alexandra antoine

seeds that bore fruit honors four of my ancestral mentors and the knowledge they gathered, shared and planted within me.

"vibration cooking," the literary storytelling work of vertamae smart-grosvenor

continues to be a pivotal guiding source for me as i shape the ways in which i share my knowledge around foodways and traveling as i connect with folks globally while uplifting my own.

the significance of the earthly elements and their role in daily ritual and spirituality found within "the spirit of intimacy" by sobonfu somé remind me to be present within the gardens i tend and the depths of connection available to us all through the lands we steward 

the strength within community coming together and the times we move forward even when in fear, whether to challenge those around us with limited thinking or to simply assist our neighbors in having what they need, fannie lou hamer embodied that work

and the impact of a simple action by wangarĩ muta maathai, planting trees, which went on to start an entire movement, creating an environmental impact and showing us solutions we can take, no matter how small we think they are and keeping us rooted in the healing that is here for us to channel throughout the earth

i honor them

i honor myself 

and i honor the work i've come here to do

“the seeds that were planted led me here” is an installation that encompasses the aspects of what inspires and drives my research in food, art and travel. My starting point was the sorghum that I grew on the West Side of Chicago during the Summer of 2023 which is painted as a background silhouette on the wall. I’ve added elements of nature, food collages, books and some of my seed saving jars, which include Benne seeds, Okra and Sorghum seeds. I thrive to always leave the viewers of my work with the understanding that when you see me, you see all those who have come before me and those who will come after.

asé

Through this work I started a Podcast by the same name as a space to share more of my stories and background references to my work. If you feel led, check it out here

This installation is part of a larger group exhibition entitled “Beneath the Visible”

(from Ujamaa Cooperatives’ website)

COLLARDS, is the inaugural issue of The Utopian Seed Project’s series of zine publications. Edited by the extremely talented and award winning writer and editor, Dr. Cynthia Greenlee. Dr Greenlee first thought, “Will we have enough articles about collard greens to justify a whole issue? . . . I somehow couldn’t imagine that too many people would come out of the proverbial woodwork to write about this sturdy plant”. But she soon realized that there is a lot to say about collards.

COLLARDS is a beautiful collection of collard focused art, essays, poetry and recipes. The cover is by Chicago’s Alexandra Antoine. Chris Smith, author of The Whole Okra, gives a short history of the Heirloom Collard Project. Mark Farnham’s short glossary delineates the type of collards (illustrated by Kristen Eggen, and co-editor Melissa DeSa provides an illustrated tour of the collard growing cycle.

Learn more about the zine and get your copy HERE

I collaborated with Slow Food USA to design their Plant a Seed 2023 Campaign focused on different varieties of Greens.

The 2023 Seed Kit Included:

Feaster’s Mustard

Ultracross Collard

Hanson Lettuce

New Mexico Amaranth

Yu Choy Sum

Matilde Escarole

Sea Kale

To learn more about the seeds in this campaign and to get a free download of the “Greens Zine” visit their site here.

Pathways: On Reflecting, Wisdom and Meditation is a participatory art installation with Cultivator at Bray Grove Farm. This installation included herbal plants and portraiture collages within the pathways of a labyrinth design. It is Influenced by my Haitian ancestry and the homemade herbal remedies passed down to me through my maternal lineage.

This work is meant to offer the viewer a moment for reflection and ease, create a space to practice meditation in motion, and acknowledge the ancestral wisdom and understanding that leads to internal wellness.

As a lover of tea, my intentions with this project were to share some of my favorite tea flavors with my community. Alongside the teas I created and printed unique digital food collages for each flavor and a short piece of my own writings on the flavors, background history and cultural references of each tea. Within the text I included a prompt to meditate on some aspect of ones life in relation to that tea blend.

Each tea blend was made from scratch by me with all natural ingredients :)

From Michael Rangel’s Curatorial Statement:

The duo show Gastropoetics considers the vital questions: What does food become when we consider race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship? Conversely, how might we view these intersecting identities differently through food and art-making practices?

