ARTISTS TALK: "Maize in Art and Community" with Dail Chambers and Megan Singleton

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming this evening to MAZE in Art and Community at the Sachs Museum. My name is Neshka Pfeiffer, and I am the museum curator who organized this special exhibition called Kernels of Culture, MAZE Around the World, that is one of the reasons why you're all here this evening. This exhibition is an exploration of the botany and the culture and history and the contemporary art of corn in our daily lives. And tonight's speakers both have their work featured in the exhibition, and they're here to share more about their practice and their process with you. And after their presentations, there'll be time for Q&A, so I'll ask you to save those questions for after the second speaker is finished, and then there'll still be some time to see the exhibition, which is in three different galleries. This one, of course, there's a small one behind you, and then another one downstairs. So our first speaker this evening will be Dale Chambers, and Dale is a visual artist, a creative consultant and grower whose urban farm, Ko'ohama Orchards in North St. Louis, is dedicated to the cross-cultural heritage of Native and African people. And her farming and community work is featured in Kernels of Culture, right over there, as one of the black and indigenous farmers who are growing corn amongst many other foods to feed their communities. Ko'ohama Orchards works to create food forests to combat the effects of climate change that impact the community members and all of ours, health and their urban environments, as well as their access to food and nutrition. Their agricultural practice incorporates the practice of crop diversity and rematriating seed and food knowledge to bring balance to their communities. And our second speaker will be Megan Singleton, who is a practicing artist and educator in St. Louis, whose ecology-based work combines hand-papermaking sculpture and installation. And her series, Transposable Elements, explores that intersection between maize botany, genetics and fiber. And this new body of work, which was commissioned for Kernels of Culture, which is on display in the South Gallery behind you, investigates the connections between an innovative pioneering woman in corn science, Barbara McClintock, and the brilliant beauty of the Hopi Zaya maize varieties. Zaya maize is the scientific name for corn. Now, two of these varieties, Hopi Purple and Hopi Turquoise, were actually grown by the Gardens Horticultural Team at the Kemper Center for Home Gardening for use as the medium in Megan's visual and installation work that's on display and which she'll be speaking more about. So please give a warm welcome to Dale Chambers, who will be here. Generally, I would ask permission for my elders to speak. In this situation, I feel like my ancestors and elders have already given me permission in my practice. It's an honor to be here at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, definitely working in this moment alongside Megan Singleton. And I'll say a moment about that in a second. And to see my good friends and my farm manager, LaQuinda Lynn, who has been on this journey with me, visiting social justice spaces, spending intimate time on the reservation, and also organizing our biodiverse practice. My name is Dale Chambers. I'm a visual artist and grower. I've been doing this my whole life. My family are the folks who first taught me how to grow. I'm a permaculturist, an herbalist, a spiritualist, an ancestor worker, an archivist. And I do whatever it takes to take a closer look at culture and my own cultural heritage. I am, of course, clearly of African descent, but I have both native and Cherokee heritage. And it's been my long-term practice to find different signals and symbols of cross-cultural heritage and cooperation between African peoples and First Nation peoples. So let's talk about the plants. I am growing predominantly native plants. And I would say my planting is about seven years old. 70% native and then 30% cross-variety between okra and herbs of European descent as well. So on our site, this is my website, dalechambers.life. There is a tab called Kahoma Orchards where you can find all this information. Let's start at the bottom with our land story before I start getting into the plants. Sometimes I'm a little bit more plant-friendly than I am person-friendly. So excuse me if I stumble through this. According to the site nativeland.ca, that this place was originally worked and loved by the Osage, Miami, Sioux, and Iroquois groups, and now what we call St. Louis. Previous to that, there had been an ancient relationship with this land, with the Mississippian culture. And I'm so honored by that. Half of my sites are in the Greaterville neighborhood, and I'll say a third. A third of my sites are in the Greaterville neighborhood where I'm stewarding these land projects and creating art in a place-based research attempt. And half of the sites are in the Jeff Vanderloo area. I'm saying half, but it's a third, excuse me. And then I have an extension site in the west part of St. Louis City, not Wells Fargo, Wells Goodfellow area, excuse me. And also where my family lives in Mississippi, in Coahoma County, which my orchard