Photo Credit by Jennifer Taylor

homeade field of love
A Well-Being Concert | Carnegie Hall, NYC
2026

esperanza spalding
brontë velez
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Spirit Adams, Jasmine Best, Cici Osias, Karina Sharif, Nastassja Swift

Co-produced by SOURCE Studio

homemade field of love is a well-being concert rooted in Black Feminist thought and language, guided by ancestor Fannie Lou Hamer and ancestor June Jordan. Inspired in part by Jordan’s poem, 1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, written after her visit with Hamer, the project meditates on our collective power to craft spaces of communal care. To build, even amidst violence, a homemade field of love.

During a week-long fellowship in residence, each visual artist created a sacrament in response to the question: How might the sacraments in this space honor our ancestors’ dreams for more Black Livingness? Our creations functioned not simply as objects, but as contemplative practices.

My offering for the evening consisted of three hand-felted wool floor cushions, created through both wet and needle felting processes. I responded to the prompt: How might we sit “lion spine relaxed,” as June witnessed Fannie sit, despite the racial violence she was up against?

These cushions invite the body into an arched, open posture- one that invite the body to soften rather than strive, to consider the shapes we take when we are finally supported. They ask us to allow our bellies, rather than our backs, to become a bridge.