Michigan African American Craft Legacy Project

Authors: Dr. Liv Furman & Dr. Marsha MacDowell
Michigan State University

Project Overview
The Michigan African American Craft Legacy Project (MAACLP), a new project developed through the MSU Museum (MSUM) in partnership with Smithsonian Affiliates, serves the needs of craft artists while simultaneously building a network of community connections. The project grew out of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s African American Craft Initiative, which aims to expand visibility of African American artists and makers through collaborative research and documentation, public programming and community building among makers and organizations across the broader U.S. and international craft communities. With a grant from CERF+ (Craft Emergency Relief Fund), the Smithsonian Affiliates coordinated a special funding initiative to work on issues of cultural sustainability for craft artists. Four organizations, including the MSUM, received support to conduct the work. In the Michigan project, the emphasis has been to engage and further develop Black artists and community members' knowledge and skills in documentation, archiving, and community engagement using digital media. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the MAACL Project is to expand the visibility of underrepresented local elder African American artisans. Similar to the Cultural Sustainability and Legacy Planning for Craft Artists, this project was conceived to assist makers in safeguarding their stories while building relationships among artists, between elders and youth, and with local cultural institutions.
 
The three individuals leading the Michigan project and their affiliations are listed below. All are committed to community-engagement activities and have brought their own networks and field expertise into the planning and facilitation of the project.
Project Description
In the fall of 2023, the MAACLP took root and became a reality as project directors began the work of gathering to identify shared commitments, goals, and resources. This project revived long-standing partnerships and established new professional relationships within campus and community networks. Partners in this work included the statewide Michigan Traditional Arts Program, Matrix and its Quilt Index (www.quiltindex.org) – a digital humanities research and education project – and MSU’s University Outreach and Engagement. Notably, the MAACLP also strengthened connections the MSU Museum had with on-campus entities such as the MSU Department of African and African American Studies (AAAS) and the College of Education, as well as off-campus groups located in the metro Detroit area such as the Motor City Doll Club and the Great Lakes African American Quilters Network.
 
In October 2023, MAACLP roots were nurtured as project leaders both attended and helped facilitate a series of virtual Cultural Sustainability & Legacy Planning Workshop trainings led and attended by museum and research professionals. Concurrent with this training, Michigan partners continued to organize and lay the groundwork for the MAACLP. This planning included hosting a site visit with Smithsonian staff member and leader, Diana N’Diaye, Ph.D. During Dr. N’Diaye’s site visit in Michigan, she and project leaders met with prominent elder craft artists in Detroit, visited exhibitions regarding Black craft traditions and Detroit’s geographical history, and hosted visits to the MSU Museum cultural collections center. During their visit to the cultural collections center, the team viewed items made by artists who participated in the Michigan Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program and the museum’s collection of African and African American quilts (one of the largest and most diverse in the world).
 
The roots of the MAACLP project continued to grow in the Spring of 2024, sprouting green leaves of growth through public-facing activity resulting from the fall groundwork laid by project leaders. Namely, Liv Furman and Natasha Miller, designed and co-facilitated a series of 5 workshops for Black craft artists and developing scholars regarding methodologies of documentation, archiving, and community engagement.
 
The first three workshops provided training and conversation space for four young creative professionals interested in developing their storytelling and archiving skills. The creative professionals for this project included two undergraduate student AAAS majors, Amber McAddley and Ayodele Uhuru, as well as two doctoral graduate students in the College of Education, Samuela Mouzaoir and Dasmen Richards, whose research and teaching foci which honor the lives of Black women and girls. During these workshops, the creative professionals received skill-development training on various topics, including culturally-sustaining methodologies for documenting oral histories and craft legacies, digital archiving, and utilizing digital media for storytelling and archival documentation. Importantly, the participation of AAAS student majors in this project expands and is reflective of the possibilities available to them and their fellow AAAS students within the fields of fine art and craft, museum studies, museum preservation and archival scholarship. Relationships built between campus and community partners during this project are intended to be strengthened in the future, making way for more AAAS students to receive valuable training and opportunities within these fields. The participation of doctoral graduate students in education similarly reflects the professional arts-based and archival possibilities available to graduate students and early-career researchers, and will have lasting implications on their interdisciplinary conceptualizations of arts-based education and research praxis.
 
Following the first three workshops with MSU graduate and undergraduate students, project leaders and students then facilitated two public-facing workshops at the MSU Detroit Center. At this stage, the MAACLP began to blossom, burgeoning with possibilities and communal conversations. The workshops, advertised within many community networks and open to any interested individuals, were designed to increase participants' knowledge and skill in both physical and digital methodologies of the documentation, archiving, and community engagement of Black artists and their crafts. The events were sequential and participants were encouraged to attend both sessions, however some participants chose to only attend one session based on their availability. Although Black elder craft artists were the target audience, the workshops attracted individuals of varying ages, backgrounds, and interests.
 
