

Rest is an Act of Resistance

The Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year. It is a consistent reminder that life too is short. The past two years of intense and constant upheaval have deepened our interest individually and organizationally in interiority, documentation, preservation, legacy, archiving, and rest. Rest is an act of resistance. The recent passing of bell hooks reminded us of the urgency of rest and rigor. We need collective care and transformative justice; humor and collaboration; and archiving and saying yes to creativity simultaneous to living inside of the destructive system we are working to dismantle. Throughout her career, bell hooks realized that too many radical, Black, queer, and feminist's work was being destroyed--that a lifetime of work was not being valued or engaged with. In a 2015 panel discussion with Darnell Moore and Marci Blackman, she shared how she made a decision to pre-emptively create the bell hooks Center at Berea College to be a place where all people could go to engage in feminist conversation, scholarship, and community. She shared that it was in allowing herself to engage in her radical imagination that this vision came into form. She took care of her archive. When the Center launched early this year, the Shirley Chisholm Cultural Institute, which was established in 1977 was the only other institute in the US focused on preserving the archive of a Black woman. The imaginations of these Black feminists make room for all of us–room for our scholarship, our work, our joy, our love, our complexity, our healing, and our visions.

We hope to honor the legacy of bell hooks through our work at The Weavers Project. Her words have helped shape our mission, vision, and theory of change. Her work encompasses all that we have been reflecting on, thinking, dreaming, and living the past intense two years. As a Black radical feminist organization, we are indebted to the legacy of bell hooks and all other black feminist leaders and activists who die too angry, too tired, too young, and too painfully as a consequence of racialized and gendered capitalism. May our work respect and honor their legacy and strengthen the ongoing fight for the liberation of all people.

Message

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#@TheNapMinistry · #@TheNapMinistry · #@TheNapMinistry · #@TheNapMinistry
We examine the liberating power of naps. We believe rest is a form of resistance & reparations.
#@TheNapMinistry · #@TheNapMinistry · #@TheNapMinistry · #@TheNapMinistry

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The Weavers Project Anchor Team
(Counterclockwise): kai, La Tonya, and Willa

Our new partnership with the Proteus Fund
We are happy to announce that beginning January 1, 2022, a new phase of our growth will include being a project in the Proteus Fund fiscal sponsorship program. Through participation in the program we are extended Proteus' 501(c)(3) tax-exemption and associated benefits. In addition, Proteus will provide us with fiduciary oversight, financial management, and operations and managerial support. As you might already know, The Weavers Project was founded in early 2017 to respond to the call by Black radical creatives to support their thought leadership, movement-building, and creative work in deep and substantial ways. During the first two years of organization-building we focused on aligning our beliefs and mission with our praxis (i.e. the practical application of theory). The main focus of our work the past two years has been strengthening our culture, systems, and structures. We look forward to sharing more with you soon about what we are planning for 2022 and beyond.

••••

“Whoa, zoom, I'd like to fly far away from here. Where my mind, oh Lord, is fresh and clear. And I'd find the love that I long to see. Where everybody can be what they wanna be.” -Zoom, The Commodores

••••

The Sugar Shack by Ernie Barnes.

Dance With Us
Continuing to tend to our bodies and spirits in the midst of ongoing upheaval is a discipline and gesture of love that can be an anchor in the dark that makes space for us to keep living, not just be alive. In this period of transition from fall to winter, we invite you to dance with us. Here is our winter playlist. Through movement, allow yourself to reflect on your year. As you dance, notice which songs move you without you having to think about it. After you finish dancing, take a moment to hydrate, rest, and write down anything that comes up for you. We would love to hear your reflections—what you are moving with and through and what you are hoping for 2022.

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Don’t Pretty Me

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

Don’t pretty me. Don’t pretty me.

                                                                   Don’t.

-Nabila Lovelace, Sons of Achilles

 

Collage by kai l. barrow.

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Video Interview*
bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation
(Transcript)
*Please let us know if you have trouble accessing it. We will try to help.

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What We Are:

Reading:

  • "101 Reasons/Tell the Truth" by Sheree Greer

  • Humans of New York: “I was a Prada Suit Motherfucker I Was”
    “I was a Prada-suit motherfucker. I was running a limousine company. But when the last financial crisis hit, I lost all my lines of credit and the whole thing came apart. I felt too old to start again. My wife would come home from work and find me still in my pajamas, reading magazines and newspapers. This was in August, when school really starts to crank up. So I kept seeing these articles about underfunded schools: no art, no gym, no music. My kids went to private school, so these conditions were hard for me to imagine. It seemed sensational. So one morning I got on the subway and took it to 135th street in Harlem. I couldn’t have been more arrogant. I walked through the doors of the first elementary school I could find, asked for the principal, and said: ‘I’m here to try to break the cycle of poverty.’”

