Groundwork explores research-driven creative practice through fieldwork, material experimentation, and critical inquiry viewing research and artmaking, and our relationship to land—earth and nature and all life, through lenses and intersections of personal, political, sacred, and creative experience. Crossroads are also intersections, and home of Ifa-Orisha deity, Eshu, the Trickster. With case studies research, summer 2026 Groundwork centers on perspectives and activism of Black and Indigenous leaders and spiritual Elders, authors, and artists in respect to decolonization, reparation and land back projects—especially ones engaged in garden, farm, and mutual aid work. We will learn about Soulfire Farm in upstate New York, and Jambalaya Center, near the Russian River in California. Both case studies are projects whose leadership and members are also practitioners of Ifa-Orisha spirituality. We have been invited to visit the center during the last week of this class. Research-driven creative practices explore alternative ways of gathering information, and affirming it as truth. For example, gathering information from one's dreams; reflecting on what's received; translating the new knowledge into a creative art form. It could also be reaching out, drawing out, really listening to formerly silent relatives—a method for recovering ancestral memory (before it's lost forever), a basis for sustaining historical knowledge and truth, and a site for developing storytelling through art and image.

Visit Workday to view this information.