A reflection and meditation by brontë velez
Header image: Nancy Nowacek, Wall, Levy, Beach (Maneuver), 2018-2019. 20,000 lbs of sand, textiles and mylar. Installation image courtesy of the artist.
one of my dear friends and co-collaborators esperanza spalding invited me to curate the environment for her concert featuring Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs. the concert was called homemade field of love following June Jordan’s 1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and was held this past February as a part of Carnegie Hall’s Well-Being Concerts, a series that affirms music’s gravity to transform spiritual, emotional, mental and physical wellbeing.
the evening of the homemade field of love was replete with music, poetry, dance, and recitations set in the company of Sista Docta Alexis’s black feminist historiography, which amplifies black feminism as a cosmology that conspires the world toward the communion and livability of tenderness. Alexis’s offering followed the wisdom and teachings of June Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. through tracing their relationships and exchanges with one another, and their relationship to the land and site we gathered in, Alexis emphasized the well of merit shimmering in the ground beneath us: that if we are present to the ancestral inheritance of our foremothers, human and more-than-human, always available to us and within each of us, we can attune to our capacity to cool the water, clean the air, and change matter through “the vibrational technology in the power of music.”
Nancy Nowacek, Wall, Levy, Beach (Maneuver), 2018-2019. 20,000 lbs of sand, textiles and mylar. Installation image courtesy of the artist.
following June Jordan’s 1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and Alexis’s ministry of caring for black feminist language by drawing it into our breath, matter, offering, and being, my curation for the environment asked: how might the sacraments in this space honor our ancestors’ dreams for more “black livingness,” as Dr. Katherine McKittrick calls it? how might we follow Alexis’s wisdom to read and live June Jordan’s line — “homemade field of love” — again and again? to believe we can create environments of refuge for ourselves and one another, those homemade fields of love that ancestor June experienced from ancestor Fannie.
through esperanza’s invitation to curate the environment, i followed that impulse to make livingness. as a theologian and artist, i think of sacraments as objects or practices that facilitate a material encounter with the divine. how sacraments feel even more unmediated when the prayer of how they were made shares the same intent for their use, and when and how they are later received continues to honor that sacramental nature. i think of monastic communities making their own icons, candles, and cloths, letting the repetition of carving, dipping, and stitching become contemplative practice.
Nancy Nowacek, Wall, Levy, Beach (Maneuver), 2018-2019. 20,000 lbs of sand, textiles and mylar. Installation image courtesy of the artist. Left: Resilience Training activation transforms Wall into Levy. Right: Resilience Training activation transforms Levy into Beach.
i am interested in sacramentalizing objects because black people know a thing or two about being thingified. we know what it means to be objectified, to be made of use, to be disposable. i am interested in the sanctification of matter as a way i also care for black material culture, as a way we atoned love for ourselves through the companionship of “things”.
Tiya Miles writes in her essay, “How the Survivors of Slavery Used Material Objects to Preserve Intergenerational Wisdom”:
“Having been treated as possessions and deprived of ownership of themselves, their families, crops they nurtured, and objects they made and maintained, African American survivors of slavery recognized the world of things. They lived each day in haunted awareness of the thin boundary line between human and non-human, a thinness daily exposed and abused by slave societies…enslaved Blacks knew that people could be treated like things and things prized over people.”
in an atmosphere where enslaved black folks’ homes, families, objects, and very personhood were always at risk of death, forced migration, or theft, it required a singular kind of spiritual stamina to remain in relationship with what could be taken away from you at a moment’s notice. while this ritualized intimacy with impermanence cultivated a theology of presence, it also traumatized the capacity for secure attachment: will they take my things from me? could my child or partner be taken away tomorrow? how will i be used against my will? this relationship with impermanence and loss shaped a unique material culture. it is ms. shange’s “somebody almost run off with alla my stuff…/i want my own things, how i lived them. / and give me my memories, how i was when i was there…
the stuff shange is talking about is her life force, her swag, her interiority. the stuff exceeds gratuity and is the essence of herself. it is this reclaiming of our stuff i’m after. in companionship with their own thingification, enslaved folks cultivated an ethic of care that offered tenderness to the stuff that mirrored their own dehumanization. what Miles references as a spiritual imaginary of matter, allowed enslaved black communities to consecrate everyday objects with power and presence that moved below the radar of their enslavers. this spiritual imaginary of matter or the apotropaic, the power of objects to protect and dispel haunting, is the clearing i am interested in offering through my life and craft — an imperative i was grateful to draw into how we developed the environment for homemade field of love.
listening to Fannie Lou Hamer sing, i pulled notes that spoke to me from June Jordan’s poem along with invitations from esperanza and the prompts from Sista Docta Alexis for the evening: how might we clean the air and maybe make our hands brooms? how might we cool our internal waters with a libation? how might we sit “lion spine relaxed” like ancestor June witnessed of ancestor Fannie despite the racial violence she was up against? how might the fire at the center of this field of love be “one full Black lily luminescent?” if esperanza wants a way everyone can participate in “co-musicking” with percussive instruments, how might we make instruments from “bullets/turnips/okra” to craft “one solid gospel (sanctified), one gospel (peace).” and what kind of environment would we need as artists to develop this homemade field of love?