Listening to:

Podcast: The Throughline series on capitalism asks, “What do we mean when we talk about capitalism?”. It examines ways the “economic system might seem inevitable” and the ways that it is a “construction project hundreds of years in the making” with no part of it “natural or left to chance.”

Watching:

••••

Thank you for being a part of our community. Please stay in touch by signing up for our mailing list and following us on IG. We hope you have a healthy and renewing winter and peaceful, loving, and happy 2022!

-La Tonya, Willa, and kai

 

FALL EQUINOX 2021

The Weavers Fellowship closing convening, New Orleans African American Museum, Fall 2019.

Releasing and Harvesting in Times of Upheaval

As we step fully into the Fall season, we are present to the harvest of the last year. As a team, we began our meeting on the Equinox with the simple questions: What are we releasing? What are we harvesting? The trees show us the natural cycles of losing what is no longer needed (their leaves) and the abundant harvest that comes in Fall asks us to be present to all that we have grown and gained in the months before. To hold these simple questions in the face of climate disaster that manifests in the forms of COVID, flooding, and hurricanes is no small task, yet provides a place of breath for us to be present to our collective grief and burnout. These moments of reflection allow the season to guide us. We can begin to rest knowing that we can rely on the natural systems of change for stability when the world feels chaotic and uncontrollable. The changing weather is a reminder to slow down and be present to the natural transitions that we can depend on. Who is not touched by grief at this time? Loss is all around us and we need one another to build both quiet and boisterous spaces of connection to bring more revolution, grace, and tenderness into our current reality. 

In this newsletter, we are excited to lift up organizations that have been working on the ground to support rebuilding after Hurricane Ida while simultaneously engaging in the long-term organizing required to make the change necessary for our planet to be more habitable for all beings in the long term. As an organization, we are reflecting on our own relationship to land, and what it means for us to cultivate imaginative space to dream and create a new reality. As part of our reflecting we are also considering the physical space needed to support artists through evacuation and displacement. And as we build our own internal team to build-out our vision, we continue to  follow the seasons as guides. We look forward to the time when we can gather together as a community again, and plan to make spaces to dream together soon. Please reach out to us, we want to connect with you!

Recovering from Hurricane Ida--Places to Give
I want to remind people that yes, Louisiana is full of beautiful, resourceful people. But folks cannot continue to expect us to be resilient. Resilience is a short-term condition where one stretches themselves until problems can be resolved. The idea that resilience is a permanent state is false. If we do not address the problems causing people to be resilient, it is simply oppression
- Ashley K Shelton, On Hurricane Ida, Covid-19, and trauma: Resilience cannot be a permanent state

Hurricane Ida hit the Louisiana coast as a category 4 hurricane on August 29th, leaving over a million people in Louisiana without power, some for weeks. Although all power has been restored in New Orleans, and the city is slowly opening back up, the lower river parishes are facing a housing crisis after Ida’s 150 mile per hour winds destroyed homes, power lines, and further destroyed the deteriorating land in the state. Living with and facing climate catastrophe is part of our lived reality, and something that all of us, artists, movement leaders, donor organizers, and communities are asked to think strategically about in order for us all to live a more sustainable future. Fully recovering from climate catastrophe is not something that we can count on, but collaboration, mutual aid, and building both the vision and practice of sustainability is required of all of us.


Below are a few organizations that are and a collaboration that is leading not only immediate needs, but committed to the long-term organizing and ongoing infrastructure-building we need to contend with the environmental consequences of racial and gendered capitalism.

Ese Ne Tekrema
"the teeth and the tongue"
An Adinkra symbol representing friendship and interdependence

“In the village, there is the belief that when anyone passes, no matter what their place in the community, something valuable to everyone is lost. Every death affects every person. Everyone grieves together. One thing that is often overlooked in the West is the importance of collective grief. When a death is not grieved by the whole community together, it leaves the individuals who were closest to the deceased shattered and alone. They end up without a path back to the group.
- Sobonfu E. Some, Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing, and Wisdom


••••

Embodied Emissions by Hannah Chalew 2020.

**Hannah is raising funds for her community partners in St James Parish. Please consider participating in her raffle (ends Friday, October 1st) to win a piece of her original art. More info here.**

Committing to Practice as You and the World are Being Rearranged 

Committing to practices of noticing can allow us to process and feel both our grief and joy, creating more space for presence and liberation. A time of great upheaval is an important opportunity to recommit to and deepen the daily practices that help us keep our mind, body, and spirit aligned. In this period of transition from summer to fall, we invite you to join us in a practice that might assist you in achieving and/or maintaining some stability.

  • To begin, please take a moment to look out a window. Or if you are already outside, please take a moment to look around you.

  • Please take a few deep breaths as you make note of what you see or feel that gives indication of nature transitioning from summer to fall. Perhaps it is a chill in the air, or the changing color of leaves, or the birds you are seeing.

