Afternoon: Hybrid
3-4:30 p.m.
Interlude
Doreen Abubakar, Community Park Enhancement Network (CPEN), New Haven
Morning: In person
10-11 a.m. Morning celebration at UrbanScapes Native Plant Nursery, 133 Hazel Street, Newhallville, New Haven
Mid-morning: Hybrid
11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.
1-2 p.m. LUNCH
Afternoon: In person
2:15-3:45 p.m.
This paper takes okra as an unruly and sacred lifeform through which to think Black feminist ritual technologies of refusal across the Atlantic world. Animated by the homograph: okra/ɔkra, I examine the okra plant’s historical and ongoing use as an abortifacient alongside the Akan metaphysical conception of Ōkra, the living soul. Moving between botanical, medicinal, and spiritual registers, I argue that okra offers an eco-ontological grammar of relation and a Black sacred technology that unsettles plantation logics of mastery, reproduction, and extractive life-making.
In Akan ontology, ɔkra names the bipartite living soul– operating in dynamic interaction with sunsum (the animating force of desire, thought, and feeling) and honam (the body). Against Western metaphysical traditions that subordinate sensation to reason and sever soul from flesh, Akan philosophy insists on an interactionist ontology in which soul and body mutually affect one another.
Okra’s botanical life likewise exceeds secular-rational enclosure. As an allopolyploid, it is a being born of mixture, with genealogies that resist linear descent. Its perfect flower—containing both pollinating and ovulating parts—offers an ungendered reproductive logic that resonates with Akan dual interactionism rather than sexual dimorphism. Its mucilage—viscous, slippery, neither solid nor liquid—materializes a mode of transcorporeality, thickening relations across bodies, plants, and geographies.
I place this metaphysical framework in dialogue with colonial botanical and medical archives that document okra’s circulation across the Atlantic world and its use by enslaved African and Indigenous women as both nourishment and abortifacient. I read these practices as ritual technologies of refusal: clandestine forms of sacred practice through which Black women “stole away” from the racially sexuated violence of slavery.
Endiya Griffin is a farmer, artist, and memory worker as well as a doctoral student in Black Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. By tending farms and gardens across Chicago, Endiya has come to understand Black ecologies as fluid, relational practices of self-determination—where the future is not a distant horizon but a tense continuously struggled for and embodied through everyday ritual. In these spaces, the boundaries between mind and body, human and other-than-human, blur through collective acts of care. Worldbuilding emerges as an embodied healing practice that composts dispossession into enlivened forms of relation and possibility. Endiya’s emergent research explores how Black feminist worldbuilding practices cultivate life-affirming ways of being beyond the violences of colonial humanism.
This paper examines the artistic practice of Precious Okoyomon (born 1993, Nigerian
American), whose recent art installations are composed of living kudzu plants. In these works, butterflies hover amid lush overgrowths of kudzu and sugarcane, while semi-humanoid shapes made from raw wool—termed “deities, or angels” by the artist—seem to rise organically from the soil like the plants that surround them. Okoyomon’s overflowing gardens of kudzu celebrate the unexpected resistance this plant has achieved to its own instrumentalization. Propagated in the early 20 th century by the U.S. government in an attempt to fix soil erosion caused by plantation agriculture, kudzu has since escaped human control and is now considered “invasive.” Kudzu has displayed an unexpected
ethical autonomy, defying human expectations of how the natural world should work. The result, Okoyomon has said, is that kudzu is seen as “monstrous”– not angelic but demonic, an aberrant pathology in the ecosystems of the American South.
How can we understand the complex past and vilified contemporary status of kudzu? I argue that Okoyomon’s artworks suggest a posthumanist vision of history where the independent narratives of organisms like kudzu coexist alongside human histories. History has typically been considered the exclusive domain of human beings, whereas nature is thought to change but remain bereft of true historicity. Okoyomon’s kudzu art challenges the hubris of this humanist position through a celebration of the spiritual quality of these plants, which arises from their resilient ability to grow and flourish.