is named after. They migrated there from the southeast and central region of Mississippi in their lifetime. And that is where some of my relatives have settled. And let me go back for a moment before we keep looking at this website to say, during the pandemic, I wanted to get to know more about what my ethnographic work would be in the area in which I lived. So I took out my own little practice and used my anthropology background from undergraduate to come up with a research project that informed my growth practice and my fine art practice. And so I surveyed my neighbors, my people who support North St. Louis, and just the general population through online surveying. I used a Google Doc form and my interest was public health. The question was a cultural inquiry. How have people in North St. Louis survived? What plants, what folk remedy, and what traditions have been kept alive in North St. Louis? Some of the questions were, do you feel beautiful? Do you think, do you consider yourself healthy? What is resilient? Are you resilient? And then I got into some basic questions. Do you have diabetes? You know, do you have heart disease? I looked at the ailments that were plaguing many of the nations as well as the African race to kind of get an idea of how I can support and help in my own way, you know, outside of institutional support, but through one-on-one connections. So some of the plants that it is that I determined that I wanted to work with were directly brought up in this survey. The survey went on for about nine months and I started a cultural arts campaign based on its findings and we titled it Beautiful, Healthy, Resilient. So a lot of what it is that I do is based on what my neighbors and relatives have informed me to do. Secondly, from that survey, I then got into something called migration stories, whereas, well, you know, once I put the sign up that said Kahoma Orchards on Vandivenor, everyone started to ask me, why would I do that? So some folks knew the meaning of the word, it means a red panther in Choctaw and some folks hadn't lived there previously or their family members hadn't lived there previously. So it became a center point for conversation and to go deeper into what I would call my inquiry, right? Through that, I began to record people who have stories that are rooted in their ancestry and most of the folks of African descent in North St. Louis that I interviewed also shared some sort of native heritage in their family line that may or may not had been explored. Some people were registered tribal members, some people were not and it was just a beautiful opportunity for me to learn even more about myself to listen to these other folk, you know? And what an honor. So on site, and like I said, this is my website is a very extensive, me being an archivist, you can go to dalechambers.life and find the migration stories. You can find this page we're looking at now and you can also find out how to get in contact with me, see other public works that may not relate to this project that we're talking about today and more about my professional career. There's so many articles. Okay, so we provide the following, elderberry, black cherry, chokeberry, wild plum, pawpaw, persimmon, blueberry, strawberries, echinacea, aster, brown-eyed susans, daisies, bee balm, St. John's wort, and I'll just say and more, okay? And I wanna talk to you all a little bit about the persimmon. The persimmon is my favorite plant to work with on the sites that I steward because that's the one that is kind of like our family's heritage plant. There's so much oral story around the persimmon tree based on my great grandfather, who is the person who passed down whatever little bit of heritage I know about. He's no longer with us, he died in the 80s and through the tree, I'm able to build story with my family. Let me just show you the migration stories portion. This is not my laptop, so excuse me. Let me, and excuse me if I giggle. I laugh at myself often. So these are the stories. Gwen Moore from the Missouri History Museum discuss what she knows about community identity as well as there's some maps, there's mixed in with my art. This is my great aunt, the woman who helped raise me and taught me how to plant. Her father is the person, Book Haynes, who I mentioned, the grandfather who already grew persimmons. Sometimes as young people, we come into this world thinking we have the most original idea, you know? This term urban farming, this is a new term for an old practice. Everyone that lived with the land that moved into an urban environment took their survival skills with them, okay? And so now today, we see about these things called urban farming, but this is something that's no matter what cultural heritage you come from, you brought these traditions with you because you had to. This was the number one way to survive is through the food and knowing about the food and the medicines. So it's an honor to do this work despite the trending name changes throughout the times. So anyway, some of these people like Jerome, he's a jazz musician that I didn't know was a farmer, but I knew that he had some Cherokee heritage and I needed him for the interview. And then through that relationship building before we got on camera, that's when I found out more about his family