  • Next, please find a place where you feel comfortable to sit or lay down. Feel free to close your eyes, if you feel comfortable doing so.

  • Please take a moment to be silent and still. Please notice the ground as it supports you. Let any thoughts that come up float by; notice them, but please do not engage in dialogue with or judge them.

  • Notice any place(s) in your body that you are holding tension. Take as much time as you need to tend to that/those place(s)--to try to release the tension, even if just for a moment. As you are tending to that/those place(s), please take a moment to reflect on what you are releasing from your mind, body, spirit.

  • Once you have tended to that/those place(s), please take a moment and be as relaxed, silent, and still as you can be.

  • When that moment is over for you and you are ready, take a few minutes to journal, to make something, and/or to dance whatever comes up for you.


If you would like a prompt to reflect on as part of your daily practice this fall, please consider: “What am I releasing this season?” and/or “What did I plant this spring and summer?” and/or “What am I harvesting?”.

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Phantom of the Anthropocene by kai l. barrow at Project Row Houses.

WHAT WE ARE:

Reading:

Listening to:

Watching:

••••

Thank you for continuing to be in community with us and our seasonal practice of sharing with you what we are up to and what is present to us and our work. Please take good care of yourself and others. To stay in touch, sign up for our mailing list and follow us on IG.

Peace,
The Weavers Project Team (kai, La Tonya, and Willa)

 

JUNE 20, 2021 ~ SUMMER SOLSTICE

"Black Feminist Funk." Design and photo by Shana M. griffin.

Some dreams...have a different cast to them, and other [dreams] we know, instinctually, to pay attention [to]. Now, what happens is, we don’t live in a society, generally, that supports dreams as knowledge...we’re not living in a place like that. But think about it — about half of our lives, we’re out gathering information that we may not bring forth consciously, and for some of us, it’s like it’s a library that we go to when we need to know something. It works in that way.
-Joy Harjo, from her On Being interview The Whole of Time

In these first days of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, there is already a lot to process and be present to. The first tropical storm on the Gulf Coast, the commodification of Juneteenth, the joyful reunions with family and friends, and perhaps, for many of us, the dissolution of a layer of fear carried over the last fifteen months. Summer feels like an opening and with it a real felt sense of a transition. There is heat, bodies together in space, music, shared meals, gatherings, reconnection. If the pandemic is a portal, as Arundathi Roy so aptly named in the early days of the pandemic, then what is it that we’re stepping into now? What dreams are we still daring to dream while we are still feeling the painful effects of months, and generations, of loss?

Dreaming allows us to tap into our lineages and the beyond, simultaneously dreaming forward and backwards, building and keeping relationships with our ancestors and the generations to come. If our dreams are libraries like Joy Harjo says, then what are you seeking to know? How can we use the energy of summer to live into both the seen and unseen worlds? In June, the Weavers Anchor Team gathered together in person for the first time since February 2020, and our dreams for the next iteration of the Fellowship and our dreams for a world beyond racial and gendered capitalism only continue to expand. Our daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms allow us to access the depth of the resources we have as a collective, including you. At the beginning of the spring, our team reflected on what we were planting. We are spending our summer on the road connecting with our community, making art, sharing our visions with trusted comrades, and building the structure needed to create more space to engage with our community more deeply this fall. We are laying the foundation for our dreams to come to life. We hope the summer replenishes you and your loved ones, like a big exhale on the long journey of liberation.

Message

MOVE YOUR BODY

A central part of our dream as the Weavers Project, and part of why we are committed to supporting Black feminist artists, is to create more space for everyday creativity, play, pleasure, and practice. We work to support artists to give them space to make their work, and we also use everyday practices to live more deeply into our creative lives beyond production.

It’s summer, so we gotta dance. Will you play with us? We invite you to press play on our Solstice playlist and let the music move you. How does your body want to move? What happens if you let it move freely and without judgment? If you moved from your body and not directed by your mind, what else could become available? Explore the places you find pleasure or curiosity or the places you get stuck. Repeat.

Rucker Park, Harlem, Summer 2012. Photo by Jermaine Lawrence.

