Artist Statement

Maya’s work as a foodways educator and land steward feeds into her interdisciplinary praxes of cultural preservation through the engagement and multimodal documentation of food, plants, people, and the stories tied to them. Her creative process involves working with plants and foodways with an aim to explore opportunities for satiation, comfort, joy, resistance, and power in the process of tracing and understanding the complex narratives and experiences of and beyond Blackness and diaspora. Her chosen mediums for this work include fiber arts, collective cooking, photography, and writing. Additionally, her work is deeply grounded in encouraging community participation, therefore she has developed and led workshops centered on Afro-Indigenous foodways and ancestral agriculture practices.

In recent years, Maya's cultivation of heirloom cotton has led to her foray into combining her lifelong practice of crocheting alongside her contemplation and play with raw and refined fiber materials. Her crochet work can take many shapes, but most often she is drawn to make tiny figurines that capture or depict spirits from everyday, unassuming beings. Through tedious stewardship and procurement of the materials that make up her figurines she aims for them to be infused with a curious yet healing and joyful energy.