Food production, farming, cooking, and consuming food across generations and geographies show precisely the relationships and conditions of tradition, migration, identity, and diasporic legacies. The preservation of nationality and cultural connections to an origin story is, as Parama Roy describes, a constant return to tradition that insists on a “scrutiny of a grammar of ingestion and avoidance that involves an attentiveness to the complex moral structure of embodiment.”

Alexandra Antoine explores elements of life and death for Black folk and how food and land act and perform as sacred storytellers that preserve Black folk’s legacies for generations. Elements of Haitian diasporic food culture and ancestral longings are embodied in her artwork.

Gastropoetics is an exhibition that tells the stories of Black, maternal, and migrant epistemologies through food culture that articulates the precise and haunting ways history is more than something to be consumed and digested but also a discipline to be memorialized and witnessed through the everyday acts of gastronomy.

Read Full Statement Here.

Gastropoetic Dinner:

I collaborated with the Senior students in the Culinary Arts program at Simeon High School to create, test and prepare a drink and three course meal. Each menu item was dedicated to one of my ancestors and guests were given a new prompt with every course served to guide their table’s discussion on food memories and ancestry. The dinner was intentionally done within the FLXST Art Gallery space so as to allow guests to be surrounded by the artwork as they consumed the dinner.

i followed the drinking gourd…is a collection of screen prints using foods of the African Diaspora as a reference to memory, love, health and travel. I honor the various methods of cooking, visual details and culinary histories and traditions associated with hibiscus, okra, collards, black eye peas and yuca.These are all foods I ate growing up that hold significant importance to place and people for me. I reflect on the use of memory and personal experience as a way to archive and share my story with others.

I created repeat pattern designs as the base layer for each work using the foods and their textures as the surface and proceeded to layer my memories, writings and personal photos to create the final collage. The hand-sewn bead sequins references my Haitian roots and adds a final layer of dimensionality.

ASSOTTO’S CHILD AT THE ALTAR

i want to break new ground & mold a brand new community of black [queers] standing up once & for all in realization, validation & celebration of ourselves / a brand new community of black [queers] aspiring to the visions we have for ourselves / a brand new community of black [queers] singing a new love song not just for [our countries] but for ourselves.

New Love Song, Assotto Saint

Assotto’s Child at the Altar is a traveling installation exploring the life and legacy of Haitian-American queer performance artist Assotto Saint. Born Yves François Lubin (1957-1994) in Les Cayes, Haiti, the artist and LGBTQ activist changed his name to Assotto Saint, claiming the performative, spiritual, and political by combining the Vodou ceremonial drum, tambou assôto, with the name of the 19th-century Haitian Revolutionary Toussaint Louverture.

Inspired by this act of metamorphosis—becoming Assotto Saint—the installation recuperates and reimagines how gender and sexually fluid Haitians labor to preserve, contest and remake identities across generations, with grace and fortitude.

To simulate a Haitian Vodou rite of reclamation where practitioners resume communication with an ancestor and the realm of the Invisibles, Alexandra Antoine’s visual collages magnify and re-contextualize Saint’s embodiment and aesthetics, as well as a Vodou altar and a timeline of Saint’s life and accomplishments devised by Mario LaMothe.

These and other converging installation elements reflect upon how Haitians who live and thrive outside social norms exercise forms of self-care and self-love which, for some Haitians, derail institutional gender and sexual codes of conduct. Like Assotto Saint’s art practice and activism, the exhibition asks: Who and what is holy and who gets to decide? What do we deem or declare holy or sacred?

Assotto’s Child at the Altar invites viewers to question how identity is formed, performed, and claimed as a political and spiritual affirmation of one’s journey.

