Hello My Name is Lela Pierce and I am a visual artist and a dancer. I grew up in rural Minnesota in a small town in which my family members were pretty much the only black folks in our community. Ancestrally I am connected to the South through my grandparents, Jonnye Mae and Eulis Pierce Sr. along with an unknown number of generations who lived there before them and an unknown number of people who survived the middle passage from various lands in Africa before that. In 1942 my grandparents moved to the Rondo Neighborhood in St. Paul, MN from Jackson, MS after my grandfather got a job as a Pullman Porter. While this story is not particularly unique I wanted to share it because I think migration stories are important in contextualizing our connection to place, culture, identity, as well as an interconnected sense of resiliency and care amidst various forms of disruption. Growing up midwestern, rural, and black was socially challenging for me, and yet I am forever grateful for the opportunities I had to develop strong relationships with the land around me which has offered so much love and nourishment – land that remains in a deeply communal and ancestrally evolving relationship to the Dakota and Anishinaabe people who have lived here for so long.

To me, the presence of the Southern rural landscape reverberates through the artists and the work in this room and resonates deeply with me here in the North on an ancestral level of land relationship. It is felt and seen through the use of materials like wood, metal, fiber, cloth, and pigment as well as the spiritually devoted sentiments of ritual intention, placement of objects, prayer, labor and play. One artist who I am particularly drawn to is the work of Archie Byron. As someone who identifies similarly to him, I resonate with the ways that he grappled with his multiracial black identity, navigating social spaces, and finding a sense of belonging. Through his practice, it is evident that Byron dug deep in exploring both psychic and physical interconnectedness – not only among humans but something beyond – not only through melding simple materials but through a resourceful rebirthing of them in new and innovative ways.

This work reminds me of an evolving piece that I started last spring in a greenhouse on the land where I grew up. It is part of a larger body of work that I have been exploring over the past several years addressing the topic of (so-called) “invasive” plant species. In this work, I find overlapping, multilayered, contentious, and sometimes opposing metaphors between plant and human ecologies. Themes related to migration, the colonization of land, violence, domination, taking up space, resiliency, opportunity, thriving, choking out native growth, and managing populations perceived to be “out of control”. Through language and framing, our culture is inclined to project combative language, and militaristic actions as means of managing populations that are perceived to be “out of control” or difficult to understand this places people and objects in relationships of good and evil. What are the ways that multiple truths can exist at the same time and be held in ways that do not fuel various forms of violence and oppression? what are the ways that a 3rd space can exist outside of opposition and dichotomies through genuinely cultivated relationships?