Indigo Prayers: A Creation Story

From the venue:

Charmaine Minniefield was inspired by her time in the Gambia, West Africa searching for her grandmother's ancestral lines by following the encoded messages hidden within her cultural identity. The resulting body of work builds on an ongoing exploration of the Ring Shout, a traditional African-American worship practice whose West African origins predate slavery. Minniefield’s work explores indigenous pigments like indigo, crushed oyster shells, and mahogany bark as evidence of cultural preservation through time and across the Middle Passage. Her work recalls the history of these elements as ancestral totems reaffirming identity, like the Adinkra symbols in freedom quilts, hidden in plain sight to show the way home. Remembering the ancestors and inserting images of her own body into the series asserts Black identity and resilience as resistance today