Nancy Nowacek, The Bridge, 2012-2016. Mixed media, various dimensions. Superblock stability test. Image courtesy of the artist.
as i set my heart on the prayer for the evening, it became clear i wanted to host a ritual craft residency with invited artists to make the objects in prayer together that would take on the flesh of June Jordan’s poem. as i began thinking about co-conspirators to support me to produce that residency, i first turned to my collaborators Siyona Ravi and Amanda Wiles at SOURCE Studio, who i had been working with for the past year as their inaugural Research and Development fellow.
through my yearlong R&D fellowship with SOURCE, we were in an ongoing inquiry shaped by their art of gathering — a commitment to research what can only be asked and made through the curiosity of fellowship. they are interested in what cannot be made alone, how to trouble the impulse of a single artist to make a thing that longs instead for a circle, a spiral, or some other mutant shape that turns the offering on its head and opens it into something more beautiful than one singular being could imagine: Édouard Glissant’s consent to not be a single being. This for me is at the heart of SOURCE’s methodology and where my commitment to ecologizing my practice takes sweet refuge.
through SOURCE’s support of the development of my personal studio practice, supporting me to design a gathering to continue developing an aspect of the opera, and through their collaborations with Mel Chin, we cultivated a shared thread around frequency, reception, and the resanctification of craft. i was gifted the space to challenge artistic methodologies of output through collective questions on reception, which encouraged me to ask: what is the phenomenology of reception that transforms the spirit of extraction so prevalent in modern artmaking? what practices help us to receive and be present so that the artistic transmissions we offer come from unmediated encounters with our particular expression of divinity?
Nancy Nowacek, (Between) Islands, 2022-2024. A participant leads the room in the custom exercises for her weights, Hoboken, Fall 2024. Sculpture and participatory performance. Image courtesy of the artist.
when homemade field of love came across my lap toward the end of my fellowship, it felt like our questions together could be braided into the constellation of the project. i dared to pivot and invite SOURCE into collaboration to produce the residency with me, dedicating the merit of our year’s inquiry together toward the prayer for homemade field of love. i am so moved we were able to apply the fruit of our shared curiosities to the residency and concert.
when i first presented my vision for the concert to Siyona Ravi and Amanda Wiles at SOURCE, i had a clear design for the objects and was looking for fabricators to help materialize my vision (pero in a prayerful way! ha!). i am so grateful that Siyona challenged me to expand my curatorial methodology, to widen the circle of the dreamer, to move beyond familiar modes of art production that succumb to the ideator-to-fabricator pipeline. Siyona encouraged me to offer prompts that could take on a life of their own in the hands of collaborators, inviting me further into my curiosity about epicletic artmaking — epiclesis as in the set of conditions that courts the holy spirit to enter.
in challenging the prescriptions of top-down transmissions, where collaborators’ influence disappears into translating a single vision, this invitation allowed our process to kaleidoscope and become porous enough for epicletic activity to take place; where authentic collaboration could emerge between myself, the artists and the great mystery who lives at the mercy of entanglement, refuses divine singularity and prefers to be made up of at least three to make things holy and make some shit shake!
once SOURCE said they were in i petitioned that great mystery to call me to the artists who might bring these sacraments into form, and i am so grateful for each enthusiastic yes from Karina Sharif, Nastassja Swift, Jasmine Best, Spirit Adams, and Cici Osias for going above and beyond with this invitation!
upon each artist’s yes, i invited them to discern their sacrament through a ritual practice. each artist was invited to light a candle or some smudge, set out some water as a libation, lay down, and listen to a personalized attached audio file. after listening to the file, the invitation was to get on their first call with me through sharing the story, images, visualizations, and textures that emerged for them during their practice that they felt called to share without needing to have a clear vision for their sacrament yet.
each recording, began with listening to esperanza spalding’s Formwela 1 from her Songwrights Apothecary Lab album. while they listened to the song, i encouraged them to: “sink deeper and deeper into the ground, to imagine the ground holding you up, then trillions of life forms beneath the soil, all the way to the magma, all the way to the other side of the earth, all the way to the stars that want to listen to you from that place Dr. Koko Selassie calls “below where you cry from”.
