Andrea Yarbrough

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).