For Your Information
poetry is always for the people
and it is always a time of war
-Ruth Forman, We Are the Young Magicians


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fel·​low·​ship | \ ˈfe-lə-ˌship
Radical Black Feminist
fel·​low·​ship | \ ˈfe-lə-ˌship

We cultivate an embodied experimental method of learning
where change is found in the visceral.
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WHAT WE ARE:

Reading: We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
“What Does Transformation Look Like?….The inability to offer a neatly packaged and easily digestible solution does not preclude offering critique or analysis of the ills of our current system. We live in a society that has been locked into a false sense of inevitability. It’s time to look hard at how this system came to be, who profits, how it functions, and why...As writer and educator Erica Meiners suggests: ‘Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design.’ It’s time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible.” (25)

Watching:
PBS: Art Bound: Artist and Mother (Released: April 2018. Running time: 56:40)
Opening statement: “In western civilization, we have this idea of an artist. It’s about a 600-year-old idea. This person is almost always considered a white man, and he is a genius. And he will do anything for his art. A mother on the other hand also gives up everything but she does so in the guise of selfishness. The child is supposed to be the center of her universe. When you put these two terms together, ‘mother’ and ‘artist’, then you’ve got a problem. Because you cannot give up everything, for two different things.” - Helen Molesworth, Curator

HBO: “Pause with Sam Jay” (Released: June 2021. 1st season, 5 episodes)
"So I was thinking about being a kid in Boston. So what was your relationship with money in your opinion? Growing up, young, what did you understand about money?....your story, my story, in a different America, right, for us--different color skin. Different ways that mutherfuckas handle us....You know what I mean?....How do you feel about that?" -Sam Jay in conversation with Branden Mattier (Episode 4: Money and the American Way (a.k.a. NBA SamBoi, Never Broke Again)

We appreciate you being in practice with us. To stay in touch, sign up for our mailing list and follow us on IG.

Love,
The Weavers Project Team (kai, La Tonya, and Willa)

 

MARCH 20, 2021 ~ SPRING EQUINOX

“Wintering in New York City.” Harlem, February 2021.

We--all of us on Terra--live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other and all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy--with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killings of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent responses to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.
~Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Today we celebrate the Spring Equinox, which is when the sun shines directly on the Earth’s equator causing the day to be almost equal daylight and darkness. In the northern hemisphere, it is the astronomical first day of spring.

At the beginning of each season, we gather together as a team to reflect on the season that passed and to look forward into the season ahead. This week, we reflected not only on the seasonal learnings but our feelings about the transition itself. To move from the quiet of winter into spring does not feel easy this year. Wintering has brought us comfort inside of a time that has been relentless. We cannot ignore what we have lost in the last season and in the last year, especially as the light at the end of the tunnel of COVID-19 in the United States becomes brighter, touchable. The transition of winter into spring this year brings with it discomfort and joy, possibility and fear. We have been through a time, collectively, that has made visible what many of us do not want to see: the precariousness of life on the planet at this time, our vulnerability, the continued denial about historical and present-day harm and violence perpetrated by racial and gendered capitalism.

This season of winter, and the long winter that has been the last year, has reminded us of the necessity to care for ourselves and one another. Part of that involves feeling the deep grief that is bubbling all around us, and part of that is creating spaciousness to be creative, generative, and bold in the midst of all of this. As a team, over winter we explored many different ways of gathering together, adapting to these “mixed up times” with their pain and joy. Like most people, this winter we were overwhelmed by a turbulent and painful year. Exhausted by Zoom/virtual meetings and pressure to produce even as the world crumbled around us.

In November, Willa booked a one room cabin in the woods for herself for a week in February because it seemed crucial for the sake of creation and quiet. When she shared this plan with the group, the whole team thought they, too, could benefit from space like that. Because of COVID-19, the team did not feel comfortable gathering all together, so we dubbed this dedicated time the "choose your own adventure" retreat. Each Anchor Team member got a budget for their trip and got to choose a place to stay that felt comfortable. Willa and kai traveled together from New Orleans to Folsom, LA (pictured above). The joy of big white paper and a vision seen by two sets of eyes in the material world was thrilling, nourishing, and productive.

La Tonya stayed in New York City (pictured above) but for a week moved to a different neighborhood. It was energizing and renewing to be able to be quiet and still. It was also deeply grounding to reflect on the work of weaving while walking through the neighborhoods of the city on bitterly cold winter nights.

We know this space is not guaranteed; that it is a privilege and something worth fighting for and prioritizing. It is a space that has not been provided for many feminists and especially not to Black feminists, historically or in the present. We honor the lineages of feminists who have fought for this space and for the many who continue to build untamed spaces.

Our choose your own adventure retreat allowed us the space to nourish ourselves and our work by reconnecting to some of our deepest sources of inspiration--each other and our collective community of bumptious kinds. As Susan Raffo states in her ever relevant article “Resourcing,” “It’s important to have spaces in life where we are surrounded by people with shared histories, shared language, and shared ways of being alive. Communities cannot heal or change without the space or ability to resource. Resourcing is always a radical act of self-reclamation.” So as we enter spring, we till the soil and prepare to bloom.

February Retreat Day 4, Fundraising, 2021. Journal entry, kai lumumba barrow.

Deepening Our Understanding of Lineage(s)
Our reflective and critical praxis of “learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” brings us back to the question of what we are making within our systems and our lives. At Weavers, we are making daily and seasonal practices with one another, teaching and learning with one another, and building spaces to create more possibilities for radical art making. We know it is a slow and steady process, and that we are part of a blooming ecosystem with a dynamic history. 

