Andrea Yarbrough
in care of Black women
Chicago, United States · Curating
Andrea Yarbrough was awarded the 2020 Afield mentorship for her initiative in ℅: Black women (in care of Black women) in Chicago, USA to work with 2019 Fellow Imani Jacqueline Brown.
With over 30,000 vacant lots throughout the city of Chicago, Andrea sees a unique ecological opportunity for public space and the future of deemed ‘blighted’ or vacant land and founded in ℅: Black women: a creative placemaking initiative that fosters economies of care throughout the United States. The initiative invites women of color to Chicago’s South Side to collaboratively regenerate vacant spaces as sites of care. It brings together doulas, poets, curators, farmers, mamas, dancers, organizers, teachers, cultural producers, youth, and visual artists, to collectively exhume the (in)visibility of care for Black women.
By building physical structures that facilitate communal engagement and cultivating green vegetation, flowers, and water elements, in ℅: Black women create sites of care that restore vacant lots to stewards and the larger community. The initiative uses the construction of functionally designed objects with sculptural elements, the cultivation of land, and the archival and documentation of histories of local women, to exemplify how communities can reclaim and reactivate their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over vacant land.
Throughout the 18-month mentorship, Andrea co-conspired to counteract centuries of violence and challenge extraction economies that place profits over people with the New Orleans activist and 2019 Fellow Imani Jacqueline Brown, who is also interested in new schemes of reparations and reconciliation, to further expand these webs of care and develop proactive approaches to shifting policy.
in ℅: Black women opened their first exhibition, tending to, in collaboration with #LetUsBreatheCollective on June 19th. The collective also contributed to the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial in collaboration with Matri-Archi(tecture).
Andrea is a Chicago-based educator and maker. Her curatorial and artistic practice centers on stewarding vacant land and blends urban agriculture, civic engagement, and art praxis. Her community-centered visual arts production shapes local policy on Chicago’s South Side by reclaiming and reactivating abandoned land into sites of care that heal individuals and regenerate collective imaginations.
Her process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects of care that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales.She is currently pursuing a Masters in Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.