Statement

Flavored Legacies is a series of contemporary printmaking and painting works that explores the reclamation of diasporic foodways. For people living away from their ancestral homelands, food can be seen as a kind of alchemy for healing both body and ancestral memory.

These works are anchored by portraits of hands, with hands serving as symbolic and literal sites of generational innovation, knowledge, and protection. Carved from linoleum and collaged on top of acrylic paintings, these multilayered works explore themes of reclamation and connection to diasporic foodways.

These figurative portraits of women and two-spirit people across Ecuador, Haiti, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States confront the often-silenced stories of cooking, medicinal plant knowledge, and the culinary history of generational recipes buried through colonization and gendered labor. This erasure fragments our connection to the earth, our ancestry, and sweeps away the important legacies that women and two-spirit people shape.

Flavored Legacies weaves connection and community across space using the ritual of cooking and diasporic relationship to food, seeds, land and voice.