Black Belt Justice Center

Schedule D, Part III, Line 4

“Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund (AAI/BAF) is a multidisciplinary, cooperative ecosystem rooted in Black ecocultural traditions and textile arts to regenerate custodial land ownership, ecological stewardship, and food and fiber economies in the South. Channeling the collective spirit of the Freedom Quilting Bee (a textile craft cooperative founded by Black women agrarian-artisans in Alberta, Alabama in 1966), AAI re-centers ecocultural traditions in collaboration with rural communities throughout the Black Belt region through narrative storytelling, cooperative e-commerce, heritage and textile arts production, traveling exhibitions, and traditional knowledge apprenticeship programs to support agricultural regeneration and establish a sustainable funding stream to seed BAF. BAF, a community-controlled land and financial cooperative, supports the communal aspirations of securing land for landless returning generation farmers and ecopreneurs; provides non-extractive capital and legal support to heir property land stewards who desire to protect their family lands from partition sales, tax sales, foreclosures, and USDA public auctions; and creates a sustainable financial stream to revivify community wealth-building efforts throughout the Black Belt region. The Black Belt Justice Center (BBJC), a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, is the lead organization for this collective endeavor. The Griots of Cotton, Indigo, & Clay Permanent Fiber Art and Agrarian Material Culture Collection and Traveling Exhibition combines the irresistible power of art and advocacy to amplify the decades-long struggle of Black legacy farmers in their efforts to secure full debt cancellation, the return of their farmlands, and just monetary compensation from USDA. The permanent collection and traveling exhibition showcase over 200 artworks commissioned by Black fiber artists in the South Carolina Lowcountry, the Black Belt South, and African Diaspora at large. Featuring an ecosystem of over 75 master fiber artists, Griots of Cotton, Indigo, & Clay explores the innovations of ecocultural techniques in quilting, printmaking, indigo-dyeing, woodcarving and more, centering themes of reparative land justice, and broader expressions of Black cultural reclamation, including spirituality, mythology, folklore, and ecological harmony. Through reconstituting the traditional framework of the nonprofit structure to commission Black textile artists in the Black Belt South and African Diaspora to create artworks for the perpetual expansion of our permanent collection, AAI resists colonial arrangements where Black material culture and its generative wealth are commodified and severed from community. "As much as Black material culture translates into contemporary and fine art in the permanent collections of mainstream galleries and museums, Black material culture must also be stewarded by our community for our collective flight" says McCurty. Many of our commissioned fiber artworks are from Black women fiber artists-sovereign creatives who work out of their own homes or studios and share a commitment to the preservation of ancestral arts. AAI/BAF is a paradigm shift ascending towards the creation of a sustainable endowment for Black fiber artists who preserve cultural memory. As Creola Bennett Pettway, Founding Member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, instilled in us, "Lot of times, you don't need to go to a book for everything. You need some of the stuff God put in you." At this time, AAI has completed professional photoshoots for most of the 100+ artworks in our permanent collection. AAI has studied various online permanent collections for inspiration including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Currently, we are using Artwork Archive, a dynamic online platform to organize our inventory and update information into an online data system. We anticipate having this work completed by the end of 2025.”