Clayton Sisterhood Project

Inspired by the longing for ancestral remembrance through the traditional family album, Laila Annmarie Stevens’ Clayton Sisterhood Project explores contemporary queer kinship, and the continuing legacy built by the photographer’s sisters and nieces from Queens, NY moving onto Clayton, North Carolina land together as a metaphor for non-traditional “Home” building. Motivated by the new wave of reverse migration, the historical branches of trees on the southern terrain, and the longing for ancestral remembrance. Stevens utilizes the 1960s Black Power Movement principle of Self-Determination to preserve and document intergenerational Black Women figures across both state territories, and reimagine a women-centered world. Concentrating on intimate moments, the protagonists within this project allow us to enter the stories of their lives and their relationships with their families. North Carolina-based Black Feminist Poet Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs states “We knew we had to love the women we were and the women of our lineages, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, the women we never got to hold, the people coming after us and ourselves and the bridge and an invitation to all of it.”