About Us
Lavandula (LALCH) is a Visual Arts and Literary Collective & Digital Resource Garden for Black and Brown women and non-binary artists based in Atlanta.
Our communal space is where creatives gather for time-travel, deep reverie, and art-making. What comes from this communion comprises our garden of writings, photographs, films, and ephemera.
Lavandula is grounded in and oriented by Black feminist thought and praxis, and therefore abides by the knowing that we have always been artists, visionaries and agents of knowledge. Our creative practices are rooted in ongoing and lasting, though evolving, traditions.
Theory+practice deeply informs this space as we examine the holistic production and genesis of our creative treasures in our everyday artmaking. As such, we carry wellsprings of intuitive knowings and creativity well beyond our years, both past and future.
As we commit ourselves to engaging the many parts of ourselves to externalize the creativity that lives within us, we generate possibilities and opportunities for imaging alt and new worlds for generations in the present and future.
Theory x Practice
Three objectives (inspired by Alice Walker):
Think of the landscape of media as an extension of the lineage that has come before us: for centuries, Black women have been inserting themselves into the narrative scopes of western media by creating images of themselves for themselves and community. The intention was not only to define our own stories, but to disrupt the existing canon of available stories.
Learn to read images: reading supplemental writings that Black women artists pair their images with, research the author’s other writings and work, and read critical writings where Black women take pause to reflect, critique, and theorize on the inner and out creative worlds of Black artists.
Root our creative processes in Black feminist praxis: ask questions of the story, critique the story, allow our imaginations to expand the story/characters as well as find the correlation between the spaces that the navigate (inner emotional worlds, conflict, external environment and persons, etc.)
Guiding Principles
Mind and Body (to intuit)
“How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write?
And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist” (Walker, 403).
Theory and Practice (to construct)
“Therefore we must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know” (Walker, 405).
Lineage and Legacy (to remember)
“And if we ask ourselves why, and search for and find the answer, we will know beyond all efforts to erase it from our minds, just exactly who, and of what, we black American women are” (Walker, 403).
Editor’s Note
Hey kindred Earth Seeds,
Welcome to Lavandula~
I created this space because I wanted to explore the traditions and legacies that were birthed and formalized by us -- Black women artisans. Lavandula is a deliberate space. An intuitive space. And, it’s a healing and empowering collective firmly rooted in the rich soil of our mothers’ gardens of radical artistic and intellectual traditions. Together, we labor for ourselves and the collective, and we continue the work of the many that laid the groundwork for our art practices today. We meet images and the words of and by Black women with deep vigilance, care, and wonder.
I’m a proud New York native and Black+Filipino feminist scholar artivist. I earned my BA in Comparative Women’s Studies from Spelman College in 2017 and my MA from NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2020. My research focuses on Black Feminist Visual Cultural Arts and Studies. Currently, I’m a 2nd year African American Studies PhD student at Emory University.
By drawing connections between Black feminist theories and various image-making practices of artists of color, I hope to deeply inform curricula+space+community in way that will inspire artists to radically re/imagine their practices and curations around storytelling. My favorite critical tools to use for this work exist in both written and visual forms. For me, images and words have a co-informing relationship.
I hope you enjoy reading the words and images with us.
Thank you for stopping by! ~ Liz London