Día de los Muertos Altars

by | Sep 14, 2022

I always carry my mother’s words with me, and I share them with everyone I teach about Día de Los Muertos. She said, “We all suffer three deaths. The first death is the day that we give up our last breath, the day that we die. Our second death is the day we are...

“I’m a fellow traveler on a religious journey”

by | Sep 14, 2022

This article engages with secularism in an attempt to create openings for teachers, students, folklorists, and researchers to think differently about how reverberations of death, loss, and remembrance are registered, and thus navigated, by people holding scriptural...

Derecho Days

by | Aug 24, 2022

Derecho Days is an experimental, personal comic art piece that navigates the aftermath of enduring the August 2020 derecho: an inland hurricane that, in 14 hours, led to $11 billion in damage, caused 25 tornadoes from Nebraska to Ohio, and destroyed 70 percent of the...

The Smithsonian’s Will to Adorn Youth Access Project

by | Sep 8, 2021

Zora Neale Hurston, the renowned anthropologist and folklorist, observed in 1934 that “the will to adorn” is one of the primary characteristics of African American expression. Like orature, quilting, and musical forms such as the blues, African American dress and body...

Pieces of Now

by | Aug 30, 2021

Creative arts born of protest, in the context of a museum exhibition, can instruct and inspire students by expanding notions of what art is and what it can do. The multimedia creations within the Greensboro History Museum’s exhibition Pieces of Now: Murals, Masks,...