With that in mind, we are excited to announce that for 2021-2023 The Weavers Project will explore the theme "lineage(s)" throughout all areas of our work. After a year of so much loss, it feels essential that we name and deepen our connection to our lineages while staying present to what we are creating to leave to future generations. The "choose your own adventure retreat" allowed us to connect more deeply to each of our lineages and think about what we may be templating for generations to come. 

We believe in cultivating the creativity and sustainability of Black feminist artists and movement organizations not only because these sectors and people have been systemically under-resourced by racial capitalism and philanthropy, but because artists and movement builders embody what we most value--imagining and working towards liberation outside of the rules that have been set by capitalism and the state. 

We hope you will engage your radical imagination with us as we consider lineage, memory, archive, and the interior as layered and intricate reservoirs of knowledge. Our discussions will include conversations about what we are learning from the generations that came before us, how we can interrupt intergenerational harm, and what will we leave for future generations. We will be back in touch this summer with more specific program plans. 

Nobody in the world, 
nobody in history,
has ever gotten their freedom
by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
-Assata Shakur

OUR ONGOING CELEBRATION OF WEAVERS’ FELLOWS
The inaugural cohort of fellows continue their dismantling and building work. Here is more about what they have been up to:

RESOURCES WE ARE TURNING TO


A Change Is Gonna Come
Sam Cook

I was born by the river,
in a little tent.
Oh, and just like the river,
I've been running ever since.

It's been a long,
A long time coming,
But I know a change gonna come.
Oh, yes it will.

It's been too hard living,
But I'm afraid to die.
'Cause I don't know what's up there
Beyond the sky.

It's been a long,
A long time coming,
But I know a change gonna come.
Oh, yes it will.

I go to the movie.
And I go downtown.
Somebody keep telling me,
Don't hang around.

It's been a long,
A long time coming,
But I know, a change gonna come.
Oh, yes it will.

Then I go to my brother.
And I say, brother, help me please.
But he winds up, knockin' me
Back down on my knees.

Oh, there been times that I thought
I couldn't last for long,
But now I think I'm able, to carry on.

It's been a long,
A long time coming,
But I know a change gonna come.
Oh, yes it will.

Thank you for being in community with us. To stay in the loop, sign up for our mailing list and follow us on IG.

Peace & love,
The Weavers Team

 

DECEMBER 21, 2020 ~ WINTER SOLSTICE

"Through the Portal", 2020. Collage by Willa Conway.

Meditations on the Interior: #1

If I can really be with the dark parts of myself, the underground, the shadowed aspects of my life and my journey I will learn so much more, love myself deeper, rest enough to grow in invisible ways. So many of us feel far away from love and with no quick hope of traveling nearer during this season. In our creative projects we may be in the woods, unclear about where we are even going. That part of my journey that capitalism does not affirm and tries to pretend doesn’t even exist…a big clue that it must be important. The sacred unseen. Dirty, divine and evergreen. Forest Lesson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs 

Today, December 21, marks the winter solstice. The shortest day and the longest night. Darkness reminds us to turn inward, to welcome stillness, to deeply rest. 

Pause. What conditions are necessary for you to really rest? What is getting in the way of your rest? How can we help each other make space for rest?

Capitalism forces us to consider our rest as an afterthought, rather than the intention. As we are reminded to honor the darkest day and night of them all, we are reminded not to overlook our grief and our shadows. This year, more than ever, we need it. We deserve time to mourn and time to reflect on all that 2020 was. 

This turning inward in winter allows for us to get quiet. We do this for our personal and collective sustainability, as an antidote to capitalism’s stronghold, and in commitment to Black Feminist Praxis. We are all sharpest when our work honors the individual body, our collective bodies, and the land beneath our feet. 

At Weavers, we strive to align our work with the seasonal shift. Since you last heard from us on the fall equinox, we have been lucky enough to be in conversation with many of you – learning about your radical approaches to organizing, philanthropy, documentation, and archiving. 

Part of our ongoing practice is the development of an internal study group, where we read and reflect on texts that guide us. Over the summer, we read Lose Your Mother by Sadiya Hartman. In the fall, we read Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins. Next we’ll be diving into The Revolution Will Not Be Funded edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Charity Begins at Home by Teresa Odendahl.

We are looking forward to next year, where we will have more opportunity to engage in service of creativity, sustainability, and radical possibilities in the fields of philanthropy, art making and social justice. Read below for some updates from the inaugural fellows and the anchor team. Wishing you well, and may we all gather the lessons from 2020 towards a better New Year.

