Upcoming Event -Maroon Archives: Cartographies of Freedom - A Black Women Radicals x Kinfolk tech collaboration
“Maroon Archives: Cartographies of Freedom” is a two-part an online collaboration between Black Women Radicals and Kinfolk Tech.
Join Black Women Radicals & Kinfolk Tech for “Maroon Archives: Cartographies of Freedom”, an online teach-in series that features an intergenerational line-up of Black artists, activists, archivists, creatives, and scholars who will speak on the power, present, and futurity of Black archives, Marronage, and the politics of memory.
The first panel was held onTuesday, September 9 at 6:30 PM EST via Zoom, and feature dAleia Brown, Ja’Tovia Gary, Nadege Green, and Siddisse Negero.
”Maroon Archives: Cartographies of Freedom” is part of Black Women Radicals and The School for Black Feminist Politics teach-in series, “Black Feminist Marronage,” and Kinfolk Tech’s Dreaming with the Archives Initiative.
The second panel took place on Tuesday, October 21 at 6:30 PM EST and featured Marilyn Nance, Sedrick Miles, Kleaver Cruz, and Zakiya Collier.
The panel discussions will emphasize the importance of Black Diasporic archival strategies as critical tools for narrative power and (re)construction; will interrogate the politics, possibilities, pitfalls, and limitations of memory work and archival recovery in the Diaspora; and will discuss how archival and political practice(s) offer insights on Black fugitivity, worldbuilding, solidarity, refuge, and even contradictions and queries across digital and physical modalities. hese teach-ins offer crucial insights into how Black feminists have always been engaged in world/space/placemaking. By examining both the preservation of our histories and the active creation of liberatory futures, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the ongoing project of Black feminist world-making.
Watch Panel One
PANEL ONE: Featured Panelists
Aleia Brown is a scholar of Black women’s history and modern and contemporary African American history. Her work also unfolds over the following research areas: material culture, critical museum studies, Black digital humanities, and Black radicalisms. Disrupting the Loop of Recovery: Black Women, Craft & Political Thought -her current manuscript project- narrativizes and analyzes the emergence of Black women-led craft cooperatives in the Alabama Black Belt and the Mississippi Delta to build power and autonomy in the 1960s. The gratuitous violence and blacklisting that the crafters faced for their civil rights organizing, and their informal crafting circles maintained over generations primed them for cooperative development. Using material culture, oral histories, and archival materials, this history takes seriously their capacious vision to build a solidarity economy along with the transformed relations needed to bring this vision to fruition. While only one of the worker-owned cooperatives operated beyond a decade, this ephemeral history’s methodology surfaces different dimensions in Black Power, Black Cooperative, and Critical Craft Studies.
Her public history praxis prioritizes work with/in counterpublics, or the expansive spaces that the mainstream GLAM (Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums) sector has intentionally forgotten, oversimplified, exotified, or dispossessed. Experimenting with alternative models such as cooperatives and self-directed collectives, she works to create the infrastructure for histories to emerge that we have been forced to forget. This work includes: supporting the development of community archives and counter archives so that communities maintain stewardship of their cultural heritage, supporting communities in developing oral history and mapping projects to better understand dispossession and resistance to it, and exhibitions displaying how Black communities have imagined new worlds over time. This work has taken place in Newark, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and West Greenville, North Carolina, and Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Ja’Tovia Gary (she/they) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her multivalent work. Previous films have received awards at Ann Arbor Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Locarno Film Festival, among others. Select exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Hammer Museum, and Centre Pompidou. Gary has received generous support from the Herb Alpert, Trellis Art Fund, Ford Foundation, Cinereach, Sundance Documentary Institute, Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
Nadege Green is a journalist and community historian based in Miami. Her work centers the lived experiences of Black people in South Florida. Green’s practice and approach to storytelling is deeply rooted in history and first-person narratives that explore and connect issues around race, culture, climate justice and displacement. She is the director of Community Research and Storytelling at Community Justice Project, a local non-profit that supports Black and Brown people in Florida organizing for power, racial justice and human rights with innovative lawyering, research, and creative strategy tools. Green is also the founder of Black Miami-Dade, a history and storytelling platform that resists the erasure of Miami’s Black past. Earlier this year, she created the first ever exhibit in Miami to honor and uplift the history of Black LGBTQ+ Miamians called “Give Them Their Flowers.” The Miami Herald called it “the most relevant exhibit in Miami” at the time.
