- The idea of enslaving someone, taking them from their homeland,
putting them through a process called the Middle Passage,
which is storing them like beans and tobacco and rice
and seeds and livestock in the hulls of a ship
and transporting them to a new location,
trying to rob them of their humanity and their identity.
The rupture to people's lives
has been a compelling point of reference
for African American artists to pick those pieces up
and try to reconnect them or knit them or reconfigure,
revision what that experience was about.
Joyce does it through her beads.
It is a process of humility
to be able to watch a person craft something
from small, beautiful things
to a large, important, magnificent statement.
And craft becomes the ethic upon which our work,
the work that we do as human beings,
makes the difference in our world.
Audre Lorde, the poet, once said, "Did you do the work?"
Did you do the work?
And it's about the work ethic.
It's about sweat equity.
And it's not about the sweat equity
in anticipation of a reward or someone giving you a halo,
but it's also about self-worth.
And so in the African American tradition,
what we are really commenting on
when we embrace the craft of the hand,
is that we're talking about the American tradition.
This is an American story.
This is how America was built,
was constructed, has become what it is today,
and should become so much more because we must go back
and reclaim the things that made this country what it was,
and it was the craft traditions.
And the African American story
must stand alongside of the Native American stories,
the Latino stories, the Asian stories,
all of the stories of the peoples.
And those stories then mirror and reflect back
to all of the other stories
that come from the ancestral traditions
of all of the global cultures.
So for me, craft is the center of all things.