Following a shared trip to the Ruth Foundation for the Arts in Milwaukee, three Laundromat Project alumni reflect on how the experience resonated across their practices—opening new lines of inquiry around archives, ecology, and artistic process.
This spring, three Create Change alumni artists —Joyce LeeAnn Joseph, Katherine (Kat) Miranda, and Zakiya Collier—accepted an invitation to travel across the country to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, they viewed and attended the closing program of Original Order Order Original: The Art and Life of Bettina, an exhibition presented by the Ruth Foundation for the Arts in collaboration with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought. Following the trip, they recounted their experiences to LP Artist Alumni Liaison isa saldaña, offering a view into what unfolded in the room, what resonated across their practices, and what has continued to take shape in the days and weeks following.
All three artist alums foregrounded a nearly instant sense of convergence. Though Joyce LeeAnn, Zakiya, and Kat live across different cities and boroughs—Detroit/Ann Arbor, Brooklyn, and the Bronx—the artists met for the first time in Milwaukee. They simultaneously found themselves encountering a wide network, of cultural workers, archivists, and artists they had known across different parts and phases of their lives. Familiar faces and old friends from peer organizations like Wave Hill and Materials for the Arts unexpectedly appeared in rooms and lobbies miles away from the places they call home. It made the trip feel like an even rarer opportunity because they were able to spend sustained time thinking, listening, and dialoguing alongside longtime colleagues and new ones without having to exert the same level of planning effort required to schedule individual meetings with these peers or self-organize a convening. Instead, they could organically grow relationships among this newly-extended network whose practices are already similarly constellated across this triad of history & archives, visual art, and ecological inquiry.
The occasion and purpose of their meeting was to engage with the exhibition itself before it closed. The exhibition presented the artistic work of the late artist Bettina alongside her archive, bringing together drawing, textiles, notebooks, and archival materials in an evolving, multi-phase installation. Zakiya, Kat, and Joyce LeeAnn all reflected that the exhibition was less of a guided experience for a viewer and more of an opening that could be approached from any angle. Materials—archival boxes labeled and stacked, loose documents and plant matter, notebooks and works in process—were presented in a way that invited movement, interpretation, and personal association.
As such, the artists found themselves not just observing the materials presented, but also connecting with the exhibition’s structure. The rooms where both the exhibition and panels took place had hallmarks of a processing room. The stacks of boxes reminded them of this space—a familiar one for professional archivists Zakiya and Joyce LeeAnn—where an archive is still in the midst of organization, where sorting, categorizing, and meaning-making are very much underway.
Joyce LeeAnn often describes her artistic practice as moving through “archival processing as performance art,” a framework that found new resonance in the exhibition’s emphasis on sorting, holding, and activating materials over time. Zakiya and Joyce LeeAnn also noted how the title of the exhibition itself plays on this idea; the ordering of archival materials, finding the so-called original order, or making your own “original order” is all wrapped up in a question of what it means to truth-make. Kat reflected that the materials were “not yet stories”; rather, they were still seeds—waiting to be collected and gathered in a new garden plot, taking time to grow before being told.
The closing program’s panel felt like the beginning of that telling. Facilitated by writer Alhena Katsof and featuring artists and practitioners Davide Balula, K. Cassette Jones (formerly Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves), Anne Percoco, and Matthew Schrader—all five of whom think with, archive, and otherwise engage with and use plant, seed, soil, and other organic matter in their practices—the discussion covered how, even in supposed isolation (as the exhibited artist Bettina increasingly worked), they are connected.
The alum felt this embodiment of this connection during the presentations and discussion: the wash of authentic engagement across the room was intimate, a mirror to what the moderator had called the “deeply inter-generative” connectivity of Bettina’s artworks. The alumni described their own listening, and that of their peers, as intent and intense. As the program unfolded, they were quickly drawn to a few similar themes:
the intelligence of natural systems, the relationship between disturbance and desire, and the ways growth often unfolds outside of linear time.
Joyce LeeAnn recalled one panelist’s particular musings on the qui seed, describing its ability to remain dormant until the exact conditions for growth are met. This idea—of a seed that “knows” when to emerge—offered a powerful reframing:
growth is patient, responsive, and deeply attuned.
A reminder that dormancy is not absence, but a quiet, concentrated presence. Joyce LeeAnn recognized herself in the seed’s story, and in that recognition, found a new way to hold her own periods of dormancy—as necessary and wise. She named stillness as a gift that creates space to pause, turn around, and look back to see all the work that has already been carried forward.
In fact, she encountered a moment where she was actually able to turn around to see her own past reflected back.
The inclusion of plant material on the floor of the exhibition transported her back in time to a 2011 project, an original “archival text” of hers titled somethymes grief goes for a walk. She described how, in that multi-media poetic work, she typed words onto leaves using a typewriter, photographing and preserving them as part of an evolving archive that could also be (and was) activated through performance. Encountering leaf matter embedded directly into the Bettina exhibition, into a setting focused on visual arts (which can often be associated with the supposed “cleanliness” of stark white walls) was a surprise for her. The diverse treatment of the leaves—which were scattered along the floor, but also framed and held as material that was as much a part of the story being told as the archives themselves—brought the value of her former project back into focus, offering a potential point of return and contemplation on how organic elements might be re-integrated in her artistic practice and perhaps even in her archival one.
