Grounded in Grain, Washed in the Water explores ancestral narratives and the enduring relationships between land, water, memory, and Black life in the American South. Bringing together the work of Maya Freelon, Corey Alston, christa david, and Derrick Beasley, this collaborative exhibition between the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture considers how ancestral knowledge is carried across generations. Rooted in resilience, creativity, and connection, this exhibition explores how the past traverses the body, the land, material traditions, and acts of imagination. The artists reveal that the histories embedded in Southern soil and waterways are not static remnants of the past, but living systems of knowledge that continue to shape contemporary Black life while offering pathways toward collective futures.

The partnership between the Halsey Institute and the Avery Research Center underscores the exhibition’s central premise: history is not confined to the archive. While the Avery preserves the records of African American life, the artists in Grounded in Grain, Washed in the Water activate these histories that often exist beyond written texts and boxed objects. Through inherited gestures like basketweaving, ecological connections to land, spiritual traditions with water, and various creative practices, this exhibition asks us to consider what survives when knowledge is transmitted through making and remembering.

Throughout the South, land and water have long been sites of contradiction. They have endured through forced labor and displacement while simultaneously sustaining communities through farming, fishing, craftsmanship, worship, and kinship. Agricultural knowledge and our relationships to rivers, marshes, coastlines, and fields are rooted in practices carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans. Those hands and traditional practices transformed the landscapes of the South. Grain became a commodity through forced labor, and yet a testament to the refined knowledge Africans brought with them. And water remained a powerful symbol in African diasporic traditions, serving as a tool of mourning, spiritual transformation, healing, migration, and renewal. Rather than treating these histories as distant or complete, the artists exemplify how they continue to circulate through contemporary life. 

Water moves through this exhibition as both material and metaphor. It holds memory. It carries stories, erodes boundaries, and leaves traces of what has passed. In Maya Freelon’s work, the bleeding watermarks serve as a poignant point of departure for both the fragility and resilience of people of the African diaspora. Drawn to the subtle imprint that signifies “water was once here,” Freelon transforms tissue paper into woven quilt-like forms that act as spiritual archives of collective memory. The delicacy of tissue paper upholds a remarkable strength when layered and woven, an analogy for Black communities whose collective endurance has persisted despite generations of displacement and rupture.

Freelon’s incorporation of archival family photographs further expands this meditation on memory. Printed onto translucent tissue, these images move beyond documentation to become a setting of remembrance. In Freelon’s work, memory is not singular, but communal, layered, and continually reassembled. Her work is an invitation to embrace our ancestral connection to each other and suggests that images preserve history and connect us across generations.

Questions of generational inheritance continue in the work of Corey Alston, whose sweetgrass basketry embodies centries of Gullah Geechee cultural knowledge. A fifth-generation basket maker, Alston carries forward a tradition rooted in West and Central African weaving practives that evolved within the Lowcountry’s rice plantations before becoming one of the region’s most enduring artistic legacies. His practice reminds us that cultural preservation depends not solely on institutions but also on families, communities, and the intentional transmission of knowledge.

Alston learned basket weaving through his wife’s family, and with the blessing of renowned artist and matriarch Mary Jane Manigault, Alston’s journey reflects the relational nature of inheritance itself. Once used solely as essential tools, these sculptural forms continue to honor traditional methods while expanding the possibilities of sweetgrass basketry into contemporary art. As Alston creates and teaches direct descendants, he is stewarding the tradition and reinforcing the idea that heritage is continually renewed through practice, care, and kinship.

Where Freelon and Alston explore memory through fiber and weaving, christa david turns inward, examining the body as a site where ancestral knowledge is quietly received. Across paintings, collage, and fiber sculpture, a recurring kneeling figure occupies a posture of stillness beneath skies filled with shells, peaches, pecans, cacao, moonlight, water, and seed. These suspended forms appear as gifts, memories, prayers, or possibilities descending toward a figure prepared not to grasp, falling and settling on shoulders and open hands.

david’s figurative collage conveys a sense of stillness as a devotional practice, like prayer or meditation. Her work suggests that inheritance requires action. The haint blue draws upon Southern vernacular traditions of spiritual protection, while red clay and pecans anchor the work firmly within the landscapes of her South Carolina upbringing. These familiar materials become tactile reminders that the ground beneath our feet carries histories long before we learn to name them.

Rather than romanticizing the past, david’s work understands memory as something continually unfolding. Harvest appears not merely as agrarian abundance but as spiritual sustenance. A vital reminder that nourishment extends beyond the body to include belonging, reflection, and connection to place. Her work proposes that ancestral wisdom often arrives quietly, through repeated encounters with land, food, rituals, and materials that are evergreen in Black Southern life. 

While the exhibition remains deeply rooted in history, it also insists that ancestral knowledge must be understood as preparation for the future. Derrick Beasley extends this conversation through speculative world-building, imagining a future he calls the Reciprocene. Set in the year 2125, his work asks what forms of. knowledge might enable humanity to survive an era defined by climate catastrophe. His answer is neither technological acceleration nor extraction, but reciprocity.

Drawing upon the histories of Black maroon communities who sought refuge in wetlands during enslavement, Beasley imagines ecological relationships founded on mutual care between humans and the more-than-human world. Wetlands become places of refuge and innovation, where survival depends on learning from the intelligence of ecosystems themselves. His installations envision future artifacts, rituals, and technologies grounded in cooperation rather than domination, asking what new ways of living might emerge from the wisdom Black communities have cultivated for centuries.

Beasley’s speculative practice reframes climate change not solely as an environmental crisis but as a call to recover ways of knowing too often dismissed or forgotten. His work reminds us that Black relationships to land have always involved adaptation, fugitivity, stewardship, and collective imagination. In this sense, the future becomes inseparable from memory; the knowledge required to navigate ecological uncertainty may already be embedded in the cultural practices preserved generationally across time.

Together, these artists reveal that Black Southern traditions are not of the past to be preserved, but dynamic systems of knowledge that can be accessed and continue to evolve. Through basketry, collage, sculpture, painting, and immersive installation, these artists demonstrate that ancestral recall must be honored, practiced, embodied, cultivated, and imagined. Grain becomes more than sustenance, and water becomes more than geography. Together, in this exhibition, the work becomes an archive that carries histories beyond individual experience into cultural preservation.

At a moment when climate change, land displacement, cultural erasure, and the continued loss of coastal and Gullah Geechee landscapes threaten both ecological and cultural futures, Grounded in Grain, Washed in the Water, offers a different vision. It asks us to recognize Black Southern knowledge not as something belonging only to the past, but as a living resource for imagining a more just future. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on what it means to be grounded in community, in memory, and in place, while remaining open to transformative possibilities through living cultural traditions and practices. You are witnessing the beauty and complexity of a heritage shaped by endurance, transformation, and a profound reverence for the earth and water that sustain us all.