Stevia Ndoe
2024 HEAR US Awardee
Photography & Imaging Class of 2025
Stevia Ndoe (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist from Chicago, IL. Through photography, film, and sculpture, Ndoe imagines celebratory and accessible spaces for the Black diaspora. They investigate the relationship between the body, time/memory, environment, and identity formation. A student of anti-colonialism practices, Ndoe aims to deconstruct current definitions of art and provide a more inclusive and pride-centered telling of history.
Project
The White Refrigerator Project (WRP) explores the many ways that Black populations across the diaspora have honored the divinity of nature through gardening, cuisine, and herbal remedies. This project aims to provide the working class with tangible gardening skills that bring them closer to liberation.
The three main pillars to achieving this goal are public art, education, and community-based action. I am planting native, ancestral crops from the African diaspora in reusable containers to combat the overconsumption of materials in New York. The containers will have printed images of the ancestral and current stewards of the crops. The containers consist of wine/liquor bottles, Danish cookie containers, old white refrigerators, old microwaves, old washing machines, etc all of which have either been donated, recycled, or found on the street/garbage.
The crops planted are determined through surveys, interviews, and conversations with friends, family, and other Black folk across the country. The project is interdisciplinary, consisting of site-specific installations across the city, photographs of the containers (arranged by recipe; collected from survey), a digital archive of cuisines and remedies across the Black diaspora, and public programming. This project will highlight the natural healing abilities of the Earth and empower Black people to surrender to nature. I hope for this project to aid in the liberation of Black people from the rampant food apartheid in our communities and to show how rewarding and feasible cultivating a relationship with the environment is.
