The Covenant Project

I Will Make Thee a Covenant

When I smash the Creosote between my fingers

Sniff the rain now embedded in my fingerprints.

I remember I am a visitor here, always, my whole life.

I am pleased to find I have been Xed out of dusty and dreamy neighborhoods alike.

At least it makes sense.

It was etched in paper and stone…. this cannot be your home.

but I will make thee a covenant…

I Will Make Thee a Covenant is an ongoing community art project that confronts and reconfigures past regional racist neighborhood covenants through collective communion, connection, and restorative art-making. To understand my fraught relationship to this desert land I was raised in, its history of making invisible the lives of Black people, and the historical significance it’s played in shaping the landscape of my city, I started researching neighborhood covenants. In doing this research and planning works around it, I came to believe that the first part of this project must be examining, dismantling, and healing these historical documents in the present day. I intended to create a new covenant to disrupt the old. 

This was done by creating a gift for individuals working in many facets to change this land for the good every day. Some of these individuals were strangers; I invited them to dine with each other in an installation space. During the dinner, I explained the purpose of the night was to create a new covenant with each other in this space and to continue to undo the work of historical racism and oppression in our community. I started with making my own promise to the individuals in the room. It was a time for me to acknowledge their work and thank them. To provide them respite from the labor endured in their works, and I encourage them to make a covenant with each other, to bind them as a collective. Because we were working with constructs designed to erase identities, I invited participants to pick an object they felt called to and redesign it. These objects then represented the person named to it, but the energy shared that evening in the making of this new covenant. Each participant also recorded on paper a promise to be added to the development of our covenant. Both objects and promises will be displayed in a more extensive exhibition of The Covenant Project.