IN THIS ISSUE OF THE LAND, FOOD, AND FREEDOM JOURNAL, WE EXPLORE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN RE-MEMBERING IS PUT IN DIRECT CONVERSATION WITH IMAGINATION. By itself, there’s a risk that memory can become a monument—something we visit and admire from time to time, then leave it just as we found it. Imagination, too, can stagnate and/or dissolve when it drifts untethered from what has actually been lived, survived, and embodied. It runs the risk of becoming fantasy rather than possibility. But memory and imagination together connect what was true with what could still be true. 

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Our editor Ashia Aubourg reminds us that “theory without action loses its power, and action without theory loses its direction,” this curation offers a visual answer to that same concept. Each of these artists work at the intersection of study and practice: research in one hand, creation in the other. Collectively, this work insists that memory is not just memorial, it’s also material.

Our cover piece marks a milestone for this publication: G. BODILE BALAMS is the first National Black Food and Justice Alliance member to have their work featured on our cover and we are honored to have their vision leading this issue. Just Fishing and Drifting, pen and India ink drawings set on rag paper, come from his series Nu Art for Nu Minds that he describes as a journey back home. Drawn from observations along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, the composition was rendered by hand, with design motifs along the borders—waves, wood grain, foliage—that speak to the systems and patterns we are all connected to. Balams’ work resists the idea that art exists primarily for individual expression, insisting instead on creative practice as a living form of stewardship. 

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In My Name is Harriet, Fatima Seck works with black walnuts that have fallen upon Harriet Jacobs’ grave to produce pigments that then become paint. Her piece transforms the material and reminds us that the land beneath our feet holds testimony of what is possible. Her piece transforms the material and reminds us that the land beneath our feet holds testimony of what is possible.

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GABRIELLE JOSEPH turns her lens toward Black hoodoo women practitioners in Sacred Waters, capturing the fullness of their lives as it embodies ritual and ceremony. Her images depict the vastness of kinship with land and spirit and offer a portrait of spirituality not as separate from daily life, but as woven entirely through it. 

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MARYELISE translates the stories of Genesis through Revelation into vibrant, prayerful imagery in The Good Book Series. Working under a name shared with her mother, she treats the canvas as a sacred space for storytelling and connection, inviting viewers into the wonder and mystery that first drew her to faith. Her series is a reminder that spiritual inheritance, like land, is something we are given to tend and preserve.

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Finally, JESSO ALVES’ series The Enchanted Brazil ushers us into the surreal, spiritually charged landscapes of his native Maranhão, Brazil, where African, Indigenous, and popular traditions remain present in daily life. Through digital collage and experimental image-making, Alves imagines spaces where Black bodies are celebrated, expanded, and free. 

An abundance of gratitude to each artist for showing us that memory is not static, it is cultivated, carried, and made new in every generation that chooses to steward it. This curation affirms that what we remember, we protect. And what we protect, we keep alive.

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In joy and solidarity,

TABIA LISENBEE-PARKER

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