This Black Artist Is Using Farming to Heal Herself — and the Land
Dail Chambers is working to reclaim the land, clean up the environment, and reconnect with her family’s history. She wants you to do it, too.
By Adam Mahoney
Capital B
February 15, 2024
Excerpt:
“In the back of them, you see a subdivision of new homes and cotton fields in between and behind the homes, the same cotton fields my family worked,” Chambers, an artist and farmer, explained about the billboard she recently designed and had erected. While the sight of the cotton fields conjures thoughts of the forced labor of enslaved people, it also exposes a contentious yet once-central tenet of Black life: farming.
Two generations ago, Chambers’ family, like tens of thousands of other Black families, migrated from the South, the Mississippi Delta in particular, to the Midwest. With them, the tens of thousands of Black folks left their mark on the Midwest, making Black life inseparable from the fabric of daily life in the region. But it also separated Blackness from nature, and at the same time, as subdivisions and urban development took off, it locked Black families out of new land ownership opportunities.