line, his own grandmother and the likes. And then let's see if I can quickly find just a small snippet of Mary talking about anything for you all. Now, again, there's a lot, and I haven't separated from community to family relatives. And let's go back up to community because some of these people you might know. Tyrenne Lewis, who has spoken here before, he runs Heru Urban Farms, okay? He is of both African and Choctaw descent. And then you have Sequoy, who is a local actor. He is of Cherokee heritage. You have Ronald Ward here, who is another farmer in North St. Louis. He has Choctaw heritage on his mother and father's side. And we have Kendall. Kendall does not have... I'm a person who is into science, so we know Lucy came from the Congo. However, Kendall may seem white-identified, but is strongly excited about his Cherokee ancestry, and it leads his choices and decisions. One of the wonderful things in terms of how he lives his life for humanity, he is really about family. He's really grounded in the concept that we are all related. We are all family, humanity, plants, and the likes. And the greatest thing about catching some of the nuances of Kendall's story is that we kind of mapped it out, that most likely his Cherokee grandpa and my... My cross-cultural heritage on my mother's side is of both Cherokee and Choctaw. The Choctaw is my mother's father's side. The Cherokee is my mother's mother's side. So when we did the timeline for both of our personal stories, one of the amazing things is that his grandfather and my great-grandmother were living in North St. Louis in the same time, pretending to be Polish, actually. And we can get into why that is historically and the political reasonings for that after, or during Q&A if we want to. But you see, these are just some. There's many. Well, anyway, the migration stories. The anthropological piece of my work has informed pretty much everything that I do in my art practice at this stage. And when we think of what it is to be a two-dimensional or three-dimensional artist, there's no way to get around it because as I make my own natural pigments to paint with, for instance, the black walnut ink that I get from one of our community sites. And when I think of even... I have a degree in ceramic sculpture, the glazes and things. It's just a remembering, you know? It's a remembering. The same practice and the same mind state that I am when I'm making pots is the same kind of practice and mind state when I'm with the land, building up the soil. And the other thing I wanted to say, we're here about the corn. On our site, we grow the regular sweet corn for the general public, but we also grow the blue corn and we grow the glass corn. I have not done so good with the blue corn, but the glass corn and the sweet corn, I feel more comfortable with. I think that's about it. Is there anything else I should share? I think that's good. Okay. And then also just real quick before I wrap it up, these are the maps to kind of give you an idea of where our sites are located. In the ville, in the greater ville, St. Louis City annexed a farmer and conservationist, Uliard. This man owned so much land for conservation in North St. Louis. And as St. Louis expanded, he turned it into its own little town. It turned into St. Louis, what we know now as the ville. And it's an honor to also work on that land because of the intersectional history that's happening. The original ancestry of the land, then this conservationist, then the city. And now here I am back, right? In the midst of those practices that had simply already been urbanized. So I think that's about it. And thank you. There's also a story map here. If you're into doing maps or reading about maps, you can go to my mapping project, which is an extension out of all of this about where it is my ecological impact has served and been inspired by. Thank you. All right, hello. Thank you all for coming this evening. I'm Megan Singleton. Tonight, I'm gonna talk about the research and material process that was used to create the entire body of work that's in the backroom gallery that you may or may have not seen yet. So like Nashka was saying, this body of work is based on the interconnections that I found between Barbara McClintock, a pioneer scientist in maize genetics, and the exquisite beauty, significance, and genetic diversity of the Hopi turquoise and Hopi purple maize. First, I'm just gonna show you a quick diagram that talks about my overall practice. So generally, the process that I take when I start a new project involves five steps. And I kind of break these steps down into exploration of a place, observation, which is taking a lot of photographs, drawing, looking at different aspects of plants, of the ecology of an area, of the history of an area, which takes us right into our third step of research. So that research is both, again, about history, about relationships, and also about material research. So Nashka mentioned I am a hand papermaker and an installation artist, among many other things, but I guess my expertise, you would say, would be in hand papermaking and researching different types of fibers and how that they can be used in this process. The fourth step of my sort of artistic process is interpretation, which is just making art. How do I take these things