are people still playing pirates tides of fortune

Unknown to me, I opened my fiber arts studio in Philadelphia blocks away from where Forten’s sailmaking loft was located at Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River.

James Forten’s miraculous life, and its role in shaping a prominent African-American history, is one of my greatest inspirations. It was placed neatly among a pile of equally intriguing and influential books of historical and futuristic people of African descent.

I saw this book steps from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, on the table of a street vendor and book dealer, Brother Mustafa. That I, a quiet, radical, African-American fiber artist, raised in a nautical lakeshore Black community in the Pacific Northwest, would find the book A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Fortenby Julie Winch, about a free-born, quiet, radical, elite African-American fiber craftsman, living in North America from 1766 to 1842 - the most prosperous and philanthropic sailmaker, born in Philadelphia during the turbulent period of the Revolutionary War - was truly a cosmic alignment that could be straight out of the Farmers’ Almanac (if the almanac was as astrologically attuned to human movement as it is to predicting nature). Xenobia Bailey, “Still Life Photo Dedicated to all the Babies Born During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” hand-crocheted black hole, African-American manufactured doll, handmade miniature wicker chair (all images courtesy Xenobia Bailey)Įditor’s Note: This article is part of a Special Edition by this year’s Craft Archive Fellowship cohort, organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft in support of new work by emerging and established researchers in the field, with a focus on underrepresented and non-dominant histories.

Are people still playing pirates tides of fortune