Mitchell Herrmann is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, where he researches modern and contemporary art with particular interests in ecology and the environment, media and technology, and critical theory. Previously, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the 2025 Mellon Fellow for Civic Engagement. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in October, TDR: The Drama Review, Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, and MoMA Magazine.
The accession of Leo XIV marked the election of the first American and the first Augustinian pope. This talk casts fresh light onto the Augustinian Friars’ special connection to nature and sacred plants through investigating their artistic patronage in Central and South America from the 1530s onwards. A mural depicting a combat scene in the church of San Miguel Arcángel in Ixmiquilpan will serve as the departure point. Previous scholars have already associated this image with armed confrontations of the Chichimeca warriors and the imaginary of the Spanish colonial frontier. The meaning of the abundant vegetal imagery that dominates this striking scene, however, is yet to be explored. By shifting the attention to the natural realm, this talk will argue that the Augustinian Friars developed a particular interest in the vegetative world which derived from their eremitical origins in the woods of central Italy. Moreover, the Augustinians continued to capitalize on their nature-oriented roots as the foundation of their sanctity also during their colonial expansion. For this, examples like the Ixmiquilpan wall painting will be brought into conversation with both literary and liturgical sources, as well as multi-media visual imagery. The goal is not only to understand better the ways in which plants performed, evoked, and embodied sacred relations in the Augustinian ethos, but also to illuminate how the seeds of their ‘green devotions’ were transplanted from the Old World and cross-fertilized with indigenous ideas of sacrality in Central and South America over the long durée.
Dr Krisztina Ilko is a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Affiliated Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford (Trinity College), a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Toronto and spent two years as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has recently published her first monograph, The Sons of St Augustine: Art and Memory in the Augustinian Churches in Central Italy, 1256–1370 with Oxford University Press (2025).
Jade was prized in ancient Mesoamerica, and scholars have noted connections between greenstones and maize, dating to the beginning of maize agriculture. Parallels are already apparent in preclassic (1500 BCE – 200 CE) Olmec and Maya polished celts, for example, whose shape evokes a corncob or an axe for clearing a cornfield and whose color mimics lush leaves. Incised imagery on some celts details a fourfold maize plot as a cosmic plan, with a central sprout as the world tree. Other carvings show royal leaders wearing blue-green regalia, including jade jewelry, in imitation of a flourishing cornstalk. Similar links persist; Aztec (1325-1521 CE) rulers wore greenstone necklaces.
The basic unit of jade jewelry was a simple, round bead — bored through its core, polished to a sheen, and marked with red: that is, the central hole was either dusted with vermillion, or strung on a scarlet cord. I argue that despite its simplicity, the ancient Mesoamerican jade bead itself encapsulates the energetics of maize in myriad ways. These include correspondences between the stone’s endurance, and maize’s recurrent seasons; between the gem’s rotary drilling, and the cornstalk’s growth spiral; between the bead’s glistening roundness, and the dewdrop that funnels daily into the stalk’s furled center; and between the jewel’s green and red contrasts, and the maize plant’s thermal extremes — from verdant sprout, to withered stalk, with its harvest of sunbaked ears.
These congruences to the corn plant lie behind the jade bead’s longevity and importance as a sacred Mesoamerican symbol.
Lois Martin is a scholar, archaeological illustrator, and adjunct professor based in Brooklyn, NY. She teaches studio art in the Visual Arts department at Fordham University, and an art history class, “Arts of the Ancient Americas,” at City College (CUNY). She publishes and lectures on a variety of topics, including contemporary art, textiles, and ancient art. Martin’s Andean research focuses on Late Paracas and Early Nasca iconography; her Mesoamerican research focuses on Mexica regalia. She is particularly drawn to topics where insights from natural history shed light on ancient iconography.