that I've experienced and researched and turn them into sculptures and pulp paintings and books? And the last step, which I think is the most important, is how can all of this lead to a conversation? So a conversation about a specific place, about a specific plant, about a specific culture, about a specific ecology and the relationships that are there. So essentially, I typically make place-based works that explore plants and their environments. And this will materialize into sculptures, pulp paintings, installations, and books. And one of the reasons that I use handmade paper a lot is because the fiber in the material actually has an embedded meaning in it. So it has a sense, a physical sense of the place. It can have a physical sense of memory if you're making paper from someone's clothing that has a significant tie to you. And so there's a lot that can be actually physically and emotionally embedded into the work itself. So in fall 2022, I was invited by Nescha to create a new body of work for this exhibit. And like she said, the Kemper Gardens were gonna grow a plot of corn for me. I didn't find out until May of 2023 what kind of corn that they were gonna be growing. And so I was like, oh, hoppy turquoise and hoppy purple. I've never heard of those varieties of corn. So the next thing I did was I got to work researching and Google searching and compiling images and discovering like this amazing beauty of this corn but also the significance culturally to this spiritual crop. So while I was doing this just online image resourcing, I decided one aspect of the exhibition is that I wanted to document and exhibit large format photographs of the corn that was going to be grown. And at this point they were just stocks. I didn't know exactly what was gonna come out of the, like where the cob's gonna form, what were they gonna look like? But I knew that from seeing these images and reading about hoppy corn, I wanted to create these larger than life portraits that really conveyed the magnitude and importance of this hoppy Zia maze. I was also just like so enamored by this color palette. And I wanted to figure out a way also that I could bring attention to this heirloom variety and visualize like the genetic diversity that creates all of these colors and these patterns within the corn cobs. Because this is way different than, what we're getting our sweet corn from Schnucks or the farmer's market. And it was something I never really seen before or paid attention to before. But then I just had to figure out how I was gonna do that. So this is May, June of 2023, but all of these things are kind of going around in my head simultaneously. So there's gonna be some bouncing around here, but you'll kind of see how everything comes together. So here comes September 28th, harvest day. So I get a call from Nesca. She graciously helps me harvest all of the corn. You can see in the picture, she's scratching her arm. It was a very itchy harvest, but it was amazing. Like the act of collecting and sorting. We had bags and bags of the cobs that we would collect separate. And then we're like nipping down all of the stocks. My five-year-old daughter, well, she's five now. She was four then, was there with us. She actually asked me, are you gonna show pictures of when we chopped all the stocks down? So it was like a really beautiful experience to just connect with these plants and know that we're harvesting them and that they're gonna continue to be used and transformed into something new. So now I'll talk a little bit about the transformation process. I cannot thank my husband enough, who's outside right now with our daughter, for all of his assistance in this project. There was a lot of corn stalks and it was a lot of processing. So I used a chipper shredder. He did a lot of that process for me, breaking down all of the stalks into these shredded bits. Basically we're kind of making mulch. And so this process took a couple of weeks to get that all processed. Meanwhile, I was sorting all of the different cobs onto the table by color, getting ready for the photo shoot. And then on the right-hand side, you'll see some of the images of the process. So the process of taking a corn plant that you're then gonna make into paper, the first step is chopping it up. The second step is that you need to cook it with soda ash or lye. That's gonna break down all the non-cellulose material of the plant because there's lignin, there's other parts that are in the stalk. And to make paper, to make a hydrogen bond of paper, you need water and you need cellulose fibers. And so cooking, it was probably about a month and a half of small batches of cooking all of this fiber in a stainless steel keg that has the top cut off in the backyard. My next door neighbors are also here. They smelled me cooking over a course of a month and a half from me in the backyard. And so the fiber is cooked, then the fiber is rinsed, all of the lignin, non-cellulose gets washed away, and then it was dried out on screens. And so that process, doing that in the fall, allowed me to have all this material that was ready to go to be pulped, macerated into pulp throughout the winter when I was working on the exhibition. So circling back to October 2nd. So this is just the next week after we harvested the corn. I'm very