after they emerged from that listening, i invited them into a practice call xing jai meaning fasting the mind from the Daoist tradition that I received from my teacher and friend Lindsey Wei who is a Chinese American Wudang Kungfu Practitioner who has a practice called Wudang White Horse Academy. the practice is to imagine a flame at the center of your belly, it could be a candle or just a still flame. as you inhale the flame increases and as you exhale the flame dims but doesn’t go out. the invitation is that when thoughts arise you can let the mind fast and continue to come back to the breath and the flame. i invited them to try it with me and then to continue the meditation as i recited June Jordan’s 1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hammer.
emerging from the poem, i gave each of them a different prompt.
to Karina Sharif, i prompted: at the end of June Jordan’s homage, 1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, she calls Mrs. Hamer, “one full Black lily luminescent / in a homemade field of love”. following that witness comment from June Jordan and the motif of your intimacy crafting with paper and light, how might the fire at the center of this field of love work with paper and light to create “one full Black lily luminescent?”
to Jasmine Best, i prompted: following Alexis Pauline Gumbs and esperanza spalding’s overarching prayer for the homemade field of love concert to remind those gathered that there is “power in the vibrational technology of music to live out cleaning the air, cooling the waters, and nourishing the earth”, there is a moment in the evening where those gathered are invited to clean the air through song. following the motif of your piece Power Objects, i keep seeing the dancers’ hands as brooms sweeping the air. if dancers the night of the concert had objects you crafted to clean the air, what comes to your heartmind?
to Spirit Adams, i prompted: Following Alexis Pauline Gumbs and esperanza spalding’s overarching prayer for the homemade field of love concert to remind those gathered that there is “power in the vibrational technology of music to live out cleaning the air, cooling the waters, and nourishing the earth”, there is a moment in the evening where those gathered are invited to reflect on gratitude for “who has cooled our boiling waters”. i imagined a libation to accompany this moment. what’s a libation that comes to you that everyone in the room can drink that follows this prompt. and how might that libation be served in the space?
Cici Osias, came in right at the midnight hour to join the fellowship and i’m so grateful! our flow was a bit different from the other artists, as we met before sending their prompt to them about the project at large and they were thinking about agbadas, raffia, and marley hair already as material oracles they were working with. my prompt to them after our first meeting was: what ways do garments change how we make dance, how we make music, how we make prayer? how does inhabiting a garment become an instrument of the divine and a way we are instrumentalized by the divine?
WorkingWorking Group, a collaboration with Allison Rowe, Just Crushing: Art and Civics Camp, 2022-2025.
after the artists, heard the prompt for their sacrament, i invited them to listen to three spirituals sung by Fannie Lou Hamer: “Oh Lord, You Know Just How I Feel”, “Walk With Me”, and “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning” to guide them into a divination for what wanted to emerge for their offering. they then brought those oracular notes of what came through while listening to ancestor Fannie’s music to their first call with me.
we closed chanting one full black lily luminescent in a homemade field of love. following Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ black feminist breathing chorus practice and the artists were then invited to offer their libation to the earth and close their candle.
i then met with each artist in one-on-one calls to connect and to listen for what had begun to emerge in their time divining their sacrament. it was such a potent way to begin a relationship with each collaborator and to start our connection from a place of shared practice, altar and prayer. after our conversations, each artist returned with designs for their offerings, along with a sense of what they would fabricate ahead of the residency and what they would craft while we were in person together during residency.
following the spirit of jazz, i invited each artist’s design to hold the crafting process as something responsive to the movement of the spirit and their own inclination toward improvisation. i asked: what do you know now about how your sacrament longs to take form? what is the invocation for your offering? the invitation was to hold a prayer for the sacrament more than being committed to the form that prayer took.
during this time, karina also developed a new piece using an ideogram they had been working with as a fugitive black language, crafting June Jordan’s poem into a totem sculpture!
while dreaming into our sacraments, i also prompted questions to guide our material choices: as a prayer for the homemade field of love, how might we care for the home-made-ness of our sacraments? how can we source our materials in ways that feel as home-grown as possible? this might include upcycling or repurposing existing materials, and/or sourcing fibers and materials from black growers and makers where possible. how might we upcycle materials from existing pieces and/or materials we already have?
for example, i invited Jasmine to utilize sorghum grown by my friend, landmate, and black and indian farmer ameia smith grown at botánika oya in collaboration with Flore Costumé at The School for Inclement Weather.
for my offering as an artist, i was called to offer the instruments for each guest for the night. i went to kiskeya with a dear loved one oona valles in prayer, play and instrument making. i told my taíno sibling Vianny on the island that i wanted to make shakers for homemade field of love with a native ancestral seed. she brought us to marcelo tavarez’s workshop in sosúa to study. in presence and prayer, we went to the selva to gather and process hundreds of samo seeds for the rattles i would craft in residency ahead of the concert.