Step into a deep secret sonic field where leaves whisper forgotten sacred songs, agricultural machinery hums hidden rhythms, and deep below the earth, roots twist and dance to their own mysterious music. “Chants for Plants” is a new 20-minute performance of live-coded sound and light. The performance includes divinatory trance music based on the sounds of the plants where I grew up in the woods and corn fields of rural Michigan, synchronized light art based on hypnotic sacred geometry, and wearable sculptures and musical instruments created with endangered North American native carnivorous plants that I cross-breed and clone. I consider these plants as not just materials, but also collaborators and audiences. I create sound and light using live computer coding as an occult practice, as a type of magical spelling, full of strange words, symbols, and numerology, designed to affect change in our world. My occult themes are based on my ancestors who were executed during the Salem Witch Trials. This performance builds on my previous “Deep Rituals/Robotic Rebellion” performance based on algae, marine parasites, and Edgar Allan Poe poetry at The Peale Museum in Baltimore; my upcoming “Rituals, Rhythms, and Rebirths” performance at the Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic area of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association conference in Albuquerque, NM; and my previous “Electronic Exorcism” augmented reality performance designed to exorcise demons of Confederate monuments in Richmond, VA. The monuments were torn down six months later. Let’s see what possible similar changes “Chants for Plants” might help bring.
Eric Millikin is an experimental artist based in Baltimore, Maryland, (previously in Detroit, Michigan, and Richmond, Virginia) with over 30 years of experience creating biological, sound, and occult artwork. He comes from a working-class family and grew up in a mobile home in rural Michigan. He is a first-generation college student who earned his BFA from Michigan State University and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. His artwork has been featured by WIRED, USA Today, and The New York Times. Millikin is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
This presentation examines how the indigenous Mesoamerican Codex Fejérváry-Mayer deploys anthropomorphic plant imagery to express the dynamic and sacred interdependence between plants and humans, articulated through shared visual metaphors of growth, nourishment, and emergence from the earth. Two plants are key to this visual strategy: maize and maguey.
A set of four maize-hybrid images in the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer illustrates each hybrid figure’s buttock as rooted in the earth while maize cobs sprouting from the hair on its head. These images reveal a dual logic: on the one hand, the anthropomorphic plant becomes socially activated, having the capacity to convey affect through body paint, ornaments, and postures. On the other hand, plant growth in turn worked as an epistemic model for the human body and society. Reading the images alongside contemporaneous Nahuatl language disclose further meanings. In Nahuatl, tzintli (anus, butt) refers to the beginning of a process, while tzontli (hair) designates its end. The visual pairing of root and cob thus mirrors this linguistic structure, projecting vegetal growth onto the human body.
Another parallel is presented by the maguey-human hybrid image in the same codex: a female figure emerges from the maguey and breastfeeds an infant. The visual analogy of agua miel (the sap used for pulque production) and breastmilk renders equivalent plant and human bodily fluids, epitomizing the shared generative vitality of plants and humans. In all, rather than portraying plants as passive entities, the codex depicts them as active beings whose lives and behaviors are intertwined with humans.
Rong Lin is a PhD candidate in Pre-Columbian Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research centers on the entanglements of materiality, sensory perception, and embodied experience in Mesoamerican art, with particular attention to the roles of natural materials in processes of making and reception. Her dissertation is tentatively titled as “Vegetal Bodies: Negotiating Plant and Human Relations in Late Postclassic and Early Colonial Central Mexico”. The project reconsiders how human-plant relations were made bodily through images, materials, and practices in late postclassic and early colonial Central Mexico, focusing on how these relations were produced, negotiated, and transformed during this period.
