Camo Coat v2: The Garden Collection

The diary of Octavia Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, begins on July 20, 2024, an important date that will be marked during this campaign. Her middle name evokes Oya, Yoruba orisa of whirlwinds and storms, as she sets off on a perilous journey through a post-apocalyptic California on fire, traveling northward to freedom, to the creation of a new world she calls Earthseed, and, ultimately, “to take root among the stars.”

The Camo Coat Collection serves as a conceptual and practical engagement with contemporary “dazzle camouflage” and ideas of protection and healing, especially for Black queer femme individuals in the urban landscape. It arose first in the Osanyin Commemorative Portrait Series of NEH Fellows amidst the flora of Emory University campus, as an archive of this historic gathering in Black aesthetics and sacred systems, specifically referencing Osanyin, the orisa of forest wisdom often depicted as half human and half tree. A spiritual camouflage translated to garment in coded pattern, the original Camo Coat Collection featured eight ensembles launched with monograph AFRIFUTURI 02022020 on this palindrome date with a beautiful community at Blanc Gallery in historic Bronzeville. The project responded largely to Chicago, to surveillance and the art of the shapeshifter, to movement and navigation within city and rural spaces, and to sites of respite and inspiration from lakefront skylines to prairie grasses.

CCv2: The Garden Collection introduces a series of site-responsive textiles as the first of this ambitious project’s three main phases, including research and travel, textile design and fabrication, and public launches. The initial goal for the campaign is to cover costs for Phase One of the project, which is the most critical piece of what will become the future CCv2 Collection. It entails travel to specific gardens in the U.S. that have important references to the Parable story and to my ongoing practice centering themes of trace, reclamation, and healing through body, textile, and architecture. At each location, I will create photographs which I will then develop using African fractal design concepts into commemorative textiles for the collection, as well as a series of Black portraitures mapping the points of journey. 

Travel will include California and Massachusetts, with additional destinations here in Chicago. Locations in California include the desert gardens of the Huntington Library in Pasadena where Butler lived and where her archives are housed, and a pilgrimage to the historic Noah Purifoy Sculpture Garden in Joshua Tree (referencing years of teaching his work as part of the Black Arts Movement and Black West and inspired by his sculpture and activation of the body in performance). On the other side of the country, in Massachusetts I will photograph in the gardens of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the historic Olmsted-designed campus at alma mater Smith College (which includes Paradise Pond and campus Underground Railroad connections), and the healing gardens of chosen family centered at Bela Vegetarian Restaurant in Northampton, MA.

If I reach my initial fundraising goal early, ideally before the long-awaited Parable start date of July 20, then I will initiate a stretch goal to support the next phases of the project, which includes travel to other key reference locations in Morocco where I have been invited to a residency which will include photography within the Jnane Tamsna property gardens; to Senegal in a focus on water, West African textile, and embroidery during Dakar Fashion Week; and potentially to support future costs associated with the creation of and public launch activities for the official CCv2 Collection.

CCv2: The Garden Collection will be presented in 2025 along with next steps as supported by the additional phase stretch goals. Exhibitions may include Black women in Afrofuturism at the SFO Museum which, as an airport and center of international transit, will bring full circle the California connection with the Parable story’s travel from south to north. The travel to Boston, MA, will also include a visit to the MFA Boston which has acquired the Hip Hop Flounce Camo Coat from the original collection (modeled by Tonika Johnson of Folded Map). Ultimately, I plan to organize the CCv2 Collection ensembles launch featuring The Garden textiles.

 *In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens is the title of Alice Walker’s 1983 collected writings and originally an essay published in 1972, the year of my birth.