fortunate to work for a supportive photography studio. I approached one of the photographers and asked if he would be willing to work with me to set up a scenario where I could capture these very high resolution images of corn. I'm a digital retoucher for Brookings Strobe Studios, and that is the studio where I was sort of assisted to set up this situation where I could just, I showed up with three big Tupperwares full of corn stalks. Eric Johnson and Mandy Hall, his assistant, helped me get all the lights set up, and then I was just there for days taking hundreds of pictures of corn cobs. So there were, I think, over 200 images. Basically, the scenario was, you saw how the lighting was set up, and then I had a metal rod with blue goo that I would stick the cobs to and then kind of style the husks. I was really interested in these gestures that the husks would create, depending on if they were upside down or right side up. And so that ultimately, that photo shoot, I narrowed it down to six images, which was a little difficult, that were then retouched, and then printed for the exhibition. I also ended up retouching another 19 photos that went into an artist book, but I still have a very large archive of Hopi corn photographs. So then, circling back to, okay, how do I, how am I gonna create an installation also using the papermaking techniques and knowledge that I know, all of this corn fiber that I have, and create something that's gonna bring attention to this heirloom variety of corn and visualize the genetic diversity. And so I started just doing Google searches again, like of how is DNA visualized? How are different genetics visualized? And so what I decided is that I wanted to experiment with casting and mold making, because it wasn't something that I'd done a lot of. And I thought, I'm gonna use this commission as an opportunity to expand my practice. And so I was working with like different ways I could cast the corn, different molding materials. Again, my husband was instrumental in helping me with the rubber and making the molds for the corn. And so it was actually quite difficult to find the data of just what is Hopi, the genetic sequence of Hopi corn? It doesn't really exist. And I came to learn, it actually has not been identified completely. And that is when I was introduced to Dr. Katie Murphy, who is a scientist at the Danforth Center. And so on October 12th, I was very fortunate to go and have a visit with her at the Danforth Center, discuss my project. I had like cast paper and a mold in my purse. I was like, look at what I'm trying to do. And I was telling her about my ideas, how I wanna use these cast papers and visualize this genetic data, but I can't figure it out because I'm a citizen scientist and I don't understand the language that most of these complex sites are using. So she was so nice and really was able to help me dissect and digest some of the information. But also she was the person that introduced me to Barbara McClintock and her groundbreaking work in maize cytogenetics. Back in the 1940s. So Barbara McClintock is not a very well known woman scientist, but she was brilliant. So she graduated with her PhD, I believe it was 1923. And she was working on complex genetic studies of maize and corn in the 40s. And so what she discovered is called transposition, jumping genes. And so I'm gonna try to explain this the best that I can, but it's basically, it is what can control genes turning on and off physical traits. So before it was thought that genes were always on a single chain. They were on a single string, like being beads all strung together. But what she discovered with her corn research, and you gotta remember, this was before technical microscopes and electronics. So she is splicing thin pieces of corn kernels to look at them under a microscope to see all of these different traits. And so she figured out that there are different genes that move around and can turn off different physical traits, such as the coloration of corn. And so she has this discovery, but number one, she's a woman in the 40s and 50s with a very complex concept. She is turned away and sort of mocked at conferences where she's trying to explain this concept. And you gotta remember, this was before DNA was actually discovered in the late 40s, early 50s. So that research did not occur yet. So she quietly just kept on working and kept on working. She continued to present up until, I believe, 1956, where then she just went back and just kept doing her research and continued to find more discoveries, which you can see on the last slide. Oops, sorry. I believe it was, yeah, 1983, she won the Nobel Prize. And that was for the work that she had discovered in the 1940s and 50s. It took that long for the community to come and acknowledge the work that she had done. So I'm learning all this, trying to figure it out, digest it, and try to figure out, okay, she's studying corn colors and patterns. How can I relate that to the Hopi corn? And so this is where Katie and I had a lot of discourse back and forth emails. And so she informed me about the, since there was no study, it has not been mapped the actual genetic sequence of Hopi turquoise or Hopi purple corn. She said, there are maps though of the sequences of the BZ1 gene and the C genes, which these