• Dreaming South
  • Artist Statement
  • Outsider preservation initiative
  • FOLK FEST 2023
  • Coffee//Koolaid & the tabernacle of rememory
  • Vestiges Heritage Project
  • MEDIA ARCHIVE
  • MEMORY MATTER(S)
    • Heritage Preservation think board
  • Collaborative Explorations
  • Heritage Settlement Retreat
  • quantum-ecology
  • Performance Index
  • Artist Fellowship with the Crossroads Project at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion Portfolio
  • Southern Android Heritage House
  • THE INBETWEEN SPACES
  • Heritage Preservation Initiatives
  • Dreaming South
  • Artist Statement
  • Outsider preservation initiative
  • FOLK FEST 2023
  • Coffee//Koolaid & the tabernacle of rememory
  • Vestiges Heritage Project
  • MEDIA ARCHIVE
  • MEMORY MATTER(S)
    • Heritage Preservation think board
  • Collaborative Explorations
  • Heritage Settlement Retreat
  • quantum-ecology
  • Performance Index
  • Artist Fellowship with the Crossroads Project at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion Portfolio
  • Southern Android Heritage House
  • THE INBETWEEN SPACES
  • Heritage Preservation Initiatives
  My Site

“Coffee//Kool Aid & the Tabernacle of (Re)Memory”

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“Coffee//Kool Aid & the Tabernacle of (Re)Memory was ​mounted at the Community Artists Collective in the Spring of 2022  for  nine weeks in the historic 3rd ward neighborhood in the artists hometown of Houston TX, the exhibition featured an  immersive installation highlighting the artists material archive and collage/assemblage compositions that celebrate and examine African American pre urban cultural practices.

This research and  found object based creative arts initiative  is designed to collect and reinterpret cultural data relating to the migration histories,  memories and archives of African American urban settlers and their ancestral rural settlements.   The exhibition also featured a series of semi-public workshops and interventions that explored conceptual and material themes around notions of preservation, genealogy, ecology, reparations and ritual theater. Through the accumulation of these rich cultural artifacts, Givens seeks to create spaces & media  that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual (re)memory in relation to Africa and its Diaspora.

*** Note both Coolaid and Koffee are stand in metaphors for elixirs used to negotiate comfort.  Be it a morning cup of Java or tall glass of colored sugar water after hard playing outside-- Both are liquid substances when too sweet- when not carefully considered -- pose a subtle and quiet danger. At its core this investigation begs to explore what aspects of culture are worth preserving and what elements deserve revision and reconsideration.
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I excite when I hear read watch once lived story poems of emancipation's Jubilation--cotton picking plucked in burlap sacs full of weevils wobbling 'bout the treacherous bulb-- drifted on the shores of the Atlantic in the bosom of Osun where cakes were offerings of meal tilled and readied by han-- the stars and mathematics--rituals and villages filled with shoes made for walking the nomadic tribes --the drifters the seeds--  it all reminds me of my reason, gives possibility on as to how life was simplicity tightly wove sewn crocheted into complexity, cause those living then considered what life living would be fore me in the now."

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