Gallery > Steeping Memory

Steeping Memory marks the culmination of my long-term social investigation into community care and wellness, which began in Jamaica, Queens, in the spring of 2016. Through my Creative Wellness Gathering Station (CWGS), I draw inspiration from my Caribbean heritage as the daughter of Grenadian parents who introduced me to the tradition of sharing herbs and spices from their ancestral homeland as a gesture of well-being. The CWGS amplifies this tradition with an interactive mobile tea cart stocked with curated herbs. It has traveled to neighborhoods across Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Westchester County, and even Portland, Maine.

At the cart, I hosted tea-making activities to encourage conversation with passersby and offered them the opportunity to create custom mixes from the herbal selections. Through these gatherings, I sought answers to the question at the heart of my practice: “Can a simple, creative act of community care offer meaningful, culturally grounded solutions while drawing on ancestral knowledge as a source for collective healing, growth, and strength?”

In their own gesture of thanks, visitors left a portion of the blends they created at the cart, along with handwritten notes that included their names and the places they call home. From these individual organza pouches filled with guest-made tea blends, I have assembled and hand-sewn multi-sensory tapestries. In the accompanying catalogue and guide published for the exhibition, Queens-based novelist Bushra Rehman calls the tapestries “cosmograms of healing.”

The exhibition will return these offerings to the very community that made these hand-sewn tapestries possible. It also features photographs from past CWGS activations, along with free public wellness programs and a specially published exhibition catalogue available for download on the Links page.