are two very important gene sequences in Barbara Milken Tuck's work. And these are also very important in determining how corn gets color. So this is how she explained it to me. The BZ1 gene encodes a protein that actually makes pigment colors. And in its presence or absence, determines whether there is none brown or purple pigment. Okay, great. BZ1 corn is the color. The C gene encodes a transcription factor, which you can think of as an on or off switch gene. So when the C gene is present and active, it will turn on the BZ1 gene, creating color. And it even has a dimmer switch. So it could create a little color or a lot of color, a lot of color, a little color. So that I was like, okay, great. So that to me, it was like, that is how these Hopi corn are getting their colors. It's because of these two genes. So I decided that I was going to interpret the C gene. And so the C gene has 1,312, characters. I'm blanking on the name of what those letters actually are called scientifically. I'm so sorry. Anthocyanin is the compound that makes the red color in corn. So that's the name of the installation. And it actually depicts the C gene. So the corn cobs that you see in the gallery, I created this whole color system. So I took this code in black and white into Microsoft Word, and I was trying to figure out how I could make it less. How can I find patterns within these letters? And so I just started saying, okay, well, first I'm gonna start with all the double G's, all the double C's, all the double A's. So I just started making my own color code. And I came up with 14 different patterns. And that enabled me to make about 800 cobs of corn versus 1,300 for each letter. And then about halfway, three quarters of the way through, I said, G is a negative space, minus 112 cobs that I have to cast. So that's my key. That was sort of like my little paper Bible that I had with me everywhere I went. I was trying to figure out, not everywhere I went, but it was always in my sketchbook, in my studio, where I was figuring out, okay, so I make these color codes in Word. Now I have to actually relate this to pigment that I can, and colors of pulp that I can make to create this pattern out of cast corn. And so these are just some images of that process. So I took all of that corn we saw earlier in the slides, and I have a machine called a Hollander beater, and it basically macerates the plant fiber, mashes it up, doesn't cut it, but takes water. Basically what's happening when you beat fiber is that it fibrillates. So you could think of it like a piece of hair, and then you hit that hair with a hammer, and then more hairs come off of that hair, and then you hit it again, and more hairs come off. And everywhere those little fibers are fibrillated, those are spots for connection, for hydrogen bonding. So when you take all those fibrillated fibers, and you put them with water and make a pulp slurry, you can either pull a sheet of paper with a mold and decal, or you can just smash it all into rubber molds like I did for the casting. So it was a lot of casting, and a lot of pigmenting and colors. But ultimately, I had 14 colors that correlated back to that color sequence that you saw. And just so you guys can kind of see how I went about in the install process, because I think it was a little bit interesting. So each of the corn cobs, I had to figure out how to put 800 things on the wall. So I filled each one with a compact piece of felt, and then on each piece of felt that was glued into the paper cob is a command strip. And they're just stuck to the wall. With the advice of Neshka, that was after our consultation. And then, so I figured out the math of like how many lines would be in each row if I made, I can't remember off the top of my head, 17 lines, I think, or 18 lines. And then I cut a piece of paper for each strip and then had to like look at my chart and then lay them all out to make sure they were in the right order. Because it was, you know, I mean, some people were like, they're never gonna know if that one's not the right color. But I will know, it's important. I spent so much time. So the last part of this show, I mean, it's the last part of the show. The last part of my process in the exhibit is that I wanted to create a physical interpretation of a corn plant. And I wanted to cluster together in the way that sort of Hopi farmers grow. They grow their two or three or four plants together closely in rows that are separated. It is not like the really close together rows, they're separated. So they're clusters, they're little clumps. And I also wanted to figure out like, I should make a book because I have all of this data, all this information, all of these, more of these photos. And I wanted a way to share that with everybody. And so that is what I did. And this is what we ended up with. So thank you. Dale, would you like to come up here too? So we're gonna, I'm afraid the ladies are gonna have to share a mic. And then I'm gonna use this mic for your Q&A because we're recording this evening. So we wanna make sure we capture everybody's questions so everyone can hear. Before we capture the questions, I just really wanted to capture a very strong memory between the two of us because 14 years ago, we were part of a short-term artist collective called Long River