Kat and Zakiya’s reflections also focused on plant matter, but turned primarily toward weeds—plants often dismissed as invasive or undesirable, yet are profoundly adaptive and well-suited to thriving in environments shaped by human activity. Zakiya reflected on a learning from the panel: “weeds are provoked by human activity. They emerge, not randomly, but in direct relationship to us.” This reframing shifted something for her: rather than something to be removed, weeds became signals—responses to conditions we help create:
“weeds are provoked by human activity. They emerge, not randomly, but in direct relationship to us.”
This reframing shifted something for her:
rather than something to be removed, weeds became signals—responses to conditions we help create.
Kat extended this further, noting that “weeds are the plants that adapted the best to humans,” describing them as “nature’s response to our call.” The panel’s examples—such as fireweed, which grows only after fire, or urban weeds that thrive in disturbed soil—pointed to a larger ecological intelligence at work. Together, these ideas invited a reconsideration of what is often labeled undesirable, and what might instead be understood as responsive and necessary.
For Zakiya, this conversation sparked connections to how community archives emerge from what has been excluded or overlooked. She found parallels between weeds and community archives: both emerge from and thrive within spaces that have been historically excluded, and both challenge dominant ideas of what is worth preserving. “There’s a relationship between what we decide to keep and what we leave out,” she noted. This insight is directly connected to her ongoing interrogation of archival histories, including a poem and workshop titled weeding, which explores “archival inheritance—what is passed down, what is chosen, and what must be tended regardless.”
She emphasized this point further by bringing up seed libraries that prioritize edible or otherwise “useful” plants while excluding weeds, asking implicitly: what is preserved, what is discarded, and who decides? The experience in Milwaukee expanded this line of inquiry for her, offering new language and frameworks that she plans to bring into her teaching and workshops, including an upcoming session with Urban Bush Women.
For Kat, whose practice engages with plant life and familial archives, the discussions on weeds felt strikingly aligned. Kat’s ongoing work involves collecting dandelions, researching weeds, drawing, and preserving plant materials. In a conversation after the program with one of the panelists, Anne Percoco, Kat was introduced to the Next Epoch Seed Library (NESL), an artist-run seed-saving project dedicated to storing and sharing those seeds often excluded from traditional systems of cultivation—those of the exceedingly adaptable plants known as weeds. Kat shared that the two of them have since remained in touch, exchanging newsletters and resources.
Another moment that stayed with Kat came from a presentation on the London plane tree, a common urban tree whose bark peels away in response to pollution. The peeling, they learned, is not damage but adaptation—“shedding its skin in order to protect itself.” For Kat, this example extended the broader conversation about ecological response: “it’s like nature is adapting to us—and we don’t really recognize it. But then there it is.”
Placed alongside the discussion of weeds,
the tree became another model for thinking about survival, resilience, and transformation—
how living systems adjust, respond, and persist under pressure. It also echoed something more intuitive about the experience of the trip itself: moments of alignment that appear almost unexpectedly. “It felt like it was made for me,” he shared. For Kat, the trip offered an affirmation that his work is part of a broader, evolving field of inquiry, with tangible pathways for deepening it.
Across the conversations about seeds, weeds, and archival practice, another idea began to surface: the tension between control and chance. The alumni recalled one panelist naming this dynamic explicitly, describing artistic practice as a negotiation between what can be shaped and what must be allowed to emerge. This tension echoed across the artists’ experiences—both within their practices and within their lives.
As new collaborations between these three artists continue to form in the weeks following the trip, their research paths have expanded and additional earlier works have been revisited with fresh perspectives. It has become clear to all of them that the paths forward are open and many; they can begin anywhere, including a city away from home. The trip also amplified for them, and for us at The LP, the significance of gathering artists across disciplines and geographies, of making space for conversation and convergence—believing that what is planted when we meet, whether immediately visible or not, may bloom at some later time, if only we wait.
“We’ll just have to trust that whatever pops up through the soil later will be exactly what we need.”
CONTRIBUTORS
Joyce LeeAnn Joseph is a certified archivist and an interdisciplinary artist. Her work explores the poetics of archival processing and redefines the archive as a space for healing, transformation, and embodied practice. She is the founder of Archival Alchemy®, a creative and consulting practice that supports individuals and institutions in activating archives through artistic and experimental methods. Joyce LeeAnn has held positions at institutions including the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Weeksville Heritage Center, and was a 2013 Create Change Fellow with The Laundromat Project.
archivalalchemy.com
Katherine (Kat) Miranda (they/he) is a Latinx, non-binary multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and based in the Bronx, NY. Working with materials sourced from their family, community, and the natural environment, Kat creates objects and images that honor ancestral memory and explore cycles of preservation, transformation, and reclamation. His practice often incorporates plant life, found objects, and familial archives to reimagine histories and envision alternative futures. Kat is a recipient of fellowships including the 2023 Create Create Fellowship at The Laundromat Project, the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill and the AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum. He has exhibited widely across New York City.
Zakiya Collier (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary archivist and memory worker whose practice centers collective approaches to preserving cultural memory. Her work focuses on supporting communities—particularly Black and diasporic communities—in stewarding their own histories through archival training, consulting, and creative practice. Zakiya has held roles including Program Director at Archiving the Black Web, Digital Archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Project Archivist at Weeksville Heritage Center, and co-editor of The Black Scholar’s special issue on Black archival practice. She is an educator and a co-producer on the forthcoming documentary, Somebody’s Gone. Zakiya was a 2025 Create Change Artist-in-Residence.
isa saldaña is a performance artist and student of black performance studies. Their focus is on intimacy, disability and end-of-life care. They work with artists and arts workers to surface new and old ways of living and dying.