Through my creative work, I reflect on Indigenous language revitalization, using plant-based knowledge as a methodology through music. As a Poetics Lab Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Lab, I composed an original song, “Colors,” which explores how funk music can support learning and teaching the Rarámuri language. The song grew from thinking about how my grandfather didn’t pass down the Rarámuri language directly, but instead shared knowledge with me through planting (Reyes 2021). Working alongside him in the soil, planting became a way of learning care, patience, and attention to roots, themes carried into the song. His plant-based teachings showed me that issues must be addressed at their source, like pulling weeds—a practice requiring discernment, embodied labor, and responsibility for future growth. My family’s survival through more than 260 years of colonial missions reveals how Indigenous knowledge and language persist through indirect, relational practices grounded in daily care. Like plants, this knowledge can remain dormant, conserving energy and keeping roots alive. These plant-based knowledges are carried into my work with the Caring for Ancestors Collective in 2024, as we pulled weeds at Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a rematriated land located in Oakland. Weeding here becomes an act of care and maintenance that forges relations between body, land, ancestors, and futurity. Across these experiences, plant-based pedagogy emerges as a way to understand, remember, and imagine Indigenous futures. Rooted in music and language, this work moves toward reciprocity, transmission, and shared creative practice.
Everardo “Ever” Reyes (Rarámuri descent and Chicanx) is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting instructor at Colorado College. He researches music, social movements, and Indigenous self-determination. His dissertation explores the sonic and political impact of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz on Indigenous social movements today. Ever holds a BA (2017, University of Northern Colorado), MA (2019, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) in Sociology, and an MA in Ethnomusicology (2021, University of California, Berkeley). He also works on Rarámuri and Nahuatl language revitalization through music technology and songwriting.
In Magnifera: A Lesbian Mango Feasting Ritual, Adrienne Renée Weiss and Lydia Daniller enact an embodied ritual of eco-erotic power where they use mangos as vehicles of molecular transit for spells and wishes. Inspired by the “Adder’s Tongue Credenza,” Northern Renaissance tableware designed to protect nobility from poisoning at banquets, they perform an inversion wherein lesbian pleasure acts as an antidote to the poison of present day nobility. The original 15th century object is said to have derived its power from “tongue stones,” which Pliny the Elder postulated were amulets that fell from the sky during the Wolf Moon. Others thought they were the petrified secretions from the mouths of Adder snakes. When held above poisoned drink or food, “tongue stones” were rumored to sweat. In present times, legend has it that on the full moon lesbians gather and plunge their tongues and teeth into mangos and transmit their eco-erotic wishes into the cyanide molecules of mangos’ hearts. Depending on where a person falls in their desire for protection or revenge, the resulting seeds are used as amulets or as a type of defixio, to either protect their owners from falling prey to the perversion of money worship or to curse money worshippers with everlasting psychic agony. During the performance of Magnifera, Weiss and Daniller will share how lesbians create apotropaic magic when they encounter the slippery wonder of mangos.
Adrienne Renée Weiss is a research based artist whose work is an earthly and sensual investigation of textural intimacy, lesbian histories, and esoteric lore. She spins yarn, weaves, welds, molds clay, and performs rituals. Weiss currently serves on the Board of the American Tapestry Alliance as the Director of Exhibitions, is a fellow with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and a member of the Jewish Museum of Chicago Artist Collective. Weiss has exhibited in Chicago, the Bay Area, Ohio, Atlanta, and Berlin. She earned her BA from the University of California at Berkeley and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lydia Daniller is a portrait and editorial photographer based in San Francisco. Her work conveys the warmth, intimacy, and mischief of the artists and queer communities she documents. She has photographed Peaches, Lara Downes, Michelle Tea, Annie Sprinkle + Beth Stephens, Sean Dorsey, Madison Young, and many others. Daniller’s work has appeared in the New York Times, KQED, NPR, A Passion Thing, i-D, InDance Magazine, TimeOut New York, Forbes, The Cut, SFWeekly, SF Chronicle, SF Bay Guardian, and SFGATE. She’s currently in post-production on her first film entitled Ask Adele.
