by B. Kelly | Oct 26, 2026 | Installations
I’ve been sitting with a list of names for two days now. It’s a page from a poll book: Appomattox County, Virginia, District No. 5, October 1867. In a clerk’s handwriting, in a book kept for colored voters, is the name Robert Statham. Turn back three...
by B. Kelly | Sep 11, 2026 | Legacy Building
A death certificate is a document about a death. It is also, when you read it correctly, a document about a birth that happened seventy years earlier, a marriage nobody in the family talks about, a street address you can still walk to, a funeral home whose ledgers may...
by B. Kelly | Jul 3, 2026 | Installations
The country turns 250 this week. We are counting the same years, and we are counting them differently. Our newest installation, The Record and the Silence, is live now. It reads 250 years of Black America as a running account: the firsts that were won and seated, set...
by B. Kelly | Jun 18, 2026 | Uncategorized
On January 29, 1901, George Henry White of North Carolina stood on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and delivered his farewell address. He was the last Black congressman from the South. He walked out on March 3, 1901. njila Before he left, he...
by B. Kelly | Feb 25, 2026 | Ancestral Healing
There’s a reason they tried to take our names. During the transatlantic slave trade, one of the first things that happened to enslaved Africans upon arrival in the Americas was the removal of their names. Their given names — names that carried meaning, lineage,...
by B. Kelly | Feb 25, 2026 | Rituals & Practices
One of the most common things people tell me when they first learn about ancestral healing is: I want to connect, but I don’t know how to start. I understand that feeling. When I began my own journey, I assumed I needed special training, specific spiritual...
by B. Kelly | Feb 25, 2026 | Legacy Building
We talk about legacy like it’s something we inherit. A house. A name. A set of values passed down like heirlooms. And yes, some of legacy is received. But the most powerful legacies — the ones that actually shape the future — are built. Deliberately. With...
by B. Kelly | Feb 25, 2026 | Cultural Storytelling
My grandmother used to say things that didn’t make sense to me as a child. Passing references to places nobody in our family had lived in my lifetime. Names spoken with a weight that suggested they mattered deeply, though no one ever explained why. A habit of...
by B. Kelly | Feb 25, 2026 | Ancestral Healing
I was sitting in a county courthouse in rural Louisiana, holding a document older than anyone in my living family, when the question hit me: What happens to the pieces of ourselves we never get to know? The document was a census record from 1870 — the first census...
