What a fun conversation this is with artist and death doula Brianna L. Hernández. Brianna shares a few stories about her mom, Miss Sylvia, including her sense of humor and her complicated relationship with cooking. We actually recorded on Miss Sylvia's birthday, so that was really special. Brianna talks about being a grief-y kid and her multimedia art installations that have been born out of caretaking her mom. She also shares some of the things that have become really important to her, like the artist's role in creating cultural death rituals and death education. See below for links to her art installations, articles and Ma's House Art Studio.

Brianna L. Hernández is a Chicana artist, curator, and death doula guided by socially engaged practices. In the studio, she creates multi-media installations focused on end-of-life care, grief, and mourning rituals based on lived experience, cultural research, and collaborations with peers including death education workshops. She proudly serves as Director of Curation and Board Secretary of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, and as Assistant Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, New York.

Website

Ma's House Residency and BIPOC Art Studio

Anticipatory|Después
Útiles Curativos
Aquí Descansamos
Going with Grace Death Doula Program

Hypoallergenic article

Instagram

- death education

- emotional public expressions of grief

- burials that are better for the environment

- healing our relationship with death and dying through creativity

- cooking for and caretaking for her mom, Miss Sylvia

- Miss Sylvia's sense of humor

- creating a living cemetery

- the way she approaches making matcha

- no difference between love and grief

- "mix to combine"

In this episode, I have a sincere and heartfelt conversation with my friend and artist Nancey B. Price. She shares about her relationship with the land, the smell of peanut dust, mothering the mothers and honoring the fathers. She names collage art and writing as portals and large parts of her grieving process. It's a beautiful conversation with a lot of depth and soul as well as a lot of plenty of laughter and jokes. It's also an invitation to you, the listener, to come to this interview with intentional, sacred listening and divine witnessing.

Nancey B. Price is a Black, queer collage artist, writer and storyteller from rural Georgia with an appreciation for all things Black, Southern and imaginative. In her creative pursuits, she seeks to build worlds in which Black people can exist freely in all their beauty and complexity. As a visual artist, she's exhibited her artwork across the country and has been featured in various publications, including O, the Oprah Magazine, Garden&Gun Magazine, and Black Collagists: The Book. In her stories of fiction, Nancey invokes magical realism and southern gothic storytelling to build worlds and weave together lives inspired by the folklore and oral histories of her hometown, Girard, GA. Furthermore, she has shared stories on Hoodoo Plant Mamas and You Had Me At Black, and as the executive producer and host of the podcast, Dreaming In Color with Nancey B. Price, she highlights the importance of dream-telling in the Black community by creating a safe space for each of her guests to share a dream story and deconstruct its meaning in their waking lives.

Instagram

Dreaming in Color Podcast

Website

- dreaming

- peanut dust smell

- her relationship with the land and the land keeping her safe

- seasons

- how her dog, Olivia, fell out of the sky

- when she became a full-time artist

- intergenerational transference of knowledge

- mothering the mothers

- honoring the men
- The Grounding

- The Seedling

- art as a portal & and as a grieving process

- visitations (or there lack thereof)

- Girdles and wigs

- Whose hair she got

- Grandma Essie

- "making do"

- what's nourishing her body right now

- GMO foods

- her favorite fruit

- The Great British Baking Show

- boiled peanuts

- nicknames

- just "sit in it"