CELEBRATING WEAVERS’ FELLOWS

Sweetie,
if you’re 
not living 
on the edge,
then you’re 
taking up
Space.
-Florynce Kennedy

The inaugural cohort of fellows continue to be an inspiration in these times of unending chaos. They are forging ahead and we are in awe of all they have accomplished in 2020. Here’s a snapshot:

  • Marlon Peterson’s book Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist's Freedom Song is now available for preorder! The blurb - “From a leading advocate for prison abolition and transformative justice, a moving memoir about coming of age in Brooklyn and surviving incarceration — and an urgent call to end all the cages that constrain us.” Here’s a good list of Black-owned bookstores you might be able to pre-order with.

  • Shana m. griffin is a 2021 Creative Capital Award recipient for her work DISPLACED, which uses public history to chronicle the formation and institutionalization of racialized violence in housing policies, residential segregation, land-use planning, and urban development in New Orleans. Learn more about her project and the other awardees here. 

  • Nabila Lovelace participated in numerous virtual readings, including the Little Lights Reading Series (which was amplified here by The New York Times!) with Books Are Magic, offered this thorough thread of essential racial justice texts with free PDF links, facilitated conversations on Black Corporal Freedom on IG, and lots more.

  • Key Jackson will be co-facilitating Freedom School 2021, which gives folks the analysis, intellectual framework, and practical tools to think critically about oppression and actively move towards liberation. More info here.

  • And last but certainly not least...when kai lumumba barrow isn’t working on developing the next Weavers Fellowship, she’s co-leading [b]reach: adventures in heterotopia, an abolitionist visual opera, which is “a series of performances and installations that feature the antics of PRISONER #25, shape-shifting Black Subjects who world themselves through the history and afterlife of colonialism and slavery." Over the fall, gallery of the streets went on a fugitive journey across the eastern U.S. and are in the process of making a film from this journey – look out for it in early 2021!

ANCHOR TEAM OFFERINGS

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

The anchor team comes together weekly to build community and develop our collective goals as we grow The Weavers Project. During these wild times, our group has been a stable refuge. No matter what’s going on in the world, our Tuesday mornings remain a space to be in conversation, be silly, and deepen our practice together. Here are some takeaways and resources we want to share:

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What (related to Weavers) has inspired you this year? Reflection. I am particularly inspired by our desire to explore the “Archive” as a tool to subvert racial and gendered capitalism. From climate disasters to celebrity culture; white supremacy to global economic, health, and safety crises; the pot has boiled over and the kettle is once again en vogue. This go round, how can we make it easier for future generations who will struggle with climate disasters; celebrity culture; white supremacy; and global economic, health, and safety crises? How will we help them avoid the mistakes, mistook, and missed opportunities? If only there were some way…

I think the (radical) Archive can be a useful tactic for grassroots movement-building organizations and their folks to gather and document the histories of themselves. Whose stories are told and how will they be re-called and re-collected? Who will see, hear, find, hold, care for, and share these stories of the work required to create change? The objects, materials, and documents that make up our movement(s) for change; the ways we care for these items, how we access these materials and what decisions we make regarding transparency and accountability seems to me particularly critical as we look ahead to the next 25-30 years. 
- kai lumumba barrow

What are you excited to bring forward in 2021? This fall I completed Level 1 and Level 2 of Jane Clapp's Movement for Trauma training and it left me feeling prepared and excited for 2021. It helped me grow my capacity as a practitioner and facilitator and draw connections between collective trauma and the individual and collective nervous system. Neuroscience, nervous system support, balance, releasing techniques and strength techniques can provide us with so much more access to our bodies and also to the possibilities of transformation. To integrate body based practices into the ways that we work with undoing white supremacy and the harms of wealth accumulation feels more and more essential to making sustained change. This work isn’t just about doing the right thing, but getting our aliveness back as individuals and as a collective community. To truly repair harm we need to feel how systems are held in our bodies and build skills to make different choices and build more humane systems. I am fortified by this work that feels honest and alive.
- Willa Conway

~ A compilation of resources from all of us ~ 

To read:

To listen:

To learn from & experiment with:

song at midnight
Lucille Clifton

…do not send me out
among strangers
—Sonia Sanchez


brothers,
this big woman
carries much sweetness
in the folds of her flesh.
her hair
is white with wonderful.
she is
rounder than the moon
and far more faithful.
brothers,
who will not hold her,
who will find her beautiful
if you do not?
[untitled: won’t you celebrate with me]
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Thanks for reading. To stay in the loop, sign up for our mailing list and follow us on IG.

With love & gratitude,
The Weavers Team

 

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020 ~ FALL EQUINOX

 
New Orleans, Treme. From Black Geographies series. Mixed media collage by kai lumumba barrow

New Orleans, Treme. From Black Geographies series. Mixed media collage by kai lumumba barrow.