Her reporting and essays have appeared on NPR, WLRN News, and in the Gravy Journal, the Miami Herald, The Atlantic and Harper’s Bazaar. Green is currently a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. She was the 2022 Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture at the Institute of African American Affairs, and she was the inaugural Community Scholar in Residence at the University of Miami’s Center for Global Black Studies in 2021. A child of Haitian immigrants and former farmworkers, she was born and raised in the county of Dade where she is raising her two magical sons.
Siddisse Negero (she/they) is a first gen Ethiopian-American creative researcher, writer, and self taught archivist born and raised in the D.C. metro area, currently based in Philadelphia. She is a graduate of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park with an emphasis in Black Queer Studies. They are co-founder of KyKy Archives, a digital archival resource focused on collecting the histories of Black Lesbian, Queer, Gender Non conforming, and Trans people. Their work is focused on creating a vast web of interconnection between and within the stories of black people globally, and their multiple expressions of gender and sexuality through storytelling, artistic practice, and creative preservation methods.
Watch Panel Two
PANEL TWO: Featured Panelists
Marilyn Nance’s artistry takes on many forms including photographs, prints, fiber arts, installation, and social practice. A graduate of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Nance is a digital pioneer. Her website soulsista.com, an artifact of the ancient web, has remained online without interruption for more than 25 years. She is known for her persistence, meticulous recordkeeping, and preservation, and vigorously encourages others to care for their collections. Nance’s motto is: 1. Keep the archive safe. 2. Organize the archive.
Nance's photographs are active agents in the work of diasporic memory, a concept elucidated by Nydia A. Swaby, a Black feminist, artist-researcher, and curator in her book, “ Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives”. Nance’s work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress, and has been published in The World History of Photography, History of Women in Photography and The Black Photographers Annual. Marilyn Nance is a 2024 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
A lover of words and their meanings across languages, Kleaver Cruz (they/them) was born and raised in Uptown, NYC between The Bronx and Washington Heights with their twin and small family. Kleaver is a writer, educator and artist that is deeply interested in the crevices of archives and history. Those dusty spots that get less light and care but are brilliant all the same. Their work is the marriage between curiosity of what has come before and the creative imagining of what can be; there's an insistence on creating mirrors and clearing up the ones already there. They have presented and conducted work across the African Diaspora. Kleaver is the Facilitator of The Black Joy Project, a digital and real-world affirmation that Black joy is resistance. Kleaver is a 2024 nominee for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Debut Author. They are the author of The Black Joy Project: A Literary and Visual Love Letter to How We Thrive.(Mariner/Harper Collins). Kleaver believes in the power of words to write the stories that did not exist when they needed them the most.
Sed Miles is a Fulbright Fellow and interdisciplinary artist working across photography, painting, mixed media, and participatory performance. His projects have been exhibited in more than ten countries, weaving together academic research, visual storytelling, and community-driven art. As founder of Atlantic Archives, a global movement amplifying historically underrepresented voices, Miles builds bridges between scholarship, cultural memory, and civic engagement. His practice, rooted in the Black Atlantic, explores archives, surrealism, and the lives of working-class communities as sites of beauty, dialogue, and resilience.
Zakiya Collier is an Afro-Carolinian archivist, memory worker, and educator. Her work and research explore archival practices that account for the material conditions of Black life and the role of cooperative thought in the sustainability of cultural memory. She leads The Black Memory Workers, a community of over 300 Black diasporic memory workers committed to practicing care and intention as they prioritize the documentation, long-term preservation, and celebration of Black life and experiences. Zakiya is currently a 2025 Create Change Artist-in-Residence with The Laundromat Project, an Adjunct Professor at Queens College (CUNY) and New York University, and the Program Director for Archiving the Black Web. She is also a co-producer on the forthcoming documentary film, Somebody’s Gone, and co-editor of a special double issue of The Black Scholar on Black Archival Practice.