Rememories of Blue Mash

Completed

2023

Medium

Video-based ritual performance

Dimensions

10.5 minutes

Cost

NFS

Description

ReMemories of Blue Mash is a collaborative community ritual that honors local histories of marronage. Blue Mash, located in Gaithersburg, MD, was a marshland during slavery. It was a space where self-liberating Black people escaped to and found refuge. Histories of marronage exist throughout the diaspora. After emancipation, the Blue Mash area was stewarded by a Free Black Town named Zion. Through a collaborative process, ReMemories of Blue Mash invited a group of Black organizers and cultural workers to be in creative study and reflection around these histories. A beautiful ritual emerged that took place at Blue Mash and honored legacies of collective care and resistance.
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About this Artist

Jessica Valoris

Jessica Valoris

Jessica Valoris is an interdisciplinary artist and community facilitator based in Washington, DC. She weaves together mixed media painting, installation, ritual performance and social practice, to create sacred spaces. Her art activates ancestral wisdom, personal reflection, and community study.  Inspired by the earth-based traditions of her Black American and Jewish ancestry, Jessica engages metaphysics, spirituality, and Afrofuturism in her work. Her art is both balm and blueprint: mapping out pathways for the Black liberatory imagination and reviving recipes for collective care. Jessica collaborates with organizers and cultural workers to facilitate community rituals of remembrance and conversations about reparations, abolition, earth-stewardship, and more.   Jessica Valoris is currently a Culture and Narrative Fellow with The Opportunity Agenda and a recipient of the Washington Award from S&R Evermay. She has completed fellowships with VisArts Studio Fellowship, Public Interest Design Lab, Intercultural Leadership Institute, and Halcyon Arts Lab. Iterations of her recent body of work,…
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