I love all the beautiful stuff we’ve made under constraint but I’m pretty sure I would love all the beautiful stuff we’d make out from under constraint better. But there’s no way to get to that, except through this. We can’t go around this. We gotta fight through this. But, by the same token, anybody who thinks they can come even close to understanding how terrible the terror has been without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of that terror, is wrong. There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it. It’s just not possible.
- Fred Moten (in conversation with Sadiya Hartman) at The Black Outdoors, 2016

Today, September 22, marks the fall equinox. The days are getting shorter, the butterflies are heading south, and Fomalhaut rises, the network of luminous stars that are only visible in the continental U.S. during autumn.

It seems like every moment of communication begins with the need to acknowledge our collective grief. And good, because we all need time to share with each other how we’re surviving and thriving. In the words of Gwnedolyn Brooks, we are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

The fall equinox symbolizes the harvest. Although the kinetic energy of summer will not and can not die down as we face multiple fronts – ongoing anti-Black violence, coronavirus, raging wildfires, hurricane threats, and the election – this day reminds us to take time to capture “the beauty against the grain of terror”. It reminds us that we must financially and psychically invest in that beauty, not only during times of culturally marked upheaval, but rather, daily in our interpersonal, organizational, and institutional lives.  

And with that, The Weavers Project is thrilled to announce that we are in the ongoing daily organizational practice of investing in that beauty. We’ve updated our name and website to more accurately reflect where we’ve been and where we are. The fellowship remains central and we’ve updated our name to signal the breadth of projects Weavers encompasses. Please take a look to learn more about our work.

We (Weavers) don’t believe that we have an intervention against terror that surpasses the interventions of others. We are consciously standing on the shoulders of those before us who fought for liberation and with those working towards liberation presently. It is our intention to be an entity that is constantly reworked and/or replaced by the next generation of activists/artists.

This year, we are deepening our relationships with one another as co-leaders, learners, and creators. We are harvesting what worked inside of Weavers during the first four years, and where we can move to be even more strategic, connected, and generative. Our current landscape requires us to be even more rigorous and deliberately attuned to each other’s needs, taking the time to learn from generations of movement work that can help guide us all now. 

We are excited to come well positioned in early 2021 and share with our community how we will expand our reach as a multi-racial, multi-class community in lifting up Black artists and organizers who are transforming our cultural ecosystems. Although we are iterating and reflecting, our main objectives are the same – fund radical Black-led work, interrogate the systems that help and harm the field, and do so with as much joy and criticality as we can muster. 

Thanks for being a part of our lives. Read on to learn more about what we’re up to, our formation, and updates from our partners. To stay in the loop, sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Instagram.

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WEAVERS UPDATE 

Join us in welcoming Weavers’ new Anchor Team formation - kai lumumba barrow, La Tonya Green, Jennie Goldfarb, and Willa Conway. For years, we've all been involved with Weavers in various capacities – as a fellow, team member, supporter, and founder – we're excited to invest more deeply in this work together.

Since May, we’ve been plotting away over Zoom, building and learning with one another. Too often, social justice organizations make claims about the work they do, but ignore the needs of the people they work with on a daily basis. The non-profit industrial complex reduces beings into metrics, burns us out, and perpetuates exactly what we say we want to destroy and transform. If we want to change that, we need to start practicing with each other, period.

For us, practicing means being honest with one another and having hard conversations about race, power, and money and not sharing work that we’re not willing to do as a team first. It means experimenting with frameworks, modalities, and mediums that center history, political education, healing, and artistic expression. Our experimentation has included a critical reading and discussion of Lose Your Mother, Sadiya Hartman’s text that reckons with her journey to Ghana to better understand the slave trade and her own “strangerness”, pulling tarot cards, sharing music, collaging our work plans, and deep check ins that leave enough time for us to be goofy, be sad, and tell each other what’s really going on in our lives.  

Learn more about our team here.

COMMUNITY NEWS

In June, we shared information on campaigns to resource Black-led organizing. We want to celebrate the incredibly hard work of these achievements and name that the needs continue. We encourage our networks to support these movements not just when it’s in the news, but ongoing. Updates as follows:

  • Four pillar organizations - Alternate Roots, The Highlander Center, Project South and Southerners On New Ground launched the Southern Power Fund to move urgently needed resources to Black Southern movement leaders. The fund has raised $6.2 million and is trying to raise the remaining $3.8 million to meet their goal. Learn more about their call to action here and give.

  • Launched on Juneteenth 2020, Reparations Summer has raised over their $1.5 million goal and is still fundraising for their stretch goal of $2 million. Akua Deirdre Smith (BlackOUT Collective & Black Land and Power) writes - 

    “We are not asking people to answer for their ancestors’ crimes, we are asking them to stop upholding the structures their ancestors created and to stop hoarding the wealth our ancestors created. We are telling white people to stop hoarding, and gambling, and contributing to the continued violence and destruction of life, to heal, and to let us heal and let us build.” 

    Donate here.

