Clayton Sisterhood Project

In Laila Annmarie Stevens’s photo series, Clayton Sisterhood Project, she explores the continuing legacy built by her sisters and nieces from New York, NY moving onto Clayton, North Carolina land together. Inspired by the historical branches of trees on southern terrain and longing for ancestral remembrance through the traditional family album. Stevens utilizes the 1960s Black Arts Movement principle of Self-Determination to preserve documentation of intergenerational Black Women figures across both state territories. North Carolina-based Black Feminist Poet Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs states “We knew we had to love the women we were and the women of our lineages, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, the women we never got to hold, the people coming after us and ourselves and the bridge and an invitation to all of it.” Crossing the boundaries of documentary through a conceptual approach, this visual preservation of love in its varying forms seeks to ensure that the nature of our existence, faces and names will prosper.