Welcome to the second issue of the Land, Food, and Freedom Journal, a work born from the knowing that lineage and land are not just inheritances, but living, breathing relationships. This issue emerges from the rhythms of the growing season—an offering rooted in Spirit, memory work, root work, and the newness that arrives when we make sacred space for reclamation and possibility.

In the spirit of this burgeoning, we ask: What regenerates us? What stories do we plant in the soil and in our souls? What does healing and resistance sound/feel/look/taste like in our hands, in our kin, in our futures?

The artists featured in this issue were chosen not simply because of the power in their craft, but because their practices are in divine alignment with the cultural, spiritual, and political stakes of this moment. Their work embodies the truth that art is not just decoration. It is a declaration, invocation, and restoration.

Christopher Barker invites us into an ethereal dimension of Black life with his Bionic Still Life sculpture series. Merging surrealism, fantasy, and editorial precision, his photography captures the interior and expansive worlds of Black being. His work feels like a portal, an invitation to dwell in the liminal space between memory and imagination.

Geoffrey “Geo” Edwards brings us ancestral cartographies through his mixed-media and ceramic work. He works with shapes like the octagram, often found in his grandmother’s quilt patterns, and materials ranging from burlap to brass. Geo’s pieces are a blend of altar and archive. His contributions honor tenant farming stories, land practices of the Mississippi Delta, and the healing traditions of his Maroon and Southern lineage. 

Zakia Elliott offers a sacred practice of self-portraiture as a ritual of healing and political devotion. Her three-part series The Terrain I’ve Traveled transforms the tarot into a visual language of movement work, resilience, and spiritual reflection. Rendered in colored pencil and acrylic on black paper, her work reveals how deeply art, spirituality, and liberation are braided together.

Iyana Esters gifts us with Our Hands Play at Instant Park, a tactile, dyed photo-tapestry that sings the rhythms of Black girlhood. Through hand-dyed textiles, herbal pigments, and documentary photography, she revives childhood hand games as cultural inheritance and ecological reverence. Her artistry stitches joy and memory into textile, bringing to life placemaking and play.

Nana Kumi’s immersive multimedia piece SOIL initiates a six-part ancestral journey through land, memory, and Black Southern cosmology. Her work is a channel that honors West African spiritual lineages and Mississippi roots, offering nature reverence as a technology for liberation and remembrance.

Naima Penniman’s collage series I See Us Flourishing! truly illustrates the core essence of this issue. Each piece offers a visual gateway into the various layers that abundant futures sprout from. Drawing from their personal library of images and experiences on sacred land, Naima’s work imbues the joy, reciprocity, reverence, and belonging cultivated by the Soul Fire Farm and WILDSEED community. Their work is both a visual prophecy and a reminder that liberation is not only possible, it’s already blooming around and within us.

Clay Williams documents what is often unseen but deeply felt: the everyday sacredness of Black food culture. Through his camera lens, we witness joy, community, and reclamation across kitchens, gatherings, and collective celebrations. His images are testimony and proof that Black nourishment is communal, radical, and deeply rooted.

Each artist in this issue helps us listen more closely to the whispers of our ancestors, to the stories seeded in soil, to the resistance embedded in our cultural practices. Their work calls us home—again and again—to the land, to each other, and to the future we’re co-creating.

May this collection nourish you as it has nourished us.

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In joy and solidarity,

Tabia Lisenbee-Parker