Whitney French & Lue Boileau
October 1st, 2020 - December 8th, 2020
“We can
Each of us
Do the impossible
As long as we convince ourselves
That it has been done before”
— Earthseed Book of the Living by Octavia E. Butler
Materials: Acorns, Oak leaves, goldenrod, dresser drawers, tree stumps, tea, candles
Project Acorn Bread is a community arts initiative with a singular purpose of making wild acorn bread during the autumn season as a means to deepen solidarity between Black, Afro-Indigenous and Indigenous communities in Toronto. Led by writers Whitney French and Lue Boileau, this project is spiritually guided by the masterful writing of Octavia E. Butler — namely her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. People from all ages will be invited to forage, store, mill flour to make acorn bread, a favourite meal by the novel’s protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina.
This exhibition is phase one of the full project: FORGING & STORING. Since August 27th, Black and Indigenous youth have been building relationships with the oaks in their respective neighbourhoods in Toronto and foraged wild acorns for this project. By reflecting, meditating, poetry-making and journalling, these foragers learned to identify trees, take only what is needed and (re)connected with the land. This is an alter space and storing station, where the acorns will rest until they are processed in phase two.
This project meets at the intersection of food justice, tradition keeping, community building and Black and Indigenous Futures. Parables of the Sower acknowledges the Indigenous tradition that was shared with Black communities in the Americas in the text and these solidarities survive today and will continue to survive in future.
“Most of the people in this country don’t eat acorns you know. They have no tradition of eating them, they don’t know how to prepare them…some of our neighbours wanted to cut down all our big live oak trees and plant something useful. You wouldn’t believe the time I had changing their minds.”
— Spoken from Lauren’s father by Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower
In partnership with the digital artist residency through CRATE Studio and the Durham Art Gallery.
Artist Biographies
Whitney French is a storyteller and a multi-disciplinary artist. She is a self-described Black futurist and aspiring farmer, who is committed to building radical new worlds by centering stories of Black women and queer BIPOC communities around memory, loss, technology and nature. Language is her favourite collaborator. Whitney French is the co-founder of the Black queer feminist press Hush Harbour. Currently, she lives in Toronto, Canada where she works as an editor, an arts educator and community organizer.
Lue Boileau is a writer of Black speculative and environmentalist fiction, a visual artist and poet with roots in Portland, Jamaica. Their prize winning stories have been anthologized in Canada and the Caribbean. Lue is currently completing their first full-length work, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
