Indigo Prayers: a Creation Story
Saturday, March 19, 2022 - Sunday, September 18, 2022
What if seven Black women
spinning counterclockwise,
each upholding a single attribute
of God, conjured creation?
What if they were charged
with birthing humankind,
and passing each attribute on
to every generation to come?
Cyclically moving from the past to present,
powered by an infinite Love,
what if they encoded these attributes as
secret messages within our cultural identity,
like symbols hidden within a Freedom Quilt,
pointing the way home to freedom?
What if it is our single responsibility
to only remember:
remember where we came from,
re-member ourselves;
to remember our own divinity instilled within
by the prayers of our mothers, grandmothers
and great-grandmothers
lifting us to Life to create a new world?
What would this radical recentering
of Blackness mean?
Charmaine Minniefield considers these questions in her series, Indigo Prayers.
Created during a year-long self-initiated, pandemic-forced artist residency in the Gambia, the work weaves together ancestral memories of resistance in response to both contemporary and historic acts of erasure. This sojourn, though unexpected, was inspired by recent world events and her ongoing exploration of the Ring Shout, an early African American practice of resistance whose West African origins predate slavery. Having grown up in the Pentecostal faith, Minniefield had experienced this full-bodied rhythmic prayer taught to her by her great-grandmother, as performed by her ancestors during enslavement.
Indigo Prayers summon the history of these traditions as ancestral totems and as evidence of a resilience that preserved aspects of African culture over the Middle Passage.
Minniefield uses the indigenous pigment of indigo which came to the West along with trade skills retained by her enslaved ancestors. Similarly she incorporates mahogany bark and crushed oyster shells, a pigment used in the architecture along the coastal regions of both the American South and West Africa. As Minniefield inserts her own body as life-sized self-portraits into the series, each work is a prayer. Like the Ring Shout before, its ritual affirms Black life and asserts Black identity as resistance against erasure past and present, to conjure a new world and to imagine a new freedom today.
Indigo Prayers is being presented in conjunction with Minniefield’s Praise House Project, which recreates the small, single room structures in which enslaved people gathered to worship and perform what was known as the Ring Shout. The first in the series of Praise Houses was constructed at Oakland Cemetery to celebrate Juneteenth 2021 and to honor the over 800 unmarked graves found in the cemetery’s African American Burial Grounds. While Minniefield’s Praise House at Oakland has now closed, she plans future locations on Emory University’s main campus, at South-View Cemetery, where many prominent African American Atlantans were laid to rest, and in downtown Decatur, each honoring the African American history of its community.
This exhibition has been made possible by the Massey Charitable Trust and the Wish Foundation.
spinning counterclockwise,
each upholding a single attribute
of God, conjured creation?
What if they were charged
with birthing humankind,
and passing each attribute on
to every generation to come?
Cyclically moving from the past to present,
powered by an infinite Love,
what if they encoded these attributes as
secret messages within our cultural identity,
like symbols hidden within a Freedom Quilt,
pointing the way home to freedom?
What if it is our single responsibility
to only remember:
remember where we came from,
re-member ourselves;
to remember our own divinity instilled within
by the prayers of our mothers, grandmothers
and great-grandmothers
lifting us to Life to create a new world?
What would this radical recentering
of Blackness mean?
Charmaine Minniefield considers these questions in her series, Indigo Prayers.
Created during a year-long self-initiated, pandemic-forced artist residency in the Gambia, the work weaves together ancestral memories of resistance in response to both contemporary and historic acts of erasure. This sojourn, though unexpected, was inspired by recent world events and her ongoing exploration of the Ring Shout, an early African American practice of resistance whose West African origins predate slavery. Having grown up in the Pentecostal faith, Minniefield had experienced this full-bodied rhythmic prayer taught to her by her great-grandmother, as performed by her ancestors during enslavement.
Indigo Prayers summon the history of these traditions as ancestral totems and as evidence of a resilience that preserved aspects of African culture over the Middle Passage.
Minniefield uses the indigenous pigment of indigo which came to the West along with trade skills retained by her enslaved ancestors. Similarly she incorporates mahogany bark and crushed oyster shells, a pigment used in the architecture along the coastal regions of both the American South and West Africa. As Minniefield inserts her own body as life-sized self-portraits into the series, each work is a prayer. Like the Ring Shout before, its ritual affirms Black life and asserts Black identity as resistance against erasure past and present, to conjure a new world and to imagine a new freedom today.
Indigo Prayers is being presented in conjunction with Minniefield’s Praise House Project, which recreates the small, single room structures in which enslaved people gathered to worship and perform what was known as the Ring Shout. The first in the series of Praise Houses was constructed at Oakland Cemetery to celebrate Juneteenth 2021 and to honor the over 800 unmarked graves found in the cemetery’s African American Burial Grounds. While Minniefield’s Praise House at Oakland has now closed, she plans future locations on Emory University’s main campus, at South-View Cemetery, where many prominent African American Atlantans were laid to rest, and in downtown Decatur, each honoring the African American history of its community.
This exhibition has been made possible by the Massey Charitable Trust and the Wish Foundation.