In her performance “Presence” (2017), the internationally renowned Guatemalan artist
Regina José Galindo assumed the identities of thirteen women who were assassinated by men in her country (most of them victims of feminicide). To do so, she dressed as if she were one of them and titled each performance session with the victim’s name. Acknowledging that she would work with the energy unlashed by their assassination, Galindo “cleaned” the victim’s garments, the performance space, and her own body, before and after each enactment. Along with a female Mayan daykeeper (Aj q’ij), Galindo carried out ceremonies structured around two central elements: fire and plants. These rituals aimed to calm the ‘tormented souls’ summoned by the performer and to subsequently channel their energy. What ancestral and syncretic practices informed this purpose? What role did plants play in Galindo’s performance?
In “Presence,” the artist invoked each victim and asked the fire for permission to perform in her name, while using plants such as rue, yarrow, bougainvillea petals, cinnamon or bay leaves to transform and purify the energy left by the violence inflicted upon their bodies. In this presentation, I will explain how and why these plants were used in tandem with their sacred and curative significance in Guatemalan/Mesoamerican vernacular culture. By activating botanical knowledge, traditional medicine, spiritual memory, human and nonhuman interconnections, “Presence” emerges as a healing act that also actualizes the religious and material culture in which it is grounded.
Mariví Véliz holds a Ph.D. in Literary, Cultural, and Linguistic Studies (University of Miami, 2021) and a B.A. in Art History (University of Havana, 1999) with a certificate in Cultural Anthropology (Fundación Fernando Ortiz, 2002). Between 2003 and 2011, she worked in and from Guatemala as a contemporary Latin American art lecturer, curator, journalist and independent researcher. During her graduate studies, she developed her interest in performance art, understood as ritual. Her dissertation, “Silences in Performance Art: Liveness in the Americas in 21st Century,” was awarded the Barret Prize for the Best Dissertation on a Latin American or Caribbean topic, by the University of Miami’s Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas in 2023.
“Cotton is a material with memory.” ––Leonardo Drew
Cotton, at its core, is a transformative material full of both potential and melancholy. In this conference discussion, Talia Kimberly Wright and Aidan Anne Frierson reflect on how cotton’s complicated history can be utilized as both a vessel for memory and site for material reclamation.
As an African American artist and speculative writer whose ancestry is directly tied to Mississippi cotton plantations, Wright approaches cotton as a conduit for time travel and embodied memory. Similarly, Frierson’s papermaking practice is embedded in the history of cotton, often positing the material as the “reason why we’re here.”
In October of last year, Wright and Frierson visited a Black-owned cotton farm in Northampton, North Carolina. Guided by farmer, land steward, and fifth-generation cotton farmer Julius Tillery, the visit marked the first time either artist had seen cotton growing in the field. “Why We’re Here: The Transformative Nature of Cotton” will be a conversation weaving together the American history of cotton, the material processes of cotton papermaking, and the fiber’s capacity to function as both connective tissue and a temporal bridge.
Talia Kimberly Wright is a multidisciplinary artist and writer born and raised on the Southside of Chicago. Utilizing memory, word, and material object, her work aims to bridge the gap between the ancestral, traditional, and regenerated lives of Black people in America––especially those who have been impacted by the Great Migration. She employs different methodologies like book-making, ceramics, collaging, and painting in an effort to investigate the expansiveness of geography inhabited by Black Americans and the relationships built within them, specifically through the lens of Afro-surrealism. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Aidan Anne Frierson is an Artist and Educator from Chicago primarily practicing Hand Papermaking. Her work is a contemporary retrospective rooted in living, feeling, autobiography, spirit, and archive. Through Hand Papermaking, she honors history as a material by embedding ephemera in relationship with cellulose, engaging conversations about plants, people, love and labor. Frierson’s work is a culmination––a form––of material storytelling and diaristic cartography, that reflect memory’s interdependent relationship with reality. Frierson is the Co-Founder of Chicago Pulp Papermill & Studio and the Executive Director of the North American Hand Papermakers organization.