In the Fall of 2020 I got the opportunity to design the new Fresh Moves Mobile Market for Urban Growers Collective in Chicago, IL. I wanted the design to intentionally reflect the people and mission of UGC and the joy they bring to all of the communities they serve. With Barilla USA as a sponsor we were all able to make this bus a reality.

This installation uses the structural, linear design of metal work found throughout the African Diaspora as a reference in the creation of a wider narrative around memory, language and envisioning. Embedded in these patterns are narratives found within various mediums, such as textile and architectural forms, that the artist has had experience producing through apprenticeships and residencies. The significance of the color palette in connecting the multiple meanings behind blue and brown tones within the diaspora as it relates to spirituality, creation and humanity are woven throughout. The works on paper reference various open landscapes, both urban and rural, within the framework of a structured design questioning how we are able to observe our everyday built environments through another lens, one of design and conscious arrangement. How is language used to build architectural frameworks in a way that honors our lineage while contextualizing our experiences to speak to those who will come after us?

The work presented in ‘Nou La’ utilizes the images of friends and family taken by the artist during her travels back to her parents homeland of Léogâne, Haiti as well as her travels in Ouidah, Benin. Her work has a very colorful palette, reminiscent of Haitian artwork, linear patterns as well as beaded sequins. The mixing of traditional artistic practices with contemporary painting and the use of symbolic language in the form of stylistic backdrops are present throughout her work.

The title Nou La means 'We are here' in Haitian Kreyol and pays homage to the Haitian community that has and continues to thrive here in the Midwest while keeping the culture of their ancestral land alive.

"Koute mòn yo"

(Listen to the mountains)

This installation is inspired by and honors the landscape of Léogâne, Haiti, my parent's homeland. It looks at the aesthetics of a particular design material and photography and its use in the built environment as a form of non-verbal communication.

Let the mountains speak looks at memory and architectural landscapes of my childhood summers spent in Léogâne, Haiti. The artistic craftsmanship of the ironwork throughout Haiti as well as the wider Caribbean serves as inspiration in the creation of a visual language that incorporates the iconography, religion, and culture through my experience of the land. The work exposes viewers to a landscape that speaks to the very meaning of the native name given to Haiti, Ayiti, meaning 'land of mountains' by the Taino natives who inhabited the land. These landscapes are in stark contrast to that of which is so widely shown through media outlets here in the U.S. but is very fitting for the well know Haitian proverb 'Déyé mòn gen mòn,' behind mountains are more mountains.

Inaugural Fall Artist Residency at Urban Growers Collective South Chicago Farm

Thinking about the ‘Farm as Studio’ I along with community members collectively created murals on the farm containers as well as led and participated in block printing workshops with the Youth Corps participants.

Check out the amazing work that’s happening at UGC South Chicago farm

An Elsewhere Within Here features the work of Hiba Ali, Alexandra Antoine, Andy Li, Lynnette Miranda, and Tamara Becerra Valdez—curated by Josh Rios.

The title of this exhibition is taken from an interview with the postcolonial theorist and visual anthropologist Trinh T. Minh-ha, who describes the simultaneous feeling of belonging and alienation symptomatic of the colonial experience as “…not quite other, not quite the same…[a] situation in which one is always slightly off, and yet not entirely outside.” To further explain this sensibility of estrangement, being both inside and outside dominant culture, Minh-ha states: “I've used the term 'elsewhere,' to which I've often added 'within here'—an elsewhere within here." As a concept for framing and understanding the world, “an elsewhere within here” can refer to geopolitical subjectivities displaced via the histories of diasporic struggle; it can refer to the many ways time and history are collapsed into the archive, which is situated in the past (elsewhere in time), while existing in the present (within the here-and-now); it can refer to cultural producers taking up the challenge to work within and against various institutions in the hopes of transforming all-too-settled value systems; it can refer to the general sense of rupture one feels in relation to their own somatic fiction; and finally; it can refer to our relation to global capital as we consume goods and services from far flung regions without any understanding of the processes that makes those goods and services mysteriously appear.