we then gathered for four days ahead of the week of the concert at a residency in upstate New York called arts letters and numbers (ALN) in the blustery winter snow to be in ritual craft together to make our sacraments. that harsh, quiet weather that so many of our ancestors collaborated with to set their eyes toward freedom. we found ourselves collaborating with the fugitivity of winter. we made prayer beads while listening to Fannie’s spirituals.
following Sista Docta Alexis’s black feminist breathing chorus practice, we used the prayer beads to chant a black feminist text from June, Alexis and esperanza 108 times a day: i need to speak about living room (June Jordan), love come flood through here (esperanza spalding), “[my gifts can] hold water” (adapting a line on baskets holding water from Alexis Pauline Gumb’s M Archive: After the End of the World). in each other’s company, we felt the resonance between our voices lifted that our craft has the power to offer refuge. as we made our prayer beads, we shared in council together the kinds of living room we needed in our lives. as we made incense cones together with plants from the land i steward at The School for Inclement Weather we answered the questions: what prayers need to be sent up through smoke for you right now? what needs to burn that will clean the air? how will the burning daylight a river that lets love flood through and overflow in your life?
we anointed each other’s hands in peanut oil. we identified personal mantras to set on the meditation of our hearts as we crafted our sacraments: my senses are your instruments (Pir Ziya Inayat Khan), your soul is quiet on the matter (something a brother at seminary said to me), refuse precision (Cici Osias). so, so much prayer, presence, laughter and joy went into crafting our sacraments! and so much hospitality surrounded us to rest into the prayer, through a friend of mine from college Sara Taylor being down to cook for us during the residency, through last minute runs to find each and every little last minute element we needed from Amanda and Siyona, to Amanda helping me get the mechanics clear on a new rattle design at the last minute, to an Iranian family dinner cooked by artist-in-residence ____ at arts letters and numbers. it was a labor of love.
i invited Spirit Adams to interpret the dish Mrs. Fannie cooked for June through a turnip and okra stew. we ate Spirit’s meal in fellowship together buttermilk cat fish and turnip and okra stew with chicken thighs, black eyed peas, and tomato venerating the hospitality they offered and received from one another. we laid out spirit plates for them on our altar honoring them.
as SOURCE Studio and i worked on the “homemade field of logistics”, as we called it (ha!), we would always open in a prayer: “as we enter a homemade field of love, which is also replete with a homemade field of logistics, may we be able to witness the heart of love that animates each task. may we remember ‘attention is the substance of prayer’ (Simone Weil) and may we honor what is before us with presence and right effort. may these ritual objects amplify the prayer and support the distillation of esperanza and Sista Docta Alexis’s medicine, so the most potent dose of their offering can be received. may those who experience this environment feel a temporary sanctuary and know they can always return to the images, sounds, and poetry in their heart as oracles that accompany them. as these objects transition to live at a black feminist space of sanctuary-making, may they be given more time to rest into the sanctity of what we have made together, so the merits of this space are dedicated to their new home.”
this prayer continuously returned our hearts to living into the prayer of the offering, shimmering like a mindfulness bell even when we drifted. their soft glimmer a reminder that production and coordination cannot live outside the altar of sacred work. nothing can be off the altar. this is a teaching that will be with me for a long time.
i met someone after the concert who told me their name meant manifesting heaven. i asked them if they had a good bed to rest in with the burden of that name at the end of each day. i said, you must be exhausted manifesting heaven! they smiled and reassured me that they relate to manifesting heaven as easeful. i wish i would have heard that BEFORE homemade field of love! ha! and i was grateful to receive the wisdom after that we can manifest heaven with ease! what a relief and what a petition.
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alas, the day of install was also the day of the concert and it was a homemade field of a whole lotta lot!! Karina Sharif and her partner Grant got up at 4 am to get a uHaul to transport her totem sculpture and get her light installed bright and early at Carnegie. they were met by dear folks at Carnegie, Sam and Anna, along with many others, who were up early to assist with install. working with Carnegie was such a blessed corrective experience as a black femme. to work with such a prestigious institution and to be met with softness, care, love, curiosity, and shared prayer was truly a well.
meanwhile, back at arts letters & numbers in upstate New York, the artists and SOURCE team worked to close our time in residency and pack our pieces to drive down to the city. a generous soul from arts letters & numbers, Elliot, was down to drive all our precious sacraments down along with the literal ton of bricks Amanda retrieved for my altar of instruments. Elliot rocked a Sisyphean feat as they tried several times to safely get up the hill in the snow with the bricks towing the rear.
Nancy Nowacek
2024 Corrina Mehiel Fellow Meet Nancy: (she/they) I am an interdisciplinary artist interested in social infrastructures. I make installations, sculptures, drawings, photographs, video, sound, and participatory works to activate social change. These works are often site-specific and employ writing, typography, symbolic languages, images, and/or found objects as material. A background in design informs the problem-seeking nature of my process and the visual quality of my work. My practice is research-based and
