We Belong to the Earth

Vol. 1, Earth Day Issue | April 22, 2025 — A celebration of connections to nature, honoring histories too long overlooked and reimagining a future where Black bodies find sanctuary in open spaces.

"Fisherman" by the artist Sidney Carter centers a Black angler in communion with nature, walking home through dappled woods, his catch swaying by his side. Through rich color and thoughtful detail, Carter transforms an everyday scene into a moment of grace and grounding. Image Credit: Sidney Carter

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Somewhere, a gate swings open on rusted hinges. A hoof presses into red earth. Dust lifts and hangs, like terracotta gauze. In the distance, someone is planting. Shoulders bent to rhythm, not hurry. A camera rises, steadies. The shutter clicks.

This quiet choreography between body, animal, and earth unfolds across the American South. Here, land holds what archives choose to forget, while rich soil preserves stories that textbooks abandoned and water maps the contours of time.

Before "sustainability" appeared on organic cotton tote bags, before Earth Day surrendered to corporate hashtags, something more fundamental existed: communion with land, dialogue with water, Black people moving through open space with a knowing born of time and tenderness—a knowing that persisted despite the scattering of six million souls north and west, despite fourteen million acres slipping from Black hands through theft, coercion, and legal sleight of hand.

You can feel the presence of water even when it isn't pictured. Its hush. Its weight. Its memory. The way it shapes conversations about survival in the South. Too much. Too little. Who controls its flow and who lives in its path.

Breath moves through this work too; invisible yet essential. The measured exhalations of horses under a photographer's lens reveal trust earned across generations. Underwater figures hold their breath not in struggle but in communion, practicing an ancestral patience. In cultivated fields, the rhythm of planting follows the cadence of breathing. This respiratory knowledge connects sky to earth, wind patterns to harvest, inhalation to exertion. In communities where breathing itself has been political—where "I can't breathe" echoes as both historical condition and contemporary plea—the simple act of drawing air becomes revolutionary praxis, another form of claiming space.

Three Black artists, Kennedi Carter, Allison Janae Hamilton, and Sunn m'Cheaux, move in this same current, their work flowing together in conversation. Not as separate streams, but as tributaries of the same watershed.

Land speaks its own language in their work. Not as backdrop, but as protagonist. Carter's photographs frame Black bodies against horizons that are neither romanticized nor diminished, capturing how generations have read terrain like text. The particular angle of hillsides, the specific texture of soil between fingers, the way sunlight breaks across fields and plains. These become characters rather than settings. Hamilton's installations transform earth itself into medium, incorporating elements from personal geographies. And m'Cheaux's music and preservation of Gullah language reveals how Black cultural knowledge has always understood land not as property but as partnership. His compositions map the cadences of coastal waterways, the rhythm of tides, the sonic terrain of a landscape that speaks through human voice. Together, they map a belonging that existed long before deeds and documents tried to formalize what the Black bodies already knew.

When Carter photographs a young boy’s fingers tracing the withers of a horse in her "Ridin’ Sucka Free" series, the image captures more than a moment, it documents a tactile language. This same literacy appears in m'Cheaux's musical compositions, where Gullah words roll with the precise inflections of sea island currents, a lexicon handed down through generations. The horse knows. The tongue remembers too.

This connection persists in Hamilton's "Florida Water I" and “Florida Water II” underwater imagery, where figures in billowing white hover in swamp water—neither drowning nor dancing but dwelling. The submerged forms exist in that liminal space where history and myth commingle, where white fabric billows like storm clouds, like spirits never silenced. Her work speaks not of death but of another kind of breathing—one that transcends the binary of air and water.

This alternative respiration echoes in Carter's equestrian portraits, where horse nostrils flare. Her photographs reveal how her practice depends on relationship rather than documentation. Between these artists emerges a new ecological grammar, through practices that dissolve the boundaries between observer and participant.

The act of creation itself becomes an excavation of living knowledge, passed down through demonstration and practice. When m'Cheaux teaches Gullah at Harvard—his voice carrying the tonal memory of coastal generations—he engages in the same resurrection of memory that Hamilton pursues through her underwater choreography. Carter's celebration of Black equestrian culture completes this circle, her lens capturing the particular angle of a wrist guiding reins, an expertise learned without textbooks.

In their shared understanding, water accepts what soil sometimes rejects. This amphibious wisdom permeates Hamilton's practice, where her swamp-dwellers neither conquer nor surrender to the marsh but exist within its logics.

The triangulation between these artists reveals what singular perspectives cannot. They aren't merely representing Black ecological presence but embodying its continuity. When Carter captures a rider's posture shaped by generations of horsemanship, when Hamilton submerges white cotton until it becomes translucent as moss, when m'Cheaux layers ancestral phonemes into mixed media compositions. Each enacts an embodied memory that industrial homogenization and academic canonization alike have rendered peripheral.

In Carter's photographs, horses' coats gleam with sweat, water beading like evidence. In Hamilton's projections, this same liquid sheen appears on her submerged dancers’ shoulders. Different waters, same skin. The body reads wetness through our oldest literacy: touch.

We have always belonged to the land. Not in borrowed ways. Not as background. But as architects of soil and rhythm, of waterways and watersheds, of pathways worn by grace.

Their work suggests that elements hold our stories. The tears, the sweat, the exhalations, the floods that took and gave life in equal measure. What might it mean to witness this complexity? To stand at that threshold between art and earth, between history and horizon? Perhaps it means acknowledging that sustainability isn't something we invented, but something we forgot.

They do not simply invite us back to the earth. They show us we never left.