PERIWINKLE, MOURNING DOVES, AND POUND CAKES:
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Periwinkle, Mourning Doves, and Pound Cakes is a living, participatory installation and growing archive dedicated to Black women whose labor, care, creativity, and leadership have sustained communities across generations. The work centers on a simple yet radical gesture: the drawing of a woman’s left eye, rendered in blue colored pencil on canvas as a portal of recognition, memory, and love. An act of care taken from the 17th-century tradition of Lovers' Eye paintings.
The installation is variable in size and form and includes eye drawings, a communal table covered in indigo-dyed cloth, pound cakes offered, and a digital database accessed via a QR code. Visitors are invited to participate by submitting the name of a Black woman—past or present—who has made a meaningful contribution to her community. This may be a mother, grandmother, aunt, neighbor, teacher, organizer, caregiver, or oneself.
How the Archive Grows. Participation begins by scanning the QR code and completing a release form. Contributors upload:
Why: History often elevates a few individuals while overlooking the collective labor that makes survival and progress possible. Mothers’ Eyes resists this narrowing of memory. It honors the women who “rolled up their sleeves” to do what needed to be done—through enslavement, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and into the present. These women were organizers, protectors, strategists, cooks, healers, and culture bearers. Their work is how we arrived at this moment—and how future generations will walk forward.
Symbolic Elements
A Living Act of Preservation. At a time when Black history and cultural memory face renewed threats of distortion and erasure, Mothers’ Garden asserts the power of communal authorship. Inspired by the work of Bryan Stevenson and institutions like the Equal Justice Initiative and the Legacy Museum, this project insists that archives do not belong only to institutions—they belong to the people.
Lineage and Inspiration: The project stands in conversation with the intellectual, cultural, and political legacies of women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Sojourner Truth, Kathleen Cleaver, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Toni Morrison, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, bell hooks, Adrian Piper, and Nichelle Nichols—alongside countless women whose names have not yet entered public record, including my own ancestors.
Invitation: This project requires the participation of the entire community. Mothers’ Eyes is an invitation to name your heroes, protect our shared history, and ensure that future generations inherit a fuller, truer archive.
The installation is variable in size and form and includes eye drawings, a communal table covered in indigo-dyed cloth, pound cakes offered, and a digital database accessed via a QR code. Visitors are invited to participate by submitting the name of a Black woman—past or present—who has made a meaningful contribution to her community. This may be a mother, grandmother, aunt, neighbor, teacher, organizer, caregiver, or oneself.
How the Archive Grows. Participation begins by scanning the QR code and completing a release form. Contributors upload:
- a photograph of the woman,
- her name, short bio, and location,
- and a brief statement describing her community contribution.
Why: History often elevates a few individuals while overlooking the collective labor that makes survival and progress possible. Mothers’ Eyes resists this narrowing of memory. It honors the women who “rolled up their sleeves” to do what needed to be done—through enslavement, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and into the present. These women were organizers, protectors, strategists, cooks, healers, and culture bearers. Their work is how we arrived at this moment—and how future generations will walk forward.
Symbolic Elements
- Periwinkle: Traditionally planted by enslaved people forbidden to mark graves, it becomes a quiet memorial to unnamed ancestors.
- Mourning Doves: Symbols of remembrance, peace, and hope—often understood as messengers from loved ones or guides through grief.
- Pound Cake: A staple of Black communal life, served at celebrations and funerals alike. It represents comfort, continuity, and recipes passed hand to hand, generation to generation.
- Indigo: A color tied to protection, labor, mourning, and beauty—bridging the spiritual and the historical.
A Living Act of Preservation. At a time when Black history and cultural memory face renewed threats of distortion and erasure, Mothers’ Garden asserts the power of communal authorship. Inspired by the work of Bryan Stevenson and institutions like the Equal Justice Initiative and the Legacy Museum, this project insists that archives do not belong only to institutions—they belong to the people.
Lineage and Inspiration: The project stands in conversation with the intellectual, cultural, and political legacies of women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Sojourner Truth, Kathleen Cleaver, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Toni Morrison, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, bell hooks, Adrian Piper, and Nichelle Nichols—alongside countless women whose names have not yet entered public record, including my own ancestors.
Invitation: This project requires the participation of the entire community. Mothers’ Eyes is an invitation to name your heroes, protect our shared history, and ensure that future generations inherit a fuller, truer archive.
Periwinkle, Mourning Doves, and Pound Cakes: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 2025, Installation: 16 Mothers' Eyes drawings, 7 homemade pound cakes, indigo cloth, potted periwinkle plants, audio; Mourning Doves call, exhibit: Old For Art School, Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECOCA), New Haven, CT
Copyright Colleen L. Coleman 2025