Seed and Story:
An exploration of one family's history with cotton and their sharecropping past
In 2021 Yolande was selected to be part of the inaugual cohort of the Earthseed Black Family Archive Project sponsored in part by The Auburn Seminary and the Northwestern University's Women's Center. This project led to an investigation of her genealogy and her family's sharecropping history. By tracing the matrilineal line of her family, she became absorbed by their relationship with cotton and how it shaped their lives and their stories. In this exhibition, she shares a portion of her family genogram and manipulates seeds, cotton, artifacts, and oral histories to go back to the past but to also examine her present place within the story of cotton as it
continues.
The full exhibition is on view at City Arts Gallery in Orlando, Florida from June 16-July 16, 2022