During the workshops, participants were encouraged to share stories and their own valuable knowledge and experiences with storing, preserving, and sharing stories about Black culture and craft artifacts. The discussion centered Black ways of being, knowing, and memory keeping, and intentionally disrupted marginalizing white western norms of archival praxis. Participants shared stories of archival rituals such as the keeping and organizing of obituaries, the recovery and preservation of letters from loved ones, the  collection of photographs of family members and their craft/art, and the ways their family histories have inspired their current artmaking and craft projects. One participant, Linda Ali, a long-time member of the GLAAQN, recounted an experience with a white museum professional. During the experience, the museum professional quizzically stated that they didn’t know Black [women] quilted, despite their long-standing traditions of doing so. She then shared a lesson of reflection with the workshop participants and leaders that, “If we don’t tell our stories, someone else will tell them incorrectly or not tell them at all.” She went on to share her trailblazing experience with the GLAAQN in writing and publishing their own stories, photographs of quilts, and quilt history in their seminal text, Everlasting Threads: Honoring Heritage & History, which includes a foreword by African American quilt scholar Kyra Hicks.
 
Many other stories and valuable pieces of knowledge were shared during the public-facing workshop events. Moreover, the spaces offered a valuable opportunity for MSU students and staff to be in community with Black artists and elders in the metro Detroit area, a space with a lasting and continuous legacy of Black art and craft traditions. At the culmination of the workshop events, workshop materials will be digitally shared on the Quilt Index (www.quiltindex.org) and with Black craft groups in the Michigan area. The project leaders will carry forward knowledge and lessons gained from this project into their campus- and community-centered commitments, research, and publications. The MSU graduate and undergraduate students who participated in trainings and workshops will share about their experiences within opportunities made available by the Department of AAAS and College of Education.
 
Overall, this collaborative project, enabled by Smithsonian Affiliates, has been important to providing direct support to artists and communities previously underserved by the Michigan State University Museum. The MAACLP has also been important to strengthening the museum’s partnership with Smithsonian units and programs as well as with a growing constellation of on- and off-campus individuals and organizations. Seeds of knowledge and relationships cultivated during this project will continue to grow locally, positively contributing to the documented legacies of Black craft artists and their communities.
 
Additional Photos: Community and Participant Feedback
The following quotes were submitted as feedback by participants who attended the workshops:
The Michigan African-American Craft Legacy Workshop was one of the most informative and well structured workshops I've attended in quite a while. The information was put together in a concise and easy to understand format. The facilitator Dr. Furman did an outstanding job of presenting the workshop, I loved that she kept reaffirming how important our work is and how we must document preserve and protect our work. How important it is to have the living legacy growing and getting stronger everyday. This was particularly important to me because, although I have a lot of works from my family today I've also lost a wonderful amount of family treasures made by multiple family members and ancestors. Thank you for sharing this workshop.

I was deeply impacted by the workshops, as an individual and as an artist that has worked and created multiple collective groups. We know that our work is important and that we need to document and archive our works. We just never had a resource or formal structure to guide our process. We've taken pictures which is the very basic thing to do. These workshops have given us a wonderful base as to what we need to do and how we need to do it. The information is so valuable I want to be able to share this information with all the Artists I know and even families of deceased artists that have works and don't know what to do with them.

The following feedback was submitted by Dasmen Richards, a doctoral graduate student in the College of Education, in response to their participation in the 3 trainings at MSU as well as observations documented during one of the workshops in Detroit, MI:
Training Sessions:  I learned a great deal about documenting, archiving, and preservation during the three workshops. I felt like these trainings were so timely as I have been thinking more about how to carry/build a legacy through my family histories, and so the information that we all learned was extremely vital and insightful. As we discussed the importance of archiving, I was provided with more language and practices to see the beauty in the archival practices of our elders and artists. But my mind was pushed further to expand on the ways that we can archive art and other family heirlooms with a system of organization. I can wholeheartedly say that I am so grateful and honored to have been a part of such an enriching and generative learning experience that I can now carry with me forever.
 
Workshop(s): One word to capture my experience sitting amongst the elders is: WOW! ✨  I was truly in awe hearing how passionate the Black women were about their craft and the different archival methods they engage in. This workshop also continues to affirm me that knowledge happens any and everywhere, not just in the academy. Learning from and with the elders was transformative and fulfilling, and a remembrance of the elders in my family and how they have created legacies through archival documentation rituals before I even recognized what they were doing. Truly a lovely experience!