![]() The slightly mounded shape creates surface relief in a flat square. The durable and uniquely colored pale yellow dried corn husks, grasses, and corn leaves will continue to sustain us in our art practices even after this garden returns to the earth.Ĭorn is tall, fluid, and feminine. Over the growing season, the plants will gain height and mature as we collectively enjoy the space, and anticipate the harvest and distribution. It serves as a lively Northeastern Native counterpoint to the controversial figure. In the spirit of this being, this garden is meant to welcome, intrigue, and provoke discussion as it is situated around the Dallin statue. Raven brought corn to this region for Native women to grow and sustain their families. Raven Reshapes Boston is a nod to the Eastern Native story about the traditional knowledge keeper, Raven. Raven Reshapes Boston: A Native Corn Garden at the MFA Hear from Elizabeth James-Perry A gardener and multimedia artist, Holmes connects her practice to a long lineage of Black women who were inspired to make and grow things for beauty and community betterment. Their work was grounded in Black cultural pride and inspired by the promise of rights for all to life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness. Local women such as Elma Lewis, Ruth Batson, Anna Bobbit Gardner, and Bessie Barnes have contributed extensively to the cultural life of the city of Boston, making it a richer city for all. ![]() In thinking about how Black women have survived and created across time and amid discrimination and oppression, Walker used the metaphor of her mother’s garden-both an actual place and a way to express creativity and imagination. Many women have inspired Ekua Holmes’s installation Radiant Community including civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alice Walker. “Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength-in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.”įrom Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1983 Radiant Community is a part of the Roxbury Sunflower Project, now in its fourth year of annually distributing more than 10,000 sunflower seeds to children, families, and organizations to plant individually, and staging sunflower plantings in collaboration with community organizations and businesses. With a spectrum of colors that uplift and bring joy, Radiant Community also partners with nature to attract endangered pollinators such as bees and butterflies. “Beauty is a basic service” that aids in the well-being and healing of the community. To extend the reach and impact of this installation, free sunflower seeds and planting instructions were available for sharing and planting at home. Resilience, radiance, deep roots, transformation, heliotropism, planting seeds, and beauty. The sunflower’s essential attributes mirror those that are reflected in the cultural traditions of Roxbury’s Black community and must now be collectively amplified in our society. Radiant Community is an invitation for the public to be surrounded by beauty, color, and fragrance. Sunflowers, native to North America, can represent, among other things, resilience, self-determination, and the ability for a community to evolve and emerge while staying grounded in its history and traditions. Over the spring and summer season, four varieties of sunflower will grow into a field and totem on the Museum’s lawn. Radiant Community is an experimental installation made of flowers. ![]() Radiant Community Courtesy of Tony Rinaldo. Raven Reshapes Boston: A Native Corn Garden at the MFA.Conservation and Collections Management.
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