Arts Collective. And we are focused with Long River Arts Collective was to go up and down the Mississippi River to share our art practices. And it was started by someone locally known as Shine Goody, who's actually related to Megan. Yeah. This was what, this work is a long-term commitment when you do this kind of work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was so nice to be reconnected with Dale because we have not been connected or stayed so much in contact pandemic and life. So it's really, this was a really great experience to be brought back together. I'm so glad Corin brought you together. Thank you. That's great. Thank you both so much. And thank you for sharing that, Dale. That's wonderful. So we're gonna do hands up, everyone, if you have questions, and then I'm gonna come to you with the mic. Okay. Hi, Dale. My name is Grace Griffin, and I'm a 10th grader at MICDS. And my question is about, how does the erasure of black stories and narratives through book banning affect what you aim your goal for your work? Well, let me first say that the multiplicity and vastness of blackness is so large that it cannot be minimized by a book ban, okay? And the culture, in the cultural heritage of our people, usually is strongest through oral tradition. And that's the case for most cultures. So as we lean into more independent practices of media, there's also a stronger narrative with the narratives of the people who actually had the experiences and the stories and the memory. And so we have to refocus ourselves on preserving our cultural heritage, more so than responding to what the popular media cycles are doing. Thank you. Anyone else, questions? Megan, how exactly did you go about figuring out exactly which sequences actually correspond to each color of the corn? Well, that was completely up to me. I mean, I created the color code, and then I correlated that color code to whichever corn I pigmented. Does that make sense? Okay, so those individual sequences don't necessarily reflect the exact color of the pigment shown? No, they don't. So those were the colors available in Microsoft Word that I could visually sort of connect and see. And so from there, I took, I mean, it's so convoluted now that I'm trying to talk about it. But basically, I was looking at all these letters and just finding patterns. And then after I found a pattern, it was easier for me to just color code it in the Word document, and then know, okay, so I have CGC. I can go and count all those. I need 72 CGC. And so CGC is going to be indigo dyed. CC, I'm gonna need 182 of those. That's gonna be natural. So I can go through and count all the CCs. So the color coding on my chart was basically just like a visual reference for me. Gotcha, yes, that helps me understand the art exhibition much better. Thank you. Anyone else, questions? I have a question for Megan. What was your relationship to the Hopi people or folks from the tribe as you did this work? And was there any cultural knowledge that you gained in this practice or process from the folks who've been taking care of the corn? Well, I've reached out to a couple different Hopi farmers and did not get any response. And so originally, my concept for the show was that I want to collaborate with a Hopi farmer and see what kind of dialogue that we can create together to create a body of work. And the lack of response sort of led me into the direction of working with scientists and genetics because you can only reach out to the heart. Got my question? Definitely, thank you. Hi, Dale. When you're planting your corn, do you know, do you have any idea what color you're planting and how that's going to turn out or is that just random act of nature? Yes. And were you influenced by Megan's work when you actually were planting the corn? Hey, if I had have known Megan was into the science like this, she would have been on my farm. I would, I would have emailed, I didn't know. For me, yes, I, each season I'm a seed keeper. So then it is that I am keeping my glass corn and I'm preserving it for the next year. And I'm planting it by row so that I can keep up with it. Also, you can tell that in a lot of the corn growth that the husk color gives you clues as to which. Now the blue corn and the glass corn, sometimes the husk variation might look a little different and you know, it has the hairs on top. They look similar. If you're not careful, it might look the same. But if you look closely, the glass corn usually has a more warmer blue if it pops out the bluish or the reds and there's visual indicators for you. Even if you lose your sign. For me, the designation starts with the seed keeping though. That's the easiest way for me because once they get to a certain height, if it's not the sweet corn, they do begin to look a lot alike sometimes. Hi, my question is for Dale about the glass corn. I believe this is my first time hearing this term. Can you talk a little bit about glass corn and its uses? Well, you can eat it. It's very beautiful. It looks like stained glass. It actually looks a lot like some of Megan pieces in the exhibition. The most common corn that we generally hear about is the sweet corn, but you have so much variation. You can find an heirloom farmer and kind of pick through which corns you wanna grow. You know, then