Thank you for being a part of the Weavers community. If you’re not already, please sign up for our mailing list to stay updated.

With love,
Weavers (kai, La Tonya, Jennie, & Willa)

ps - We've added people from our communities that we think might be interested in learning more about us. We send out a seasonal newsletter and will use this list to share periodic updates about our programs. Please feel free to unsubscribe if you're not interested. Thanks!

 

JUNE 20, 2020 ~ SUMMER SOLSTICE

 
Festivals and Funerals: for Jayne Cortez, close-up from room-scale installation, Safe(r) House. Mixed media collage by kai lumumba barrow

Festivals and Funerals: for Jayne Cortez, close-up from room-scale installation, Safe(r) House. Mixed media collage by kai lumumba barrow.

Dear friends,

We are living through two pandemics that devastate Black communities. One is new, and the other is older than this country – coronavirus and white supremacy. Yet, despite the anti-Blackness that permeates through racial capitalism, there has always been and continues to be profound leadership, imagination, and resilience existing simultaneously. 

Despite the upheaval of the last few weeks that has made many of us lose track of time and place, we are reminded that today June 20, is the summer solstice. The seasons change each year, whether we are ready or not, and with the change of season brings new work to be done, new ways to engage, and new ways to connect with one another. It is a day of reflection to honor the longest day of the year. A day to pause and honor the heaviness of our hearts and bodies, and to honor the movements for racial justice that are gaining traction across the world. Each seasonal change gives us an opportunity to be with contradiction, especially as the light of summer can be stark against the grief of the moment. 

Being overwhelmed is real, and simultaneously, we know that both pain and promise are present – and it’s inside of this contradiction that we feel closer to our own humanity. Before reading further, can you take a moment to pause for yourself and consider - what truths are being illuminated right now that are bringing me closer to my humanity?

Since our inception, Weavers has supported Black-led liberatory frameworks that work towards societal transformation. We stand firmly in solidarity with protestors, with those demanding abolition, and with those unequivocally declaring Black Lives Matter. We are invested in being led by the brilliance of Black imaginations. We invest in the brilliance of Black artists based in the South, who have always been an essential part of movements for justice, despite being disproportionately excluded from philanthropy. We know this is not just a moment of change, but part of the ongoing work of change that requires us all to be radically humble and bold with our words and actions. 

We’re reaching out to share our current and continuous efforts to meet this moment. We do not see these efforts as temporary fixes, rather, investments for the long haul of transformative change. Weavers moved additional funds to the fellows, we're supporting artists of color in New Orleans, and we are working with donors who are ready to take action. 

Thanks for being a part of our lives. Sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Instagram to stay in the loop.

Weavers Retreat 2018

After COVID-19 hit, Weavers moved an additional $20,000 to each inaugural fellow. Each fellow has now received a total of $170,000 in unrestricted funds. Unlike traditional philanthropy, Weavers fellows are completely free to use these funds as they see fit, with no administrative burdens. We believe that funders should not dictate the ways resources are used in communities, not just as an exception in crisis but as a long term practice. 

This choice is about sustaining our collective vision and staying in connection. The fellows are not simply “grantees” – they are a part of the community with whom we are interdependent. We asked the fellows for guidance about how Weavers could navigate this moment, listened to their leadership, and their wisdom guides how we invest our time and resources.

Learn more here about kai lumumba barrow, Key Jackson, Marlon Peterson, Nabila Lovelace, and Shana m. griffin.

In collaboration with Antenna, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, JuneBug Productions, and many more partners in New Orleans, we are thrilled to be a part of Creative Response. Weavers contributed $100,000 to the Creative Response Relief Fund, which is supporting individual artists with $2,000 grants. 

The fund supports the region’s greatest natural resource — the artists, performers, writers, and culture bearers that make New Orleans one of the most creative places in the world. These creators shape every aspect of the city, and the current COVID-19 crisis has ground to a halt both gig work and the tourist economy that many of them rely on.

We know much more investment in the arts in New Orleans is needed and we are grateful to work with such a robust community in meeting these immediate needs.

COMMUNITY

Support Black Organizing
We want to amplify the following interconnected initiatives happening right now to defend Black life. 

Solidaire Transformation Project
For years, the founder of the Weavers Fellowship Willa Conway, has been a member of  Solidaire Network – a community of donor organizers mobilizing critical resources to the frontlines of social justice movements. 

In collaboration, Willa is supporting the launch of the Solidaire Transformation Project, which aims to deepen relationship building and personal transformation for Solidaire's members, as they are critical building blocks to long term involvement in resourcing movements for justice. This is currently available to Solidaire members only. If you are a funder committed to radical social justice work, we encourage you to learn more about Solidaire’s membership here and read their “Love Letter to the Movement” here.

We're looking forward to continuing the work, together.

All our love,
The Weavers Project 

Photo Credit: Creative Response