there's some, like there's Ujima Seed Company and they also have a strong variation of corn. I forget Baker's Creek, you know, they have a strong variation of corn. And sometimes like, for instance, for me, some of the darker corns, I see that if I wanna just work with the corn for eating purposes, I might need to boil it longer. The blue corn has its own way to eat it so it doesn't erode your system. When we went to the reservation in Wisconsin, we learned a lot about, and when I say we, I'm talking about myself and my farm manager and a collaborator spent some time on the reservation looking at food systems as a whole for indigenous peoples and what practices they've preserved and what practices it is that they have borrowed from other culture to create a full ecosystem of survival. And I learned a lot about even how to store the corn, the braiding of the corn and some of the cultural nuances that it will definitely remind you of home. Thank you. It just so happens that we also last summer grew some glass gem. So this is in fact that it's dried. So the color's a little more intense, but that was the result of, I believe, an indigenous farmer finding a heritage breed and being able to recreate it and then adding it to the market basically again. And Baker Creek Seeds is great for that as well amongst, you know, particularly if you belong like Dale to a seed keeping group and sharing seeds like that. Hello, I wondered what kind of tie does your art in this project make to the water and to the women who develop the corn? See now, I know, love, respect and am inspired by so many people in the audience today. And so when you see me giggling, it's because I feel very good about you all who are listening to these topics and the questions y'all have. And you know, for me, I can answer that a lot of ways. Yes, it's true. Sandy, who runs Native Women's Care Circle, she knows that I'm a water keeper and a seed keeper. So I'm trying to focus on just the corn here, but our relationship to the land is a relationship to all elements and the ether, our ancestry and the now, okay? So we're responding to climate just by how, when and what we decide to grow. And it's important for us to think about all of the elements when we are planting. So for me, particularly, it's an honor to grow the corn so close to the Mississippi River. And we know there was over 100 mounds found north of Laclede's Landing, right? So my relationship to the land is based on that. We know that it's good to grow from north to south with the corn, because if you go east to west, you will not have the same height. You'll get a height variation there and a production variation there. And for me, with the water keeping in particular, I have what we consider in the common language, a permaculturalist model. I call it whole agriculture, where it is, I am building berms. I'm clearing up my own soil through soil remediation practices. And I water save because we know that the chlorine and some of the chemicals that makes the water clean for us to drink is actually not good for the root system of the plants that we grow. Does that answer your question? Okay. This is for both of you. Where do you see the work growing in the future? You go first. That's a great question. I'm not 100% sure what exactly my next project is going to be, but I know that I really enjoyed working with Katie Murphy. I really enjoyed the discourse that happened between us and kind of going back and learning from each other. And I'm not sure exactly what I wanna tackle next, in terms of topics and subject matter and plants. It's just, yeah. Thank you so much for holding this itty bitty mic too. Thank you. For me, I've been deeply embedded into community work for the majority of my professional career, which has absolutely been the entirety of my adulthood and motherhood practice. So first and foremost, my future art practice looks a lot like a part of what is Megan's process is a deeper sense of observation so that I can have a stronger relationship to the plants, of course, through ethnobiology, but also how I honor these stories that will one day be archived. How can I honor the story to speak on the topics or my relationship to the plants in nature, as well as how that's a shared story with my community members. And so that's my deepest concern. I guess one thing I'll add too, is I think that it's important to look at how we can use plants, how we can use art and beauty as subversive messages to draw people in and give them more information. So, I mean, directly, like the next thing I'm working on now is I'm creating a sculptural body of work that is plants that are from, the exhibition is for a Louisiana gallery, but they are specifically the female reproductive parts of plants that are considered imperiled and endangered in that state, which is sort of, I'm drawing a direct parallel to women's rights and women's health and how that is in serious danger all across the country, but specifically Louisiana and Missouri. And so how can we look at plants and look at ways to create new meetings and draw connections and parallels and symbols? As a former resident of Louisiana, I'm so thankful that you've drawn that parallel. Okay. Yeah. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you all. Please give them a hand. Thank you.